come anticipate Miami Vice with me

wonder if HD makes period costume design harder? like if the picture is super crisp it'll pick up the fact that costumes are costumes and not clothes that ppl have been living in?

This was big problem for me with Public Enemies. So much of the clothing looked like costume, and things like matchboxes really looked like props.

Was also put off by the look in shootouts; was like a behind-the-scenes docu.

i thought it was sort of "mann-ish" in a slightly depressing way. the way that "face/off" was woo-ish. kind of an interesting movie in some respects, though i was bored for a lot of it.
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Saturday, July 29, 2006 3:06 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

just watched this cause of the poll thread - this was otm I thought

thankfully I watched this on my laptop and surfed the web during the gong lzzzzzzzz parts

^^^no way to experience this phenomenal film

considering a suggest-ban

;]

going to watch it again to restore the balance of the universe

yeah yeah the film is gorgeous and all, real shame I didn't catch it in the theater when it came out etc. etc. but still am glad I wasn't made to sit through 40 minutes of colin farrell drinking mojitos

I guess plotwise the movie hinges on the sincerity of the gong li relationship thing, which wasn't really a very believable subplot in the first place. you don't make it more believable by devoting more screentime to it, in fact you expose it even more. hi let me show you a picture of my dead mother

lots of great subtleties in that dead mother scene

As featured in Slant's Top 20 of the decade http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/best-of-the-aughts-film/216/page_9
and
Time Out's Top 50 http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/80947/the-tony-top-50-movies-of-the-decade/3.html

From the Slant piece:
A freestyle meditation on identity and self-perception, Miami Vice finds a perfect union of form and content via ravishingly rendered digital cinema, flattening the world into an expressionistic vista of interconnected tides and currents of bodies in space, subtextually loaded with ultra-gritty genre juice to spare. Michael Mann's recurring themes of freedom and the nature of will reach the metaphysical realm as the film scrutinizes the performance art inherent in undercover life, the metaphorical meaning we assign to our lives made literal. It's pulp and opera, an off-the-cuff balancing act, a liquid cinema statement from the moment Mann sends his everyman surrogate across the ocean he's for so long merely gazed upon. Like Moby's awesomely cued "One of These Mornings," it's a forever-remembered bliss.
-

Even i'm surprised by what now seems to be happening with this film.

It's a great film.

total bullshit that the theatrical cut isn't available on Blu-Ray

Needs to start with the Jay-Z.

groovemaaan otm. keep the slant bs out of the picture. "it's a forever-remembered bliss"??

it is indeed a great film. i *like* that Slant piece! it's hillariously ott.

i think the acting style and dialogue is vastly secondary to how the film was shot, scored, edited, and framed. not a criticism, i just think that mann was trying to make an entire picture of nothing but "michael mann moments" (and trying to get some kind of emotion from what some folks might find to be a cold style and story) and he succeeded. it's like 'gaucho' or something.

― jØrdån (omar little), Wednesday, November 18, 2009 11:19 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

otm tho im not sure how much it succeeded

just watched the director's cut for the first time - last time i peeped this was when it was in theaters - feel about the same now as i did then, which is that it's pretty cool but not great. feel like Heat and Mohicans are mann's only unambiguously great movies, and everything else is a mixed bag. which isn't really a criticism, because i love some of those mixed bags and revisit many of them! but its just that early in the 00s i kept waiting for his next masterpiece and never got it, and i think i know now that i should just expect 'next lumpen weird movie with lots of awesome little moments.'

some of my favorite mann moments in this:

interior of car being torn apart by anti-materiel rifle

the part before the climax where crockett & tubbs fistbump exactly when the drums of nu-metal in the air tonight kick in

scene where luis tosar is shown the security footage of crockett dancing just a little too erotically with gong li and the camera lingers on the back of his head the entire time

the raid on the trailer park was the only sequence that had any dramatic heft, to me. really would've liked to have seen the movie mann 'wanted' to make, with the climax taking place in the triple frontier. it also struck me that jamie foxx killing yero at the end = russell means killing magua at end of mohicans. in both cases it was like a concession that, yeah, the white lead was lame and the nonwhite sidekick's conflict was much more dramatically satisfying.

i couldnt actually figure out what was changed for the director's cut, aside from getting rid of the cold opening (which is like the worst possible change they could've made)

gong li did all her dialogue phonetically!

I remember certain scenes were extended and a little more sense was made of the plot, but getting rid of the cold open was such a terrible idea I never went back to watch that version again.

im a fiend for mojitos~~~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c3UeHTjxls

scene where luis tosar is shown the security footage of crockett dancing just a little too erotically with gong li and the camera lingers on the back of his head the entire time
― marios balls in 3d for 3ds (Princess TamTam), Monday, 31 January 2011 06:16 (23 minutes ago)

my favorite moment in any Mann movie.

even though getting rid of the cold open was a horrible decision, I like the movie a lot more the second time around.

Main (only?) added scene is where Tubbs calls Trudie as soon as he gets his signal back after meeting Montoya. She says she's fine and thanks him for the flowers. Then they sit in a diner and talk about whether their fake identities can be cracked.

Cold opening was a last-minute choice (if I remember a Wall Street Journal article in 2006 correctly) because the studio needed 10 mins shaved off. Maybe that explains cutting the other scene as well.

I love the scene in the airplane hangar before the final raid, when we see all the props of deception around them -- the boat, etc.

still love the contrast between Eddie Marsan's "It could come back on me, baby!" guy and Crockett's existential yearning out that window into the scene where the sound drops out.

Main (only?) added scene is where Tubbs calls Trudie as soon as he gets his signal back after meeting Montoya. She says she's fine and thanks him for the flowers. Then they sit in a diner and talk about whether their fake identities can be cracked.

Cold opening was a last-minute choice (if I remember a Wall Street Journal article in 2006 correctly) because the studio needed 10 mins shaved off. Maybe that explains cutting the other scene as well.

I love the scene in the airplane hangar before the final raid, when we see all the props of deception around them -- the boat, etc.

― An Artily Shot Sesame Street (Eazy), Monday, January 31, 2011 1:49 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah that diner scene was the main one where i was like 'this had to have been added' - i was a little fuzzy on some of the gong li stuff at the very end too, but maybe i just cared so little about that storyline that i didnt bother to remember how it ended

and yeah, dig the hanger scene. really like the exchange between crockett and tubbs there. mann really knows how to make u feel like ur 'in a moment' as its happening, and u really feel like ur in a hanger in miami in that scene.

I bought this on dvd because I heard that they were discontinuing the non-director's cut version! Gotta have that cold opening.

Still love this movie.

mh - glad I'm not the only one! I love the movie opening in the club, I don't get wthy in the Director's version they had to have some really stupid intro on the beach.

also a local actor I know is in this movie -- the assistant to the main White Supremacist guy, who claims the stuff is pure 'unlike thes tuff they sell in Nuyorico', and gets shot at the end....Steph@n Jon3s -- does a lot of local theatre here.

when it was released he said he wasn't even sure he'd be in the final cut and he's in like 10 minutes of the movie and his name appears in big letters at the end. jealous of this dude.

i love that the movie takes you through all of the complexities of undercover work, and the psyche of what it takes to be good at it.

I mean...I loved the Miami Vice show, but dunno that I"d have enjoyed it if Mann had done 2 hours of the way he did the television show, I'm glad he went the more gritty route with it (which is why many MV fanboys hated it, to be sure).

Justin Theroux must have had the opposite experience -- assuming he was a major character with a lot of scenes, but ended up in the background.

i started watching the tv series 'in earnest' when this was in the cinema and never got to season 2. apparently it does improve, but kind of doubt it was ever great.

I do think that this and Public Enemies could have been really great HBO miniseries.

A marked difference exists between the first two seasons! The first is your average crumb bum eighties P.I. drama with occasionally cool music (and Don Johnson smokes throughout); the second is when the P.I. drama gets delirious pans, long takes, and every shade of pastel, with cool music played often.

'public enemies' was once set up to be an hbo mini. it could have been sweet; it could have been nicely art-directed crap (like 'boardwalk empire'). but done right, with all the other crooks in it, it would be amazing. the book is fearfully boring, but the story isn't.

xp

huh -- ok, might rent s02!

Don't expect "Sopranos" or "Wire" level writing or acting though.

you can't watch the TV show the same way you watch the movie. the tv series is more about style and flash, and the plotlines are thin -- like ever see Crockett/Tubbs make arrests? Most of the time they got in shootouts with their criminals so the writers could neatly close the story arc. it's more black and white guilt-free fun with little deep examination of crime.

I will say this tho -- there was one pair of episodes that was far and away better than the arrest, and those were the Golden Triangle episodes, with General Lao and his formerly presumed dead wife. Much darker in tone than the rest of the series, although it had a bullshit copout ending at the end of the 2nd episode.

i have the second season on DVD but have never finishedi t, mostly cuz I'm only rarely in the mood to watch it.

I loved the episode directed by Edward James Olmos in Season Two: the one which begins with the camera panning down a South Beach sidewalk as Bryan Ferry's "Boys and Girls" plays; it had a Japanese theme.

the tv series is more about style and flash, and the plotlines are thin

The movie was 90% style and flash with a weak plotline!

the plot was kinda weak but i liked the world it took you into, the triple-frontier, haiti, rival agencies

xpost I wouldn't say the plotline was weak, it was simple sure in that it was an undercover bust of a drug ring and not much else, but the framework within that was much more developed w/ how deep they went into it. The Gong Li romance was kind of tacked on.

Being a Michael Mann movie, of course style and mood played a large role in it, but what I meant about the television show is that it was more 'candy'.

television show was "oooh, fancy clothes, shiny cars, beautiful Miami beaches, girls in bikinis, and great pop music...oh yea there's some cop stuff going on too"

movie had great shots of offshore beaches and open water, but also lots of grainy film stock and shots of the seedy white trash Miami underbelly and a lot more grime to it. I mean seeing slow motion captured exit wounds and watching a dude's arm get ripped off by bulletfire = gritty as it gets.

still wouldn't say the plotline was most of the movie because Mann invested so much into the visuals, but maybe closer to 40-45%.

movie did have some gorgeous images in it tho that's for true

xxpost one of my favorite moments is where Crockett notices his cell signal is gone due to phone jamming technology and he says "what's this doing on a dope deal?"

the grainy film stock was video i think

probably. i know very little about making films, mind you, so half my terminology is probably horseshit.

have directors cut and theatrical dvds; neither has the trailer, frown emoticon

grainy stock was digi cams running at high gain. Loved the look in Miami Vice but it made Public Enemies look like some video behind-the-scenes footage of actors acting and bugged me all through it.

i think the problem w/digital video that i have is a lot of directors seem entranced by it as much for the speed with which filming can be accomplished as much as its look. i guess it could be argued that the visual style lends some kind of immediacy to the proceedings, something which can be missing in film, but i'm really not sure that any of the films that have used it wouldn't look better with actual film stock and i'm not sure the "immediacy" thing isn't bullshit.

that said i think it worked in miami vice and collateral, but i don't think it worked better than film may have though since mann probably used it for the ability to capture certain nightscapes more than anything i'm willing to concede that point.

need to revisit 'public enemies' but i thought the use of digital was a revelation there, a new way of doing period shit. 'boardwalk empire' looks like a really dull and miscast and did i mention boring bore next to it. sometimes he went a bit far, with the gun-flashes, but sometimes art is about letting go and abandoning good taste, like the dude says in 'black swan'.

I though Public Enemies looked really bland and lifeless. No character to the lighting.