The Michael Mann poll

Black Book has bits as inspired as anything V's ever done.

I liked Miami Vice better a second time but all his movies have indigestible hooey in them.

Just got the Lightbox schedule, and they've got a series running over the winter (everything through Public Enemies except The Keep, whatever that is). I've seen them all, but I'll order for Heat and Collateral for sure, maybe a couple of others.

this was p bad & super dry, i get that is maybe what ur going for, hackers as detached actors, villains lacking motive other than $$, idk that does not make for a v compelling film imo; also i prob havent seen hemsworth ever before but he is such a blank its ridiculous

'dry' is what I feared. Dry does not suit MM, does it? It's all about mood and a kind of exaggerated pathos backed with some sort of dadtronica.

About to see this. Bad sign it's on the little screen.

yea theres little to no mann™ moodiness idk i think w/ such a global scope itd have needed to be 4 hrs if he tried to incorporate it

this movie appears to have been a bomb which isn't surprising. tbh whatever its merits may be, the ad campaign is awful, one of the worst I've seen recently.

yea my hunch is that the studio could tell it was tracking 2 be a bomb and really amped up that awful (agreed) advert campaign but idk who theyd poss be pulling in w it

centering the poster ads for your globetrotting action movie around a lock of chris hemsworth's hair is fucking strange.

yeah trailers were abysmal, made me want to see Mortdecai almost

CitizenFour is the better Mann movie on this subject/milieu, even though it's not his.

That would have made a much better 13 episode cable series. That said, what a weak TV episode. That might be the closest Mann has come to directing a crap episode of Miami Vice. This may be the first Mann with almost nothing going for it - and I'm including The Keep - beyond its innate Mann-ness, but that is not enough here.

LOL at seven foot tall Thor blending in anywhere. And the bad guy was a blank guy. Did he even have a name?

One thing that would have given this more weight, if not made it better, is had it begun with 30 minutes of Thor in prison and how it hardened him and taught him to fight. Also, another 20 minutes to show why he and dude's sister fell in love.

Eh, fuck it. Nothing could have helped. You can't condense a boilerplate miniseries into anything good.

I liked it as a infosec James Bond movie, but like all good propaganda I liked it without being able to explain why later. Every hacker I know has a braggart/ego streak miles long, but Hemsworth plays it so cool as to be inert.

I found the whole thing so ridiculous it was infuriating. So you have a super hacker, able to summon hundreds of millions of dollars at will, and able to marshall a small militia of psychos, and his grand plan is to what, blow up power plants to make more money?

And speaking of said militia, you have a group of armed men with machine guns and rocket launchers marauding around, linked to a guy who took out a nuclear power plant and manipulated the stock narket, and US intelligence just doesn't seem to care? Destroying a nuclear power plant and manipulating the stock market you might be two things that would get their attention the most!

xpost - Well, to control a commodity, which is what's creating the new super-duper-rich. But it sounded ridiculous paired with the manhuntering "That's what you're doing, you sonofabitch, isn't it?" moment. And the line that seemed most ridiculous to me was Hemsworth looking across an empty landscape and rattling through the potential materials this particular landscape could be used to create.

(And all true and otm with the second post!)

But why would he care about controlling a commodity when he can just spike the soy prices and make $75 million, or however much? Just so silly. It didn't even bother to give him a real motive, like "I am a huge hacker asshole, bow before my ego and abilities!" No, just some dude.

It felt like there were 8 hours missing from this.

every thing people say just makes me more excited to see it. it sounds like a wonderful visual experience unencumbered by boring plot-rubbish. monday. i'll probably hate it.

As much as it looks like a Mann movie, it is not even that visually impressive compared to most Mann films. some helicopter shots of cities at night, some cool reflections. I wish he put as much thought into the story as he did in re-creating the accurate sound of specific gunshots through specific materials.

it sounds like a wonderful visual experience unencumbered by boring plot-rubbish.

Yes, very.

Michael Mann's Quantum Of Solace.

It's not even James Bond level. It really is TV schlock level, imo. It's got no gravity, nothing at stake, barely fleshed out relationships.

yea part of me wants to defend it a tad but im also kinda *knodding* @ every JiC post so

Seriously, you will not find a bigger Mann defender than I am. This is not worth defending.

goddamn this is all v disappointing I was kinda excited for this movie

but every negative thing about blackhat in the thread seems m/l in line with the lukewarm reviews, bummer

some fascinating stuff in this about *just how much* material was recycled for Heat

http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/882-the-long-warm-up-to-heat/

Really, he's been recycling the James Caan scene from "Thief" again and again, at least in his crime thrillers. Basically professional people sitting across the table from one another, one telling the other that they might be friends/lovers, but when the heat comes down, it's all over and they'll never see each other again. Obviously that''s in "Heat," but it's also essentially in Public Enemies, this one, Miami Vice, maybe implicit in Manhunter, and possibly Collateral, too, where the lonely hitman (who has divested himself of all ties to civilization in pursuit of order) develops a rapport with the driver, but really the driver is biding his time before he can get the hell out of this abusive relationship.

Insider (I think his best film) flips the script, basically with Pacino telling Crowe, when the heat comes down I will *not* leave you. That's sort of the romantic underpinning of Mohicans, too. Ali ... I don't remember anything about that.

fuck "visual experiences" in narrative movies that are snazzy images with no underpinnings

Ali to foreman: "when the heat comes down I will leave you on the mat"

fuck "visual experiences" in narrative movies

lol, i meant

fuck "visual experiences" in narrative movies

If visual experiences isn't part of your equation, read a fucking book.

Excellent compromise I own:

http://www.dga.org/~/media/Images/DGAQ%20Article%20Images/0603%20Fall%202006/books_Taschen_MichaelMann%20jpg.ashx?w=175&h=207&as=1

I mean it with the quotes. Don't give me dialogue and acting you clearly don't give a fuck about, Mr Auteur.

but keep on strawmanning, EH, and pump up da volume

i like some of his movies a lot, but holy cats is michael mann a pretentious douche

https://twitter.com/vishnevetsky/status/556197084169527296/photo/1

also see his sight & sound poll comments

like, if there's one thing distinguishing thief from drive (and there are a few things), it's not that thief is an incisive marxian analysis of global capitalism

I like that conflict. Mann's roots are hardcore blue collar Chicago, and his movies are often about a working class of sorts, but cast through this intellectualized spectrum. I think it can be read as pretentious, but I think Mann really feels strongly about the world he is depicting. Like, good or bad he can make some pretty rousing defenses of what some people see as ridiculous. That's why his commentary tracks are great.

he is so obsessed with details and minutiae that when he finally makes a movie as thoughtless as his new one, I am really curious as to why he made the bad decisions that he did.

well, he has that hollywood thing (which latter-day malick has, too) where you get obsessive over the minutiae but sometimes miss the larger stuff.

and i'm not saying that his intellectualism is bogus, but he does seem really set on making sure that you're aware of it, more in his interviews than the films (although it crops up occasionally in the films, too).

I think his obsession with detail pays off when he has some space to let the information breathe. Lately, no doubt due to budgets and commercial pressure, I get the feeling he lacks the power to make 3 hour character-drive epics. I do find it interesting that so many of his films (even Heat!) were subsequently released as a director's cut. For better or for worse, he keeps thinking about and tweaking his films, and some of the versions (Ali and Mohicans in particular) are much better than the theatrical cuts, even when the changes are subtle.

Though he seems pretentious, I don't really get that from Mann. I think he is just so thoughtful and thorough that he sometimes seems to be showing off, but that's likely his autodidactism at work. This new one is such an anomaly, in that it is clearly a Mann film with many Mann things going on in it, but is lacking justification for the details it does include, while missing a ton of details it really needs.

Kinda loved this. This review is pretty on point. http://reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/1989/blackhat

As are most of his. He is remarkably faithful to his enthusiasms and I envy that.

Well, I'll give him credit for identifying all the ways the movie is weird and erratic and inconsistent, but then highlighting them as pros rather than cons.

ooooh i betray my enthusiasms all the time like most ppl

I do too; from which stems dissatisfaction.