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down n out posted:I got my first noise complaint watching Heat in a small apartment with newly bought surround sound. I watched Heat for the first time a few weekends ago. I dunno if it’s an issue with the Netflix copy, or that’s just how it’s mixed, but the dialogue and music are abnormally quiet. Turning my volume to 20 is usually verging on too loud, but for Heat I had to have it up in the 60s just to hear what everyone was saying. Then that initial car heist happens and it is at… extremely full volume. I spent the rest of the movie with my finger on the volume buttons in a state of readiness, terrified if I failed to quickly react the mom and her kids upstairs were all gonna starting firing down through the ceiling at me in reprisal. Imagine getting merc’d by a four year old over Al Pacino’s unbridled rear end enthusiasm. Real edge of your seat film experience.
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Oct 12, 2023 13:45
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Also, 5/5 movie. Can’t believe I waited this long to get into Michael Mann.
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Oct 12, 2023 13:48
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AFewBricksShy posted:Here's your "Absolutely must loving watch list" I’ve actually been on a Michael Mann kick since listening to the Video Archives episode about The Keep. I’ve seen all his movies up to Heat and bought the Miami Vice blu ray set when it was on sale for $20 (been watching an episode a night mon-thurs and just finished season one yesterday). I mean to continue watching the rest of his filmography once October is over (weekends are given over mainly to horror for the time being). I think Last of the Mohicans was my least favorite so far because it was the most “normal”. It felt like a purely technical exercise on Mann’s part, like he was only there to learn how to make a proper Hollywood blockbuster, and the skills he gained from faithfully creating a by the numbers sweeping epic summer tentpole flick he used to make Heat. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it. Milo and POTUS posted:I mean, yeah. Nobody would even question that Manhunter was tremendous.Thief is still my favorite, Heat was the most fun and the one I’d most likely watch again, but Manhunter was wild. He has, at least in his early career, such a skill at reproducing the reality breaking nature of an extremely violent or otherwise traumatic event with his visuals and sound design, and Manhunter was especially effective in that regard. Encountering The Tooth Fairy in full berserk mode was like getting in a car accident; time slows down or warps, action becomes blurry and smeared, frames drop so that he randomly seems to teleport half an inch toward his object of desire, the sound gets echoey and overwhelming, etc. Nothing supernatural is happening, but it feels so otherworldly and wrong. mysterious frankie fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 15:17
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Torquemada posted:Right; it's been this way on type of every media I've watched it on, and I've watched it on all of them. I sort of figured it was intentional, and it does work. The action is loud and punchy, and the dialogue during quiet parts is sunk into the oozing, atmospheric soundtrack, which makes them feel like dreamy respites from the chaos. But man, they need to release an Apartment Dweller Edition with a less dynamic sound mix. And don’t tell me to watch it with headphones. I like Mann’s movies, but not enough to suffer permanent hearing loss.
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Oct 12, 2023 16:50
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AFewBricksShy posted:It is definitely not nearly as stylish as his others, but those last 10 minutes are just perfection in cinematography, editing, and scoring. That quote is great. I did like the ending. The film is shot like such a soaring historical adventure, but in the end nothing is gained and everyone is sort of worse off (or dead) for having been involved. The very beginning is good too because Jared Harris is there.
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Oct 12, 2023 17:30
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Code Jockey posted:I just put on Thief last night and holy poo poo this movie is very good, I cannot believe I have been without it Thief is tremendous. I've been toying with interpreting it as an environmental horror film with Frank as the monster created and roused to action by human malfeasance, but the environment is institutional\cultural rather than physicaland the damage\mutation is psychological. Dude was dealt a bum hand at every turn coming up and, unlike most people who get that screwed that early on, he became a high-powered mutant master thief instead of a street person. But his human professional identity was like camouflage, even from himself, and he needed to move in tight controlled routines, sustained by the unachievable hope of the perfect live he had cobbled together in his wallet sized vision board, in order to maintain it. When humanity discovered him and attempted to exploit his talents for more wealth, they didn't understand what they were dealing with and that it couldn't compromise or adapt, which led to carnage and the collapse of Frank's persona along with all the life that had been built up around it.
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Oct 18, 2023 14:51
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Saganlives posted:My friends and I watched Thief a couple days ago, and whoa. I mostly agree with your analysis, though I would personally frame it more as a working class professional struggling against a system that wants to exploit his labor. Your character analysis is really spot on, too. Thief is so goddamn good. How did he come out the gate that strong?
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Oct 20, 2023 11:36
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Jose Oquendo posted:Manhunter is my favorite movie and they better loving hurry up on that 4k release. Manhunter is great. It, Thief, and The Keep seem like Mann taking his first steps to work out a philosophy on professionalism that would carry forward into all of his movies. In Thief, Frank is superficially a consummate professional, but his professionalism is a shell hiding a broken person who can’t engage naturally with other human animals and, as a result he’s a danger to the order of things when pushed to move outside his routine. In The Keep, Glaeken is like the ultimate professional who can kill demons and bang the trauma out of a lady, but he seems more like a holy instrument, devoid of emotions and attachments, than a man. It was almost like Mann was saying “only angels can be healthy beings entirely focused performing specific tasks perfectly, because they were made that way; the rest of us become weird, sad, and dangerous when we make the attempt.” But in Manhunter William Graham is like the exact opposite of a professional. He transcends the capabilities of professionals by having no barriers between himself and others, so that he intuitively understands human motive. He’s not professional enough to survive long in the world as it is. Everyone around him is miserable but they maintain a professional barrier to keep themselves from completely losing it. Will doesn’t and is always juuuuuust about to completely lose it as a result, but by giving of himself he keeps us safe. If a professional is man destroying himself by pretending to be an angel, Will is a man destroying himself trying to be a messiah. It’s a pessimistic, but deeply sympathetic, look at being alive. Mann never presents us with a balanced way to exist, just points out that the world is hostile and all our strategies for surviving us have a deeply existential personal and interpersonal cost that must be paid to execute them effectively. I feel like other directors that picked up on the idea of the self sacrificing pro who can’t have a normal life, or the psychopath opining to the hero that they’re not so different kinda missed the nuanced, sorrowful point Mann was trying to make. We weren’t made to thrive in this world. It demands too much and is destroying us. How do we cope? Can we save ourselves without destroying our essential self in the process? Is there anything beyond us that can save us from this?
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Oct 20, 2023 14:40
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Code Jockey posted:That was a great writeup, and several words into it I realized I have not seen The Keep It’s not a great movie, but it is interesting. Apparently his dp died after principal photography, and you can kinda tell what is and isn’t a reshoot because lighting is really inconsistent. It was also supposed to be something like 4 hours long and he had to hack it to bits. Ian McKellen wears bizarre old man makeup for most of the movie, and once fully formed the demon looks kinda like a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger villain. There are some absolutely gorgeous scenes though (I love that checkpoint in the woods, goddamn), the soundtrack is great, and overall if you like cinematic fiascos you’ll get something out of it. If you believe Tarantino it was the thing that drove Mann away from film and into arms of tv for a few years. I dunno if Miami Vice would have been a thing if he hadn’t whiffed it so hard his second time at bat, which means The Keep is indirectly responsible for a lot of popular American aesthetic developments in the 80s and early 90s.
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Oct 20, 2023 20:00
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Code Jockey posted:I ran this and Silence of the Lambs last night as a "more suspense than horror but I will take any excuse to run Manhunter" double feature You’re right! If it had been shot with any flashy editing, lighting, or special effects it would have lost so much impact. Instead it looks both real and completely surreal, like the murder was a magic ritual that tore a bloody hole in the fabric of domestic order itself. Almost makes me wonder if we’re seeing it how Will is seeing it, and Will is seeing it how the killer is seeing it. I also noticed he did a mirror trick in the bathroom, where the protagonist is filmed walking by multiple panes arranged at angles so that it looks like he’s going in many directions at once. I can’t recall if he did it in the other movies I’ve seen so far, but I can remember it being used at least once early on during season one of Miami Vice in a similar situation, ie the hero is confused and overwhelmed by the situation he finds himself in. Even if I’m wrong about why he’s doing it it’s a neat visual flourish! Slugworth posted:Oh yeah, that's uh, not a problem that will improve with subsequent episodes. It's a shame though, because it's incredible. That scene set to A History of Bad Men was worth price of admission alone. Milo and POTUS posted:Season 3 owned and it's not even on the same level as four, covid or not. Thewlis was so good in that season.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:13
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(blood everywhere)
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I watched an episode of Miami Vice last week where jazz legend Miles Davis plays a pimp. That was a wild thing to experience. Sorta felt like walking into the bathroom without knocking and seeing my dad naked.
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Nov 13, 2023 21:46
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MrQwerty posted:lol have you ever seen the Frank Zappa episode Not yet! I’m watching them chronologically, so I’ll be experiencing this soon. Shumagorath posted:Noted piece of poo poo G. Gordon Liddy was also on that show. This too! I have seen Gene Simmons already. It was on the same episode where Penn Jillette plays a hapless human chariot being ridden to death by one hell of a haircut.
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Nov 13, 2023 23:42
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MrQwerty posted:He literally does the exact same poo poo that got him banned for life from SNL and it's loving hilarious lol
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Nov 13, 2023 23:44
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mobby_6kl posted:Watched that a few days ago and din't love it either but it is pretty good. I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be that good at one point but he's starting to slip, and we come into his life just as it's getting too obvious to ignore. His monologues about himself, how he does his job, and how he sees the rest of us are holdovers from late 90s/early 00s films about angsty outsider badasses; it feels like the central joke\question is "What would one of those sorts of larger than life male power fantasies be like if they were allowed to age the same way the guys who put their posters up on college dorms walls did?" "I dress like a beige German tourist to throw off the normies" Yeah, ok dude. You're in your late 40s and are experiencing early onset grandpa-fication. Go put on some Morrissey and cry about it.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:20
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Shumagorath posted:Parts of the 90’s/00’s vibe (down to the Zune / early flash iPod) might be from not changing a lot from the graphic novels. Makes sense. Seeing how Fincher modernized everything else in the movie (ie a big plot point is that apps and trials and general modern alienation have become an effective toolkit for the canny sociopath on the go) leaving The Killer himself back in the early aughts seems more intentional, like he's making a deliberate statement about how this kind of character can only be modernized so much and is maybe due for retirement.
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Nov 15, 2023 17:21
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Still on season 2 of Miami Vice and I'm noticing Tubbs and Crockett each represent different ways a cop can abuse their place in the cultural power dynamic. Crockett roughs up the suspects to get the results he wants, and Tubbs fucks every other female related to a case. The last episode I watched was an especially weird Tubbs one (Little Miss Dangerous). Rather than just banging the serial killer sex worker, Tubbs brings her to an upscale "safe house" and keeps her like a pet until she eventually drugs him and blows her brains out. All throughout the episode various characters seem pretty uneasy about what he's doing but don't intercede, like it's understood that Tubbs' two jobs on the team are 1.) sticking his dick in crime, and 2.) doing that really bad Jamaican accent, so just let him do his thing. If one of them also had a problem with hard drugs and gambling, they could fusion dance and become the Bad Lieutenant. Also, is anyone ever gonna do a wellness check on Detective Zito? Dude's been skulking around the background of most episodes this season looking disheveled, having emotional outbursts, getting mysterious limps, etc. I think he's still living with Switek since his apartment burned down, or maybe he's homeless? Whatever the hell is going on with that character has been the low key most interesting element of this season.
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Dec 6, 2023 17:07
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Jose Oquendo posted:Keep going. You're in for a shock with those two. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!
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Dec 6, 2023 18:19
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Extra Large Marge posted:For me a lot of the humor came from how serious Fassbender's character took himself, which contrasted with his constant gently caress-ups and doing things like checking into hotels using Nick at Nite names. Though if I remember correctly, he looks a little lost and miserable while chilling on his deck chair in the final shot. I think there are going to be a looooooot of complicated hobbies in that man's future.
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Dec 6, 2023 19:35
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Earwicker posted:thinking about it more, brad pitt would have been fine, but i think actually the ideal actor for that part is jon hamm I don't feel they have the right intense weirdo insect man energy. I'll always imagine Jon Hamm or Brad Pitt getting up to stuff with friends outside of work, growing restless, wanting to live a little, and that doesn't jibe with what I like about the character, and what makes the movie work for me as a meanspirited procedural comedy. Fassbender's killer believes his many interlocking rituals are what make him good at his job, but what made him good at his job had more to do with unique physical capabilities that are destined to fade with age. We meet him at the moment where they've faded juuuuuuust enough that he can't do his job anymore and all he's left with are his many affectations and a growing awareness that they don't do anything besides make him feel cool. Dude spent his entire life sitting in quiet rooms trying to control his pulse while listening to The Smiths and eating the guts of McMuffins because he thought that was the secret to his success as a professional murderer; I just don't buy Hamm or Pitt as that kind of overly serious, inadvertently ridiculous, process-obsessed loner. They're too warm and human.
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Dec 6, 2023 20:19
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Saganlives posted:I don't think it's even his physical capabilities. He doesn't demonstrate much physical prowess at all in the film, from what I remember, other than controlling his heart rate. I want to agree, because it's funnier, but the sheer number of resources he has at his disposal makes me predisposed to think at one point he really was some kind of murder savant.
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Dec 6, 2023 23:04
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Saganlives posted:Oh, I think he was tremendously successful but it took this incident for him to realize that luck played a far mightier part than he had previously considered. And a relatively small field of professionals potentially inflating his sense of status. In any case, I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would and I've thought about it a lot more than many other movies I've seen this year. Still one of Fincher's weakest tho. I wonder if maybe the movie was commenting on how weird years of Covid lockdowns and modern alienation has made us. For instance, he passes up a ton of easy shot opportunities during the initial assassination because he’s showing off what a perfectionist badass zen psycho he is to his imaginary audience (us). Maybe it’s not that he’s gotten weak with age, but that he’s gotten too eccentric after spending way too much time alone. —- Tonight’s Miami Vice episode stars Leonard Cohen as a French crime lord wtf, this show.
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Dec 8, 2023 01:04
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I knocked some more Mann movies off my list this weekend. Saw The Insider and Collateral. Liked both a lot! One of the most interesting things I noticed, due to watching them back to back, is that he used the protagonist’s cars, or specific rides in cars, to cleverly express a poo poo ton about the protagonist in relatively short scenes. Early on in Collateral we get a montage of Max going about a day as a cabbie and the car is shot from way back using crane or helicopter shots of hazy, slightly askew and mostly empty seeming, stretches of LA. The music diagetically playing through his radio over the montage is echoey and slightly distorted, as if the radio represents a connection to everyone else that is distant and strained because of his job and frustrations. It does a great job of communicating how alienating and routine Max’s life is. When we finally pull into the car for his big scene with Annie, the radio is playing soulful R&B music and the colors get warm and comforting; he’s in the moment and feeling a strong connection to his humanity through this woman. I thought it was interesting too that Mann’s one example of the shore in Collateral is Max’s photo of the Maldives; unlike other characters in Mann films, who are deep in situations and forced to make decisions, Max is living life from a distance, dreaming about the day where he starts living enough to be on a Michael Mann beach making a tough decision that will change everything forever (he also gives the photo to Annie, like he’s symbolically saying their interaction inspired him to take some chances, which he’s shortly thereafter forced to do when Vincent enters his life). Then, in The Insider, Jeff Wigand’s car is shot mainly from the interior and is deep blue even when it’s sunny out, and he’s never playing any music. He’s unhappy and completely isolated from everyone, which plays out in the choices he makes, which seem mainly to serve his bruised ego and self-admitted anger issues, rather than the welfare of his family or the American public. Mann even uses trees during the shoreline decision scene in The Insider to divide him from Lowell, like, this guy does not let people in, ever (and what’s in there is low lights and intense silence, mostly). I also thought it was funny how Lowell got banished to The Beach Dimension after ratting on CBS to the Associated Press. I wonder his neighbors were a turtle-raising couple who look like they stepped out of a Roxy Music album cover from the 80s. Then, finally, I wonder how inspired Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston were by Crowe’s Jeff Wigand when creating and embodying Walter White. They’re very similar characters, though Wigand is morally flawed where White is a straight up piece of poo poo. I liked both movies, but I think I got more out of The Insider. Collateral was great, but was very much a by the book brooding Hollywood action thriller (albeit impeccably executed and entertaining as poo poo), and I sort of wish he hadn’t moved to digital for this one, because shots looked cheap at times and the visual representation of one intense night in LA would have really benefited from being shot on film instead of whatever digital cameras they had in 04. I think I have five movies left now? I meant to watch them in order, but missed Ali, so I have to swing back and see that before continuing on to Miami Vice and beyond. Honestly, I’m not really looking forward to anything after Ali, though I am perversely curious about what he’ll do with a Miami Vice.
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Jan 1, 2024 18:38
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Code Jockey posted:I did not have The Insider, and I have since corrected this problem. Thank you, I can't wait to see it. It’s pretty cool! I like how he coaxed out the hidden moral and financial complexities to something that should be a no-brainer (ratting on tobacco companies for being monsters). What do you owe to yourself, what do you owe to your family, and what to you owe to the public? If you know you’re going to potentially destroy your family financially and emotionally by doing the right thing, and you know you’re doing the right thing for petty reasons rather than ethical ones, and you’re making these decisions unilaterally without your spouse, is it still the right thing? Earwicker posted:speaking of The Insider i love that Mann uses Neubauten's Armenia again in that, as well as in Heat Yeah it worked really well. A lot of the soundtrack felt kinda vanilla, but then he’d throw something like that in, or a weird spidery acoustic guitar track that sounds like something from the original Diablo. The burning car scene sticks with me. Just this little thing, but he made it seem so otherworldly and upsetting.
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Jan 1, 2024 22:08
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Earwicker posted:iirc most of that soundtrack is by Lisa Gerrard, i.e. half of Dead Can Dance, who was launching a solo career at that time. she had one track on the Heat soundtrack as well, from her first solo album, then she did a bunch of stuff on The Insider, and then her really huge hit was the Gladiator soundtrack a few years later Oh dang, I did not know that! thathonkey posted:i think the insider is the only mann (directed) film i have not seen. ive been kind of saving it. I think it helped that he started that movie in his late 30s. Seems like he did a lot of work honing his skills over in the UK, doing commercials and made for tv stuff, before he came home and tried to make a feature, and it shows.
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Jan 1, 2024 23:29
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:
The jazz club scene was great. Up until that point, Vincent's violence was very theatrical and cool. With the thieves in the alley, for example, he's doing this little murder ballet and I felt safe to just enjoy because it's so unreal. But when he point-blank, no frills, unloads his gun into the musician's forehead it felt grounded, which left me feeling both really bad for the victim and disturbed by a sudden awareness that someone could someday shoot me in the head, because as far as the universe is concerned it can be a completely mundane, casual act, like picking your nose or taking a nap. That was maybe one shot where the digital cameras worked for me; for the most part, whenever it was noticeable, it was like someone was enabling those Soap Operafication settings on my tv. Did you also notice in one of the other club scenes (there are three different club scenes, I'm now realizing), when Max is leaving the negotiations after successfully impersonating Vincent, they shot it so that his prescription eyeglasses are not clear, and look more like the sunglasses Vincent is wearing when he shows up at the airport? Like he is starting to really feel like a bit of a badass himself. Code Jockey posted:So the credits are rolling now, and holy cow was this movie good. It's a cannot miss if you like Mann's work, and it's just a great film overall. This complex struggle is absolutely one of the most compelling parts of it, the human that is caught in the middle of it all I loved the character study of Wigand and his misapprehension of his place in the world, and even how that world works. He blows the whistle not because he cares about the public, but because he feels like his ex-employer besmirched his honor when they intimated he might not be upholding his end of their agreement. He thinks of himself as a member of the landed gentry who is self-sustaining and can go to war over principles, but he doesn't even own his own house and his wife points out they basically have no financial runway without his severance. The bank owns his home and his position in this world is only as good as the next job he can land, but he acts like he's Lord Wigand of Gated Communityshire, and spends a lot of the movie trying to maintain or repair that self-image, generally to the detriment of himself and his family. By the end all he has is the painted figure of Paul Revere floating over his shoulder; he's lost his family and material wealth, so now he's trying to make do with the idea of himself as a great historical hero rather than a small angry man in a rented room. thathonkey posted:i dont really get it either. maybe its cause in not familiar with the tv show at all but miami vice is my least favorite mann movie by quite some margin I am really curious about what he did with the movie. The show is full of dodgy acting and lots of questionable production choices, and it was always punching above its weight while generally failing admirably, and that's part of what makes it so charming. Thematically it's not a deep show by any means, so if he files off the corny, experimental jank what is left? A slick movie about tropical cops?
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Jan 2, 2024 18:41
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BitBasher posted:If I recall what actually saved Max was that Vincent's muscle memory hosed him. IIRC Vincent Drew and shot first but put his rounds into the steel door aiming for center mass out of reflex, Max returned fire and got some shots through the off center glass windows shooting wild at extremely close range. E: I think the movie wants us to take away that he won by caring about something in his present, rather than always planning for an idealized future, thereby breaking out of his dehumanizing loop as Really Good Driver, which gave him the unpredictable versatility and passion to overload Vincent, the Really Good Assassin. It was absolute dumb luck, but Max laid the groundwork to force chance in his favor. I also love when Vincent dies. Just powers down like a robot. mysterious frankie fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 21:32
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:So what were the other pro watches from Mann? Manhunter? Miami Vice for that one shootout? Manhunter is extremely good. Of all the movies I've seen by him so far, the only one I'd caution against rushing into would be The Keep; that thing can only be enjoyed as a curiosity piece, though some individual scenes are gorgeous. I'm in the minority here, but I believe The Last of the Mohicans is his weakest legitimately good movie. What have you seen by him so far?
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Jan 2, 2024 22:08
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Yeah that was incredibly cool. He's in the progress of reloading, realizes what has happened and just ... powers down like you say, and sits down. I normally actively dislike Tom Cruise, but he was fantastic in Collateral. I saw some reviews from the time that said Cruise was too robotic, but I feel like they missed the point of that performance. I need to lay out my own understanding of Mann's work to really defend what I'm saying here. Apologies in advance. I've read critics who claim that Mann loves professionals, but I'd say he is in awe of professionalism as a method by which damaged people\outcasts gain superior abilities through deliberately narrowing their life experiences down to embodying a perfected set of skills, often at great personal expense, and the systems of order whose existence rely on networks of these people remaining in a disordered state of professional focus. Where those critics get confused, I think, is that Mann doesn't outright condemn professionalism and those systems, and he often shows how cool professionals operating at peak performance look, so their conclusion is he must unambiguously love this state of being. In reality, I think Mann reveres professionals and mourns their necessity in a natural world that he views as inimical to human prosperity because it doesn't\can't want, understand, or respect what we want (to live, have cool stuff, be happy, make more humans that can also have all that) and can't be bargained with; I think this oppositional, natural world is embodied in characters like Waingro, Dolarhyde, and even Frank to some degree. To oppose these forces man creates order (laws and expectations, often imposed by threat of force, that define what is and isn't an acceptable human) and uses professionals to maintain it; as a result of man's inability to create a perfect system the order creates outgroups who, still desiring all the same stuff as the ingroup, create their own prosperity driven criminal orders that are serviced by outgroup professionals. I think it's a very Judeo-Christian model of reality, laid on top of a materialism that alternates between despairing and celebrating its own insufficient primacy in human affairs. The angels- perfect servants that accomplish tasks ordained by God with peerless skills and no conflicting desires- have gone missing (except when they aren't, ie in The Keep), leaving man undefended with only his wits and physical resources; as a response we created our own angels and demons out of ourselves via professionalism and put those professionals to work maintaining our artificial heavens, hells, and kingdoms abiding by their laws. This state of being isn't natural to humans, so it causes the professional and those who love the professional a great deal of suffering which increases over time until it eclipses whatever pride & utility they receive from the arrangement. In Mann's stories the professional is often introduced at a point in their lives where they are no longer suitable to fulfill their role in whatever order they represent, and so they must choose over the course of the story to abandon their professionalism in favor of their humanity; those who do are rewarded wand those who don't suffer a full collapse of self or outright death. Collateral, taken from this view, could be seen as a critique of modern society, where the order or things and the sacrifice of professionalism is no longer counterbalanced by the value it provides. Max is a professional driver who can't use that professionalism to move on and create his own limo company, instead stuck in a loop like a worker ant; where conflicted professionals in Mann's previous films would stand on beaches that represent being at a transitional point where difficult decisions need to be made, now the professional has a picture representing the fantasy of one day having a choice (echoing Frank's photo collage of what he imagines humans want, Max has a photo of what he imagines it feels like to be able to self-determine). The man who called the hit can't tell the difference between Max and Vincent because they're interchangeable commodities, and for a moment as he leaves the club Max can't even tell the difference between himself and Vincent. Even the attendees at the third club are like programmed revelers who don't react when Vincent kills several people in the crowd while pursuing Max. Vincent represents the nihilistic pinnacle of this deadening, meaningless professionalization of all humanity. I think it's intentional that he dies, or powers off, on a train- a single-purpose mechanical device that cannot function without a track- and then the train bears the corpse of its brethren away, while Max and Annie, having chosen humanity over professionalism, watch from the platform. Naturally, Cruise should play that character as a spooky robot man! He IS a spooky robot man, and I think Cruise played him perfectly.
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Jan 3, 2024 17:36
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Earwicker posted:but given the novel it's based on that makes perfect sense and it's well done He based his screenplay on a script written by Philip Dunne in 1936. IMO it was intentionally a formalistic Hollywood blockbuster because it was a learning exercise Mann was doing to figure out how blockbusters work. He took what he learned, synthesized it with his artier crime movies, and made Heat. I'd never claim it's a bad movie, but I do think it's a weak good movie because it's like... I dunno, a well-made runway for a much more interesting jet? E: or maybe it's less like a runway and more like the plant that built some of the parts that made the jet? I'm confusing myself at this point. mysterious frankie fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 18:20
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Vampire Panties posted:Thank you for this. Somewhere in my I'd be super interested in seeing what Michael Mann would have done with that story if he wasn't trying to copy form. I'm not sure it'd be a good movie, but I'd definitely find it a lot more fun to think about. thathonkey posted:Last of the Mohicans also did not age nearly as well as many of his other movies (even older ones) imho. i saw it for the first time last year or maybe the year before though so maybe other people feel differently The thing he's done which has aged the worst (best) is the email scene in The Insider. His concept of what email is and does in 1999 is so weird that it goes all the way back around to being unintentionally awesome. Even at the time I would have been like "Wait, my Juno account isn't a winged cartoon envelope that flies around my desktop making death threats. What gives?" I'm not old enough to have casually faxed anyone, so I can only assume he got that technology 100% correct, and middle-aged yuppies were constantly using it like AIM to bug one another.
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Jan 3, 2024 20:11
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brain was rattling around "Mann based it off some 1920s/30s movie" but I couldnt find anything by googling. IIRC (again,
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Cactus Ghost posted:what about crocket turning away from romantic love to show up for brotherly love, hows that slot into yalls buncha ten cent words Well, I’m only in season 3, and so far Crockett’s job destroyed his first marriage twice; then in one episode he tried having a girlfriend and everyone in the department gave him poo poo about how he was betraying them by having outside relationships (which turns out to be true when Tubbs is almost killed while working solo), after which he gave up and went back to being a lonely boat drunk with an alligator for a pet. Tubbs tried getting a girlfriend in the last episode I watched, and she was murdered by the criminals he was pursuing before the opening titles rolled. Miami Vice doesn’t always convey it well, but everybody in that department is a lovely wreck who has nothing going on in their lives besides their jobs, and they tend to encourage one another to keep sucking at life. Switek had a girlfriend in one episode, but she just sort of disappeared after she attempted to encourage him to aim higher in his career and suggested that having his partner live in their tiny rear end apartment was an issue (also, I think she dissed Elvis?). By their own admission, Crockett and Tubbs are paid poo poo wages and don’t even own their own stuff; all their flashy poo poo is department issued and if they quit those Versace jackets and sports cars would go to the next guys. These chumps are like a colorful monastic order of headcases. Tldr Crockett got bullied out of having romantic love by his coworkers, and the gods of Vice murder anyone Tubbs show an interest in. Shaman Tank Spec posted:It's like a reversal of The Terminator II, where the robot learns to love and that makes him better at his job. Here the robot starts to remember what he gave up to be a robot, and he can't handle it. That’s a neat idea! I’m no scholar either, but it’s fun to talk about this stuff.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:55
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Cactus Ghost posted:i was talking about the movie Oh, I haven’t seen that movie yet. Regardless, I will produce several hundred words on the subject. I believe Bataille said it best when he stated… E: not related to Miami Vice, but I was just thinking how, in The Keep, it’s interesting that the only supernatural character who seems concerned about the Nazis is the demon. Glaeken is just there to kill the demon, though he does take time out of his mission to bang the trauma out of the professor’s daughter. mysterious frankie fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 17:20
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I think Mann’s films manage to stay on the right side of Scarface-Poster-Dormroom-Badass because of his specific, nuanced point of view (he seems pretty ambivalent about the use of force and the general state of modernity, and balances his anger about systemic failures with a lot more thoughtfulness than most of his wannabes do, if they even make the attempt). I also think, as a professional who has no doubt sacrificed a lot of himself for his craft, he is exploring the personal and interpersonal implications of his choices through the characters in his films; watching each film in chronological order feels a little bit like seeing what Mann thought about the state of his life and the state of a world whose professional class he is an aging vanguard of at that point in time. They’re masculine films because they’re Mann exploring Mann, as well as a patriarchal society that imposes certain expectations of conduct on its members, and he always concludes with very mixed feelings about what he finds; by comparison a lot of similar movies are simply laudatory about aggression, conflict, and hard men making hard choices, or are bleakly, unthinkingly, nihilistic. Also they’re just beautiful to behold, visually and aurally. Few of his admirers can match him on a technical or aesthetic level.
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Jan 10, 2024 18:53
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Last night I encountered what is maybe the most low-key bizarre scene in Miami Vice so far, which is saying something. The beginning of the episode titled Streetwise has the Don Johnson song "Streetwise" playing over it, while Trudy works undercover as a sex worker & mouths the spoken word part of the song. The artistic choice is kind of tacky and mildly surreal and seems like it should make some kind of deeper sense within the context of the episode, but upon further inspection it doesn't really and is just there because (I presume) Don Johnson was now a big deal and he wanted the show to feature a song he recorded prominently. I sort of love when this show lets the actors' vanity steer the direction an episode goes in. Like how any Edward James Olmos centric episode is about Castillo's samurai code, or whatever.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:12
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Last night I saw the Miami Vice two parter where Zito gets it. Biggest revelation was that he had his own apartment and wasn't still living on Switek's couch. Second biggest revelation was that he was an alcoholic.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:41
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Doesn’t he plan on making a film adaptation of Heat 2? I got it in my head that he was, and so I was gonna wait and see the movie version first.
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Jan 28, 2024 19:38
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goatsestretchgoals posted:Heat 2: A prequel with Val Kilmer in a shitload of makeup and even more CGI Val Kilmer reloading the batteries on his text to speech generator during the shootout in “Heat 2”.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:36
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