The Michael Mann poll

a guy named "my cool man" directed a film called "heat"

you should see the prequel, called Fear of a Black Hat. though weirdly it's got nothing to do with hacking and it's about a fledgling rap group

The director's cut of Miami Vice is definitely a step *down*, because the theatrical cut had one of the coolest cold openings ever and the director's cut replaces that with some speed boat racing, iirc.

The internet has a reconstruction some nerd

Dead link, as have been all the links I've found on the trail of both the director's' cut and the nerd cut.

Michael Mann director’s cuts are all worse than the theatrical IIRC.

I want to say Mohicans is better. I think there are 4 cuts of Manhunter, so who knows on that front. Ali is better, iirc. I don't think Heat is better; changes are minimal, iirc, but he re-color corrected the entire thing, I think. Insider has no director's cut. Collateral has no alternate cut. Iirc he even fiddled with Thief. Public Enemies, no interest in his director's cut (which I think exists). I'd love a director's' cut of The Keep.

Dead link, as have been all the links I've found on the trail

When he said “I’ve disabled this link because it got too popular for my well-meant but flimsy fair-use defense, DM me if you want to see it,” did you DM him or try the link anyway and get frustrated that it was dead?

I'm a passive pirate, not one to email strangers.

i might steal your booty, should i happen to bump into you.

I saw the Blackhat DC when FX aired it. And yeah the big change is he switches up the order of cyber attacks and while opening with the stock exchange and progressing from there is more organic I still think his instinct to change it so it opens it with the power plant stuff was the correct one even if it’s more narratively awkward. It just feels right to see those images earlier imo.

Generally I don’t like the idea of tinkering after the fact. Movies should be abandoned instead of perfected.

From what I read, isn't that how the movie is supposed to open? That is, it's supposed to open with the stock exchange, and the power plant thing was supposed to come in the middle, and that the theatrical version is the one that fiddled with it? I thought I saw that he even had to dub new dialogue into a couple of the Chinese scenes to account for the changes he made at the last minute in advance of the theatrical release.

oh damn thanks for warning me away from the miami vice dc y'all

Miami Vice DC is great. I own it. You can watch it with the sound on or off and it's equally awesome. (I also own the Criterion version of Thief and as far as I know he didn't fuck with that one too much, other than tinting everything blue-gray.)

There are small changes to the rest of Miami Vice that are whatever, but changing the opening is criminal.

i love the speedboat opening of the miami vice dc, the long silent shots set the tone for the rest of the movie

I'm sorry but miami vice is not a good movie

few seem to know this

The only bad parts are the Cuba sex trip scenes. It’s important to keep Foxx on screen as much as possible.

“From what I read, isn't that how the movie is supposed to open?”

Yeah. He changed his mind before the theatrical release. Feeling like he needed to open with that more dramatic attack to grab people.

I'm sorry but miami vice everything after manhunter is not a good movie

Going to go rescreen the Miami Vice trailer that cuts guns clicking as they’re racked to Jay-Z/Linkin Park.

I don’t necessarily dislike the speed boat opening of the Miami Vice DC in a stand alone sense, the slow rising to the surface is kind of otherworldly but putting us immediately in that club seems much more valuable. But sometimes with cases like this I wonder if I would always naturally prefer the first version I saw.

The only bad parts are the Cuba sex trip scenes any scene where Gong Li has dialogue

(I like her but she was awful in MV.)

everything after manhunter? that's bullshit

The director's cut of Miami Vice is definitely a step *down*, because the theatrical cut had one of the coolest cold openings ever and the director's cut replaces that with some speed boat racing, iirc.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, December 29, 2020 2:17 PM bookmarkflaglink

agree. I loved the cold open. I was obsessed with this movie after I saw it, started slinging drugs not long after

I started drinking mojitos.

haha me too.

i'm a fiend for mojitos

(i love miami vice and i'm glad both cuts exist, i'm really enjoying the dc. i agree the "numb/encore" drop is an amazing way to start a movie but i also can't complain about more loving 360 degree speedboat shots)

the photography in the port au prince scenes is totally fucking unreal

Eheh, yeah as I posted previously, watching MV the first time when it was released did nothing to me but then watching it again a couple of years ago it suddenly clicked and I was obsessed with it (I watched it like 4 times subsequently !). It LOOKS so great. Especially the moment when Crockett is outside at dusk (or dawn ?) and the sky is orange/burning. Actually my love of it is quite irrational because objectively it's a pretty common movie, borderline cheesy...
It's also rare to have a big Hollywood action movie with a leading couple in which the female actress is 10y older than the male.
And Jose Yero is so cool.

Especially the moment when Crockett is outside at dusk (or dawn ?) and the sky is orange/burning.

Not sure how digital this one movie or scene is, but Mann is one of the few director's I've heard describe his love of digital not for portability or affordability or never running out of "film" but for the specific way it accurately captures low-light scenes and situations that would otherwise be really difficult to light or which would be impossible for chemical film to capture. He's talked about it a lot, but I just came across this:

Mann helped usher in the digital revolution, enthralled to his Viper camera’s impossible night time depth of field, creating an image that is both naturalistic and dreamlike in the same moment. Characters are framed in negative space: on a nightclub roof lit only by the huge sky bathed in the illumination of grainy city lights below, or an approaching thunderstorm on the horizon; or piloting fastboats delivering a night-time shipment, every wake and wave visibly receding parallel to the distant docks. Mann and his director of photography Dion Beebe (who had replaced Paul Cameron on Collateral) spent four and a half months field-testing the cameras in conditions similar to those they expected to film in. “We shot tests at night, out at sea with helicopters and big boats and freighters,” Beebe told Susan King of The L.A Times. “They were bigger shoot days than I ever had on a feature in Australia—and it was just a test shoot. But the reason was to put ourselves in these situations and ensure we were going to get the results we wanted—securing cameras, (determining) how we were going to power them and cable them and (experimenting with) the settings we were going to choose for them.” Digital colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld then had to work out how to light it. “With the shootout at the end,” Beebe went on, “we used these big, hard lights and set out to create a single hard sidelight for the sequence. The problem is maintaining (the lighting) through the sequence because people are moving around and you are changing directions.”

My ranking.

the coyote scene in collateral alone qualifies it for good-to-great

There are a lot of good things about Collateral, but having the band in the jazz club mime to Bitches Brew is unforgivable.

I liked Public Enemies a lot in the theater but it was next level on a recent rewatch. But generally all of his movies improve on rewatch.

having the band in the jazz club mime to Bitches Brew is unforgivable.

yeah this was odd

they shoulda gotten animatronics

other than differing opinions on Collateral and a few of the films I haven't seen, Alfred you and I line up pretty much on our rankings of Mann's films

Insider is great

I'd probably swap The Keep and Collateral from Alfred's rankings. Since Collateral is good, and while The Keep is better than it could have been, like Alien 3 there really is no definitive version that the director is happy with.

I never saw the "point" of Ali tbh....we already have so much great footage of the real Ali, why settle for an expensive recreation?

To test the new DV cameras.

Just saw that there is a fan doc about the making of The Keep that's apparently been in the works for years and was last slated for release ... in 2020.

The fight staging in Ali is great. Low angle so ceilings are a centered background so so vastness of the ceilings and single white bulbs like sky full of stars. Unscored so the crud sound of the body blows and delayed dislocation between the shifts of momentum within the fight and audience’s reaction to what’s happening...emphasized realism juxtaposed w theatrical elements.

It's funny, I was going to say that Dante Spinotti had a heck of a run for a while, but just glancing I think I'd now say that Dante Spinotti had a heck of a run with Michael Mann (and Curtis Hanson) specifically. He did just a bunch of movies with Brett Ratner, and no one goes on and on about how great *they* look.

Michael Mann director’s cuts are all worse than the theatrical IIRC.

LOL. This has been discussed elsewhere, but Mann's notorious for changing and recutting his films every single chance he can get. To be fair, he's far from the only director who does this - IIRC even D.W. Griffith got thrown out of a museum's projection booth once when he tried to make edits to their Intolerance print many years after the fact. But it's not just tinkering out of perfectionism, there's a belief that Mann simply can't let go of any project. When Arrow Films in the U.K. licensed Thief for reissue, they made sure NOT to involve him because they didn't want him preventing them from releasing the film as it was originally shown. They got away with it by simply licensing Criterion's Mann-approved restoration (which meant there was no need for him to sign off on anything as it would've been redundant) and including an HD transfer of the original film as a bonus.

FWIW, Heat is my favorite, but The Insider would be close behind, followed by Manhunter and probably Thief. The Insider used to be my favorite Mann film, but it feels kind of overblown now. Plummer is still magnificent - it came up a lot this weekend because of his death, but it's probably one of his very best film performances.

I never saw the "point" of Ali tbh....we already have so much great footage of the real Ali, why settle for an expensive recreation?

Hah, I felt the same way! And this was right after When We Were Kings which got a ton of press (as well as an Oscar - I actually remember the long standing ovation they got when Ali and Foreman went up to the podium). To be fair Smith is good, and it could be his best dramatic work, but Ali is no distant memory thanks to all the footage we have of him. There's just no way Smith can compete with the real thing.

As far as fiddling with finished films go, I've yet to watch the nu-Heat, where apparently he re-color corrected the whole thing, because the original looked too "90s." First of all, I'm not sure what that means! Second of all, the original looked great. Third of all, the challenge of all these different versions is it's so hard to tell which one you're watching without a few clues. Studying run times, watching for where certain scenes land, listening for certain lines, and so on. At this point I'm not sure I would even know if I was watching nu-Heat, or the director's cut of Mohicans or Manhunter. I suppose the end credits would give a few hints of additional post-release work.

Miami Vice is still up there in my fave films of the last 20 years. Great to see the Letterboxd types truly love it.