I was browsing through last week’s issue of Entertainment Weakly, er, I mean, Weekly, which was the summer movie preview, and I was reading the bit of Michael Mann’s new movie about John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis, starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, and my favorite French hottie, Marion Cotillard.

The little one page piece on the film, called Public Enemies, is interesting depth-less write up on the upcoming film, talking about it’s timeliness in dealing with a folk hero who robbed from the fat cat banks that had turned enemy of the people, but it was much this paragraph caught my eye:

Johnny Depp had also been flirting with the idea of playing the legendary thief for a while. Depp, who grandfather ran moonshine on the back roads of Kentucky during Prohibition, grew up idolizin outlaws like Dillinger: “Some people might disagree, but I thin he was a real-life Robin Hood,” says Depp of the bank robber, who at least managed the rob-from-the-rich part of Robin Hood’s credo. “He knew that the clock was ticking, and boy, if righ now wasn’t the time to have a good time, then  don’t know when it is!” Needless to say, when Mann approached Depp to play Dillinger, the actor didn’t need to be held at gunpoint.

I wish John Dillinger had been more as Johnny Depp describes him, or as he probably plays him. It’d be nice to think that either of those were the case rather than the truth, that Dillinger was just a sociopath and a murderer. But maybe seeing it that way is a fnord?

Hell, I’d be happy to think of Dillinger as he appeared in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a bank robber who walked through walls and was practically ageless (and quite possibly the guise of an ancient shaman, but that’s a whole other kinda thing, isn’t it?) and really just wants to help “the good guys” immanentize the eschaton. And to kick some Masonic ass, but that’s only natural.

from here.

I guess I’m curious to see how they’ll handle the “betrayal” at the hands of the lady in red or if there truly is a case of mistaken identity in the Biograph theater and Dillinger gets away in the end, as he may possibly have done in real life (after death?).

Or maybe not.