AHMM
AVAILABLE IN DIGITAL FORMAT!

Reel Crime
By J. Rentilly

	The Taking of Pelham 123 (July 24) Action maestro Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Man on Fire) reteams with an authoritative, taciturn Denzel Washington in this remake of the 1974 Walter Matthau-Robert Shaw thriller, based on John Godey's 1973 bestselling novel, in which a subway train is hijacked and its occupants held for ransom. John Travolta, who's surely in the middle of the worst year of his life after his son's unexpected death in January, plays Ryder, the Big Bad. The rest of his team? Well, a la Reservoir Dogs, they're named after colors. This bottlenecked,ticking-clock thriller, almost a stage play in conception, but a visual rush in Scott's sure hands, is certain to thrill intelligent audiences and adrenaline junkies alike. The only real question is: With the original so effortlessly thrilling and tres cool, why tempt fate with a remake? Nevertheless, we're there.
	Public Enemies (July 1) Acclaimed heavyweight filmmaker Michael  Mann (Heat, Thief) cranks up the turmoil, drama, and machine gun fire in this action-thriller set in the 1930s about the federal government's relentless pursuit of celebrity gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Depression-era outlaw Dillinger (played here by Johnny Depp) was a charismatic bank robber whose rapid-fire raids made him the number-one target of J. Edgar Hoover's upstart FBI and its top agent, Melvin Purvis (played by Christian Bale). Dillinger,too, was a folk hero to a public beaten into submission by a faltering economy. Parallels with contemporary society are probably not entirely coincidental. Depp, always game for a walk on cinema's wild side,relished the opportunity to play the much-mythologized Dillinger."Let's just say, how often do you get to stand on the running board of an old 1932 Buick, blasting a fifty-round clip from a Thompson machine gun?" he recently told Entertainment Weekly. "When do you get to do that without getting into trouble for it? And with Michael (Mann, a noted obsessive-perfectionist), you get to do it again and again and again." We're primed for Mann's high-octane, character-driven, but bullet-riddled take on this loaded and resonant material.
	Angels & Demons (May 15) Oscar-winning director Ron Howard teams up with Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks in a return to the international scene of the crime in Angels & Demons, a follow-up to 2006's The Da Vinci Code. Based on Dan Brown's globally successful religious thriller, Angels follows Harvard University professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon as he solves murders, decodes Illuminati mysteries, and halts a terrorist act against the Vatican. Having braved Catholic protests and negative press, much of it surrounding Tom Hanks's wildly baroque hairdo in Da Vinci, Angels filmmakers promise an even better film this time out. Can it outdo National Treasure? Screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man) thinks they got it right, as he explains in an interview below.

AHMM: Tell us about being drafted for the big-screen version of Angels& Demons, and what challenges and opportunities the project offered you as a writer. Koepp: I got a call from Ron Howard, who I'd worked with before (on The Paper), asking if I'd take a look at the book. I'd read The Da Vinci Code, like the rest of everybody on the planet, but not Angels & Demons. I thought, in many ways, it was a much more straightforward adaptation than Da Vinci Code needed-it was sort of structured like a movie already. So I sort of saw the movie in it right away, but the challenge with Dan Brown's material is that its greatest appeal lies in the fact that it's jammed with history lessons, art lectures, religious conjecture-and how on earth do you get that into a movie? AHMM: What about the decision to make Angels a sequel, even though the novel itself is a prequel? Koepp: Prequels are tough in movies if you have any recurring characters because in real life people tend to age! And there was no real creative reason for it to be a sequel. It read perfectly well as the second in a series of adventures that this great detective character was having. In fact, by making it a subsequent adventure,instead of a prior one, it did allow us to put in an element of tension between Robert Langdon and the Catholic Church, because of the events in the first film. I viewed the beginning of this story the way I remembered those great old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone-they always started with a crime, and then some poor beleaguered soul found their way to Holmes and begged him to come in and solve the mystery. Which is exactly what we do with this film. AHMM: Tell us about the process of adapting a Dan Brown novel for the cinema. His novels are a lot of fun, but they tend to be very talky and full of exposition. How do you make that cinematic? Koepp: I think the key to any good adaptation is choosing the material to adapt wisely. Even though these books may not seem like obvious adaptations, they have a strong, inquisitive, active central character,which makes things a hell of a lot easier on the movie. The fact that there is so much learned discussion, and so much thought, though thatis harder to get on screen, isn't as off-putting as you might think. As long as there are interested parties around to listen to your"professor" character while he expounds, and as long as you have good reasons for him to share his insights, you're fine. I toyed with the idea of including flashbacks to classroom scenes to get in even more of the teachable stuff from the books, but the fact that the movie's sodriven by a clock, and a literal ticking bomb, made that impossible. AHMM: Da Vinci Code was a lightning rod for controversy, but Angels has not attracted the same furor. Tell me your thoughts about this. Koepp: I think any time you speculate about someone's religion, you are bound to ruffle a few feathers. But since the very notion of faith means believing in something that can't be proven, these conversations are fruitless. Everyone is right. What people are really trying to tell each other sometimes is, "No, you shouldn't believe that." But that's a crazy thing to say. People believe what they believe, and no amount of persuading can, or should, change that. Being an agnostic secular humanist myself, I don't get into those kinds of conversations very often. Everybody's right. And, probably, everybody's wrong. AHMM: What's your favorite sequence in the filmed version of Angels? Koepp: My favorite part of the film is the opening, and since it's the beginning, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying it concerns the death of the Pope. All that Vatican pomp and ceremony is fascinating to me, as I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school for many years. But from a writing and storytelling point of view, what I love the most is the first few scenes with Langdon-those Sherlock Holmes scenes.