The Michael Mann poll

what Mann score isn't dated within two weeks of release? Worst part of Collateral is when they're rolling slow through LA to the sweet, sweet strains of Audioslave.

Miami Vice does make good use of Jay-Z/Linkin Park, though. The assault on the drug boats! So badass.

Miami Vice. The Insider is pretty tolerable, tho, for blatant Oscar bait.

'cept Al's shameless angling for the bait wasn't noticed.

I didn't really like Ali at all. :(

Me neither.

Collateralz
James Caan is great in Thief but the movie's not the greatest. the score is really good and really bad.
indsider was booooring. russell crowe looked like he was full up to the neck with feces

you could smell him?

Ali is the oscar bait, and it suffers because of it. Insider is great.

This one is tough.

I think everyone's misread what I wrote: I said "Al," as in, "Pacino." We really shouldn't discuss Ali in polite conversation.

miami vice the show should really be in there

I really liked the insider.

AH! I assumed it was a typo. Sorry.

to alfred, obv

"we've been made"

Miami Vice sucked. My rental DVD went kablooie when they were about to rescue the chick from the trailer with the fake-pizza-delivery-scam, and I didn't even bother asking for a replacement to finish it. Awful, awful, awful, and boring to boot.

I voted for Collateral.

fuck manhunter haters YOU OWE IT AWE.

other people's unexplored fetishes are really boring

(unless, of course, you agree)

I own new-Miami Vice on dvd! Not the 'director's cut' though, since I heard it sucked so I bought the other one

YOU OWE IT AWE

^^ kudos

The Insider

i don't really care for his style. manhunter and the first 2/3rds of collateral are good too.

Police Story really needs to be in this too

I thought the same thing initially, but the best thing about Crime Story is the Abel Ferrara-directed pilot.

crime story is the best BY FAR but the pilot does stand out stylistically. wasn't the chase through the mall in the pilot?

I'm in sales and the territory I cover happens to be where I grew up. So when I travel to visit my clients I usually visit my parents and sometimes stay the weekend. They don't have any DVDs. Only VHS tapes. And of the VHS tapes they have, get this, Jurassic Park, Braveheart, and The Insider. That's it. Needless to say, there have been many times when I've been bored and will end up popping in The Insider.

And it never gets old. I think it's truly fantastic. ALL the performances are pitch perfect. That scene with Bruce McGill in the courtroom jars me every time. It's maintains the feel of a Michael Mann film but it feels weightier than usual, and not just because of the subject material.

Here's that scene I was talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdGqfhAt6yQ

Might as well post this one too :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIjpP-XngKA&mode=related&search=

I'd say definitely The Insider as well. He puts all of his visual, structural, and storytelling skills to use in something beyond a crime film. Pacino is excellent because, as in Donny Brasco, he plays a guy who basically has to pick a lock and can't raise his voice, and so forget about yelling.

Mann's films are some of the only DVDs I own, and I never get tired of watching them. The HD video on Collateral and Miami Vice is a real step forward.

Zodiac is clearly David Fincher going toe-to-toe Michael Mann.

The ending to Heat is dissatisfying.

Collateral clearly started as a very run-of-the-mill 1990s hit man dom-and-sub-male screenplay that Mann managed to make his own. I'm sure Ruffalo's path in the movie was Mann's rewrite.

There is great potential for a Best Cameo in a Michael Mann Film poll: Rollins, Tone Loc, Bud Cort, the Me and You and Everyone We Know guy.

Eazy, that's the exact thought about Zodiac I had. Visually and stylistically (whatever that means) they're pretty similar. What I just thought about, though, was that they're pretty similar thematically as well. In a way they're both about guys who are working to get a story out there but run up against institutions that are not motivated to tackle it full force. And even in the end the victory in both cases are almost afterthoughts.

hay alex in sf u a fucken faget

anyway here is my fav scene~~ http://youtube.com/watch?v=oa5z77EI8y0

So so hard, but I'm going to have to go with Miami Vice which is without a doubt the best looking film I've ever seen on a big screen, except for In The Mood For Love. Not seen the first two though.

there are people who hate James Caan? This is news to me.

Well, it's usually with a demented form of bad taste. I mean, deep down I can sort of forgive Alex because, well, he's a cool dude and all, but seriously you lack a few braincells when you discard every Mann film.
I picked Heat but after watching Collateral again I had a hard time picking between these two (and Manhunter). I simply adore his style. Miami Vice is grebt as well.

Does everyone remember this?

A Michael Mann moment

Zodiac is clearly David Fincher going toe-to-toe Michael Mann

Sure! If Zodiac had any juice!

there are people who hate James Caan? This is news to me.

Landlords and ex-girlfriends from the mid-1980s.

eh. Who needs em.

i like heat but ffs it's the insider by like a country mile, ppl. michael mann is kind of bad.

yeah i voted for the insider. I liked Heat and parts of Collateral tho.

If you want to appreciate Michael Mann, for the first time or once again, go see The Kingdom when it opens this fall. This could have been a fantastic movie if he'd made it (he produced it), but instead the characters/plot/visuals aren't as sharp, and it really goes off the rails in the last third. But the premise -- total MM territory.

smooth -- that's how we do it.

if i want to appreciate michael mann, i'm going to put on the insider, not go watch a middle movie!

middlING, sorry

Heh! Well, go see another movie at the multiplex in September and sneak into The Kingdom for a bit and see what I'm saying.

now THAT i am ok with

'ali' and 'the insider' are maybe his worst films. i haven't seen 'the keep'.

'crime story' is not the best 'by far', you smokin'. anyway mann directed like one episode. ditto 'miami vice'.

I own new-Miami Vice on dvd! Not the 'director's cut' though, since I heard it sucked so I bought the other one

-- mh, Wednesday, August 29, 2007 3:47 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Link

apart from more herc-from-the-wire at the start, there's no big difference.

What makes The Insider one of his worst? I'm curious.

Keep is my favorite. Not cuz it's great - it isn't - just cuz it's got monsters in it. Mysterious and creepy, too, with entertaining 80s Tangerine Dream score. I'll always take creepy w/ monsters over men w/ guns.

"seriously you lack a few braincells when you discard every Mann film"

Haha I didn't discard them! I've seen them all (except the Keep) and I even gave little reviews above. They just mostly suck.

https://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/michael-mann-on-the-true-chicago-story-behind-heat/

Good lord, Crime 101 (Mann not involved) is egregiously Mann-derivative in dozens of ways, from little things like lines ("How about I buy you a cup of coffee?") to decor (spartan beachfront apartment for the thief protagonist) to score (not long before the end, a pretend version of "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters") to big things like an L.A. cat-and-mouse cops/robbers story. Overwhelmingly derivative, though Chris Hemsworth improves on his Blackhat and Ruffalo gets to be a completely different cop from his Collateral one and Hallie Barrie is pretty much a version of Jada Pinkett Smith's Collateral character 20 years later. Watchable, but holy moly, what a ripoff.

Does it have an urban fox wandering the streets?

Apparently it's based on a story (novella? not a novel, at any rate) by Don Winslow, whose books are mostly pretty good. I'm gonna watch it as soon as it's streaming somewhere.

I haven’t checked it out but the soundtrack by Blanck Mass popped up in my music recommendations

Thief getting 0 votes is insane.

was it hard to see for a while? I feel like it’s had a critical resurgence in recent years. awesome movie

New cut of Manhunter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR-29nRSbTw

Mann is like the king of post-release fiddling. He's a smart guy, though, love to listen to him.

Absolutely on both counts. The first interviews I read by Mann were for The Insider and I was impressed how detailed and intelligent his responses were - this was someone who didn't necessarily have to make films, he could've been a top-notch journalist, historian, investigator or anything else along those lines. Years later, whenever I heard his former collaborators and boutique labels talks about his work, it was painfully obvious that he has some strange hang-up where he can never, ever let a film go. Literally the minute he turns in what's ostensibly the final cut of a film, he'll already be thinking of a DIFFERENT cut. This even comes across is in his own interviews. I've never seen any other filmmaker that was like this - maybe D.W. Griffith who notoriously tried to recut an exhibition print of one of his films right before a repertory screening.

*talk about his work

Ironically, I think The Insider is the one film he hasn't fiddled with, or maybe legally can't?

I don't think he's messed around with Public Enemies, because who gives a shit?

True (on both counts), but apparently:

For unknown reasons, all Blu-rays other than the North American, United Kingdom, and Australian releases have 12 seemingly random seconds cut from the scene when John Dillinger is transported to Indiana and there is a media scrum at the airfield. The excised material is wholly in the form of tighter editing on certain shots. For example, the shot of the plane coming to a stop is 1 second shorter, the shot of Dillinger being taken off the plane is 5 seconds shorter, the shot of the man with the flare is 2 seconds shorter.

Literally the minute he turns in what's ostensibly the final cut of a film, he'll already be thinking of a DIFFERENT cut.

In interviews, he's always talking about films from 30-40-(in the case of Thief)50 years ago as if he's just made them and just finished doing the research and just finished the screenplay.

He's also really obsessed with the idea that the way movies looked when he made them is somehow discordant with the way movies look now. Wong Kar Wai is the same way, color-correcting or otherwise remastering his movies to make them look more "contemporary," whatever that means.

Ashes of Time is an insane example where there was at least three different cuts put out for its original general release, and what you got depended on where you were in the world and how you were seeing it (in the theaters or on DVD).