The Michael Mann poll

Finally saw Thief today the way I have always wanted to (35mm), and tho I haven't watched Mohicans or Manhunter in ages, I think it's likely the best of the 8 films of his I've seen. Caan possibly career-best, and Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky and the wet streets of Chicago are all good too. While the phony heroics at the end are "exciting" I didn't especially like em.

Heat is basically Thief amplified in several directions. But Thief still gets its major themes and beats across with a fraction of Heat's cast and noise (however much I love Heat).

Manhunter ... it's been a while, but it to my memory is better moment by moment than as a film en total. Great soundtrack, though! Mohicans, that and Ali may be the only Mann director's cuts that fix/improve on the theatrical, but it's been a while with both.

Thief is wild, ott, beautiful

i have a pretty intense dislike of mann but thief is undeniably great - if he'd stopped there i would have been okay with it, honestly, although i'd miss manhunter a bit

wiki sez The film was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Musical Score, which is fuckin insane

rockism

otm

watched manhunter last night after having seen silence within the last two months. except for the gross shit, silence had me chuckling. so stupide. no chuckling in manhunter. no sir. fantastic if imperfect. gorgeous colors. mann just showin off his ability to frame anything he looks at perfectly. made me want to take screenshots every two minutes. it just eats silence alive.

also, the scene in the grocery store, where he and the kid stroll slowly past all the discontinued 1986 cereals. i went and looked a couple up and OF COURSE there's a cereal blog where half the comments are "hey i came here because i'm watching manhunter in 2014 and there's some bran muffin crunch and body buddies on the shelf." lol

rewatched Miami Vice over the weekend, was reminded of it by a moment on the new Pusha T album

the mixed use of format is really striking. there's a hospital scene right before the last act that's bright and clear, a complete departure from the texture of much of the low light digitally shot footage, that reads as a sobering moment

having the other cops outside of core present but relatively dialogue-free really streamlines the flow. Justin Theroux just kind of lingering in the background, saying virtually nothing, even getting shot and recovered without it really being a bump in the narrative

Ah funny I thought Pusha’s « Hard Piano » would have been perfect on Miami Vice’s soundtrack !

watched manhunter last night after having seen silence within the last two months. except for the gross shit, silence had me chuckling. so stupide. no chuckling in manhunter. no sir. fantastic if imperfect. gorgeous colors. mann just showin off his ability to frame anything he looks at perfectly. made me want to take screenshots every two minutes. it just eats silence alive.

xp yuuuuup

I can't what to see what middle-aged hunk actor he puts in a gray wig next. ACTING!

― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, August 29, 2007 12:34 PM (ten years ago)

Read this as Pacino in Heat

New complete soundtrack to Manhunter is out:

https://waxworkrecords.com/collections/vinyl/products/manhunter

'last of the mohicans' is awesome. rewatched for the first time since i was a kid and its aged pretty well

first directors cut was a step down from theatrical, more recent directors cut is prob the best version

I have finally watched Heat recently and found it quite bad.
Especially because of the reasons it's supposed to be good : Pacino and de Niro !
I don't think their ways of acting work in a Mann Movie. Or maybe it's just their personalities but something doesn't fit in.

As for Miami Vice, it's become one of my favourite movies which is weird because I had watched it when it was released and it didn't particularly leave an impression on me.
But watching it again a few months ago, somehow it clicked and I fell in love with it !
It's visually striking and I like the romanticism and dark atmosphere.

The whole sequence of the speed boat trip to Havana is marvelous.

This guy used the blu-ray and the TV-only director's cut of Blackhat to edit an ad-break-free best-quality version together (11.4 gb Mega download)

yeah anthony hopkins’ lecter is such a hammy pantomime dame performance next to brian cox’s lecktor, who is genuinely terrifying imo
― CARL MARKS PRINCIPAL INVESTING AND ADVISORY SERVICES (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, June 13, 2018 11:49 AM bookmarkflaglink

also Noonan's Tooth Fairy is way more unsettling than hulking leading man Fiennes in Red Dragon

I forgot about tom Noonan in this holy shit

Just watched "The Insider" again, what a great movie. It's telling that afaik (and there may be other reasons behind it) it's the only Michael Mann film that Mann hasn't messed with post-release.

I didn't know he did that. Heat? Collateral?

I just watched the Insider for the first time this week! Very good movie, though I wouldn't mind it being a bit shorter (don't know what I'd cut). Mann's style works really well with this story

Hmm, was curious so looked into it:

"Thief:" Michael Mann did a new director's cut in 1995.
"The Keep": Obviously this one is problematic for so many reasons, so I'll just move on, though Mann's original cut was 210 minutes, which the studio trimmed to 120.
"Manhunter:" Mann oversaw a "restored director's cut"
"Last of the Mohicans:" Mann oversaw both a "Director's Expanded Edition" and a "Director's Definitive Cut."
"Heat": There's a "Director's Definitive Edition" with a few changes.
"The Insider:" No alternate versions
"Ali": Two subsequent cuts, a new director's cut and a *second* director's cut he called the Commemorative Edition.
"Collateral": No alternate versions
"Miami Vice:" Director's cut (which fucks up the awesome cold start!)
"Public Enemies": No changes, afaict
"Blackhat": Re-edited by Mann

Further curious, it appears that Mann's director's cut of "Blackhat" aired on FX, or some FX adjacent service, but has since vanished from circulation ...

Yeah, if the re-edit of Blackhat was made available anywhere, I'd check it out (I've never seen the existing version).

anybody seen the 7 hour Heat

I see Public Enemies has popped up on Netflix, tempted to give it another watch. I liked it at the time tho I know it has plenty of detractors.

is Ali worth checking out if you're a MM fan? I really don't like Will Smith or boxing movies particularly

I haaaaated Public Enemies when it came out, but it was mostly because the digital looked incredibly shitty on a big screen. Maybe watching it on a laptop would be an improvement. But you'll still have to put up with the insanely loud gunfire.

xpost Yes. Iirc the (first) director's cut was really good. Have never seen the second director's cut, though.

I did not like Public Enemies at the time, but I only saw it the once. There's one incredible shot, though, during a prison escape (I think?) of a dying man clutching the runner of the getaway car.

Blackhat Director's Cut is apparently available on demand via AMC currently.

You mean the theatre chain? I don't see it when I search.

lol looking some more, there are actually (at least!) 4 cuts of Manhunter!

AMC the channel - it's on demand for me via Youtube TV and will air again June 4

Is it designated as a different cut? Anyway, apparently the biggest change Mann made was putting the reactor sequence back in the middle of the movie rather than at the start, where he moved it at the last minute prior to release. I saw this exchange in an interview:

When you do a first cut, is it like an assembly or it’s an actual first cut?

MANN: At this point, I know that’s gonna go, that’s gonna go. Let’s take them out now. So, it’s actually a first cut. It’s more selective than an assembly. I’ll see an assembly of a scene and start right away cutting down things that I know I’m not gonna want. But that first cut is about events, moments, if in doubt, leave them in. what’s tricky is that the storytelling rhythms sometimes are good when it’s long like that. Then you get to a denouement, the whole third act is really driven because the first act and second act were too long.

There’s a re-authoring, for me in editing. Editing is like writing. It’s like a re-authoring of the picture. You have to imagine you’re rewriting it again. And you’re determining the storytelling, what stories you’re going to tell and the rhythms of it, to a certain pace and a build. That’s, personally, the way I see it. There’s no such thing as mechanically trimming things down to see how the movie is. I have to be imagining the movie from the end to the front and how all the parts are working together, and understand how each component is affecting the other components. I made one major shift in the movie, it’s a huge shift. The nuclear explosion used to occur after the storm drain, way late in the movie.

That’s a huge change.

MANN: That’s huge. It’s like putting a hand in a socket, pulling it out the other side. I decided, “No, I have to have these events occur in the front.”

When you made that change, was it in the editing room?

MANN: Editing room. I had to reconstruct a lot of dialogue all along the way. Halfway in his interview he says, “The nuclear reactor I heard about,” but he didn’t hear about it. He hadn’t heard about the nuclear reactor because the nuclear reactor never happened that early. It was kind of tricky. It became much better.

I had no idea you made that change, that totally works. I’m curious about deleted scenes in general with your films. Miami Vice, you did a director’s cut that was released on Blu-ray. With deleted scenes for this or your previous films, are you a fan of certain deleted scenes never seeing the light of day?

MANN: No. There are films I’ve done where I never changed a frame—Heat, Insider. Other films, it’s been serial and I don’t care about when.. If I see something that could be better and there’s a new digital format and a reason to fix it, I’ll fix it. The best version of The Last of the Mohicans is the one that came out a year and a half ago. Hands down, it is the best version of the picture, ever. I’m more mature about stuff, whatever it is.

There was a speech by Chingachgook at the end, I may have felt, “I really have to make these themes land, so I’ll speechify them.” They don’t need to be speechified, it’s implicit, so I took that out. It was never in, it used to be out in the first theatrical version of the movie, it should’ve stayed out. That’s a film that’s a successful film and I like a lot, and I’ve changed it a number of times. I don’t think there’s many, maybe one or two things I’ve taken out Collateral but that all worked. Losing the first scene in Miami Vice in the theatrical version was a mistake (laughs).

Of course, here he says he hasn't touched Heat, but he did tweak it. Intriguingly, I just came across another interview (in Vanity Fair) where he implies he didn't really mess much with the edit in "Heat," but did change the image. (I'll also include a follow-up graf where he talks about why he chooses digital so often):

If this new director’s edition of Heat is structurally unaltered, visually it’s been made more contemporary. “To make the drama and emotions accessible, I wanted to approach it as if I shot it two years ago. As an audience, we evolve in terms of our relationship to story—but the visual intake, and what these mean dramatically, emotionally, how we’re impacted, all of that evolves the way the medium evolves. If I were shooting this two years ago, there might have been more shadow on the actor’s face, more expressionistic with lighting, less chroma all over the place. Some visuals are quite beautiful; their visual attractiveness takes away the intensity from what’s happening between Pacino and De Niro. It can only be done digitally, it can’t be done photochemically. I can’t get into an image and decide I don’t want to see two eyes, I only want to see one eye, because that’s where the expression’s going to hit.”

Digital filmmaking has also revolutionized night shooting. “When we did Collateral, it was the first photoreal film shot digitally. You cannot capture night photochemically. Very shallow depth of field, very pretty, diffused, defocused lights; exposure-wise, you can’t get that crazy magenta sky you have in L.A., when the sodium vapor lights are bouncing off the marine layer that’s about 1,200 feet at that time of year, and the soft illumination of magenta and orange is very alienating, very attractive, and lonely at the same time. As if the whole movie takes place in Northern Europe someplace.” I mention that the film version of Miami Vice was the first time I ever saw clouds captured in the night sky, a meteorological note of menace. “I know what scene you mean. It was shot 12 hours before a tropical-storm warning. The skies in Miami are Wagnerian.”

Yeah, it's listed as 'Blackhat Director's Cut'

YouTube (like Amazon) only has the theatrical cut.

"Heat": There's a "Director's Definitive Edition" with a few changes.

also he straight-up remade the entire movie!


some guy remade the Blackhat director's cut using the Blu-Ray, for an improved but inconsistent image quality

also he straight-up remade the entire movie!

Huh? I thought he just trimmed a couple of lines and then re-color corrected the whole movie. What else did he change?!

I mean he literally remade the entire movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye6tmftzMoI

(returning to earlier 1979-1986 3-hour script drafts, from the 90-minute 1989 version)

more like a pre-make, no?

Oh, well, yeah, I mean, that I get. "Heat" was a "remake" of "L.A. Takedown," in a sense. At one point he was also working with a novelist (iirc) on a formal prequel to "Heat," too. But "Heat" isn't exactly/strictly a remade version of "L.A. Takedown." For that matter, a lot of "Heat" rehashes the themes of "Thief," just on a bigger scale. I do kind of like the idea of Mann's oeuvre just being this amorphous cloud of constantly changing cuts and ideas to be sharpened and refined.

It's totally an example of him thinking he didn't get the film right the first time, and going back to fix it - just a bigger and better version of his tendency than usual :D

If you look at I think what I posted or at least what he has said in interviews, it's actually more interesting than that. He apparently sort of approached the film again as if he had just made it a couple of years before and adjusted his color correction accordingly (I guess?) to be more in line with his aesthetic tastes in more or less 2015 vs 1995. Whereas "Mohicans," "Manhunter," "Ali," "Miami Vice," his post release fiddling was a lot more significant in terms of scenes, edits and so on. "Ali," for example, apparently had 4 minutes removed and 14 minutes inserted into the first director's cut, but the second director's cut actually runs 5 minutes *shorter* than the theatrical cut. It's kinda crazy keeping track of all this stuff. Has any other director been this maniacal about multiple director's cuts? (Aside from Lucas, I guess.)

I was referring to remaking an earlier, twice as long version of the script with huge movie stars in it as “bigger and better” than tweaking the colour grade, not the other way around

Finally watching “The Insider” after many many years of meaning to get to it

It's a masterpiece.

Still have been unable to watch or even find the Blackhat director's cut.

after revisiting the Insider I did find it a little overfed

I saw it again pretty recently I find it pretty much perfect.

In the second half, Wigand disappears so that Al Pacino can yell a lot.

I watched it for the 1st time the other week and thought it did kinda lose itself somewhere in the back half. Pretty great up until then though.