The Michael Mann poll

I'm not sure that the movie establishes for certain that the malware activated at the nuclear power plant was intentional

The movie is actually clearer on this point than most! The fans in the reactor he disabled were the same brand as the fans in the Indonesian dam. Sure, blowing them up was a test run, but he blew them up on purpose. No idea why he wanted to blow up multiple reactors, but then, the movie doesn't make a ton of sense, motivation-wise. Like, even if it was just a test run, who tests things out by targeting a nuclear reactor first, especially when that kinds of fans are apparently a ... dam a dozen

who tests things out by targeting a nuclear reactor first

some people just want to see the world burn, Josh

Bad guy in this was so not written - like, literally, did he even have a name? - that there is no way to parse his motivations. The future? He may as well have been planning to build a space base near Mars.

And again, I would have at least been on board a bit if he just wanted to see the world burn. But what little we know of him was just $$$, which is zzzz.

Alternate version: the test run knocks out the freezer in two delis, one in Manhattan and one in Tokyo.

Yeah, seriously. The cost of the Fukushima disaster was something like $100 billion, and that's just money. Sort of an insanely disproportionate target. It'd be like him dumping millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf to corner to shrimp market.

(Incidentally, just googled, and the shrimp market and the tin market are valued about equally, around $50 billion!)

would you say that the shrimp market is "jumbo"?

"I'm a fiend for jumbo deep-battered shrimp."

*aerial shot of Eazy driving a trawler to the gulf of Maine*

wow at dropping die hard in as an example of bad movie plot. login rescinded for 6 months imo

Something admirable about this movie just popped into my head: it's called Blackhat, and they may even invoke the term "black hat," once, but they never explain what a black hat is, or counter it with "white hat," a term that afaict does not even get used. So hats off, Mann, for respecting the viewer a little.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews_60/thief_james_caan_blu-ray_/large/large_thief_12_blu-ray_.jpg

need to click on that to see it in HD, fellas

beaver? i hardly even know her.

Are there any action - hacking scenes

http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2015/01/27/blackhat-isnt-a-failed-action-movieits-a-big-budget-avant-garde-film

i guess i should see this, but i'm skeptical of the sort of defense mounted here (and elsewhere). i don't think mann's digital imagery--at least in the previous few films--is all that interesting, really. i also think it's a little too /clever/ to suggest that blackhat is an "avant-garde film," since that clearly wasn't mann's intention, and it seems to overlook the fact that at his best, mann was much more than just a maker of startling or appealing images (and juxtapositions of images). a lot of this stuff reads like special pleading to me. but i guess i need to see it now, just so i can have an opinion. :)

The same is basically true of Miami Vice, which is better as both an action film and an a-g film.

Jesus, my Letterboxd is crawling with 5/5 Mann reviews from all over his career. They're outta control.

Eric otm

eric, sorry, i had a hard time interpreting your last post. when you write that "the same is basically true," what are you referring to as "the same"?

what is letterboxd, btw, and where did the third "e" go?

it is a viewing log/diary site for cinemaniacs

I've got one of those: http://letterboxd.com/quartzcity/

what a waste of time (he writes, while posting to ILX)

Poor Ralph (Heat). Two or three of the most ignominious movie minutes ever.

my only complaint with Collateral is the epic "Max, I do this for a living!" should've been the last words Cruise spoke instead of that dead body riding the T crap.

blackhat seems to inspire the contrarian in a lot of reviewers. cant say i was convinced. chris hemsworth is totally the wrong person. not sure if it was the cinema's sound, but everything he said sounded like a huffy mumble.

No, that's Mann.

I think he is Mann's nu-Val Kilmer and I agree 100% with his casting

also I am a swole hacker

He might as worked had he just been a hacker, but turning him to action hero, too, really underscores his ridiculousness as a hacker. Like, pick one, because depicting him as both was silly.

imo all great hacking films have feats of athleticism in them, often by the computer experts -- Sneakers, Hackers, Goldeneye

film was ridiculous and the casting is what really broke it imo. he looked like someone who gets flummoxed sending an email.

who doesn't, really

and the way he almost magically got the girl with virtually zero effort was beyond dumb. for a film that seems to be selling the diversity of its cast, it would have been more novel if the agent/brother got a girl rather than the norse god.

I loved how that courtship was handled.

You mean like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKLizztikRk

Another new interview

Thief has never looked better than in its Blu-ray release -- I haven't seen it in 20 years. Too bad that it's attenuated (male) menopausal nonsense with a way too loud soundtrack.

Buried in Cannes sales news:

BECKET – Director: Michael Mann. Writer: William Monahan. Story of the 12th century Archbishop Of Canterbury who enraged King Henry II when he declared fealty to God over the king. CAA selling.

man, that one is going to have a bangin audioslave soundtrack.

blackhat's opening sequence is so great

I couldn't finish Blackhat, the first time I've had to say that about a Mann movie. ;_;

Finally got around to watching Blackhat. Michael Mann has basically abandoned the notion of character development in movies. I didn't notice any terrible soundtrack choices, which is a plus. This film has the rare quality of feeling both too long while also lacking depth, if that makes any sense. Overall forgettable but I was entertained enough, I guess.

"How fast does that go?"
"It goes very fast."
"Show me."

Been meaning to go back to Blackhat, but my one viewing bummed me out so much. Then I saw Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and thought, huh, in a lot of ways that was a more popcorn version of what Mann was going for with Blackhat. Basically, I wish Blackhat was somewhere in between the two, a movie with Mann's sensibility and pacing and patience but with a slightly more coherent villain. I dunno. Maybe it's the bourbon talking. Blackhat could have been so cool if it was 30% more, just fleshed out a bit... eh. I should watch it again.

Rewatching "Miami Vice" (theatrical cut) for the first time in ages, and I think it holds up really well. So many cool details told in elliptical Mann style. The opposite of (how I remember) "Blackhat" (which I will get to again, eventually).

I was looking to lose myself in a big genre film, so I was definitely receptive to Black Hat. Just seemed to get sillier and sillier as it went along, though. Lots of movie hokum. Imprisoned hacker gets brought onto government counter-espionage team for his computer expertise, turns out he's also very skilled with guns. Or the moment when Chris Hemsworth is standing where all those tin mines are, and he spontaneously figures out the bad guys nefarious plot like he's doing a crossword puzzle. Thought Hemsworth (who I liked in Rush), Wei Tang, and even Viola Davis were all kind of terrible.

My other biggest problem I'll put on me, not the film: whenever they started into the details of the hacking operation, I had no idea what anybody was talking about.

i finally got around to blackhat. the blu-ray was sitting on my living room table for weeks. it took a lot of willpower to actually watch it, mostly because i thought "public enemies" was already nearly-final confirmation of mann's decline.

so... it was unredeemable, absolute garbage. every fault of michael mann's films to this point (and there are many faults) was magnified. there were about two, very brief grace notes in the entire thing. (miami vice, which i did not like, had many more.) the script was among the worst for a thriller i've ever seen. mann's visual sense has never seemed less inventive and assured, and the few critics willfully hailing this as some kind of avant-garde accomplishment... well, i'll have what they're smoking. all i saw was absolutely slack and preposterous storytelling married to am almost incompetent style.

one of the worst films i've seen by an erstwhile major filmmaker.

i also read a piece from deadline speculating about why this failed so miserably in every market it played in. the answer is probably only slightly more complicated than: it is awful, and the marketing did nothing to disguise that fact.