The Michael Mann poll

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.

... I mean I’m not joking, the Letterboxd reviews are insane; off the scale. 5-stars right down the page one after the other. Millennials ‘got it’ in the way that Gen X never did. Although it always had a favourable reaction on here. It was the results of this very thread that made me see it in the first place. Well done ILX!

Another good example, because afaict the theatrical version is actually pretty hard to track down!

I never understood the backlash against Miami Vice other than "omg they're not wearing Hawaiian shirts and getting bitched out by Edward James Olmos"

The style of it is amazing

I think some people just don't like Colin Farrell in things? I think he's good in it, but Jamie Foxx is really good in it.

Another good example, because afaict the theatrical version is actually pretty hard to track down!

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, February 8, 2021 8:15 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can rent and buy it iirc

the new heat cut looks great and it remains a great movie, i am pretty "who gives a shit" beyond that

Jamie Foxx pretending to nut too soon then saying "psych!" was funny

miami vice > blackhat > collateral > heat > manhunter > thief

one day i will see the rest

Gina telling the one thing that she can shoot him in the medulla without his finger twitching and then doing that was badass

miami vice never shakes off this in-media-res quality that makes all the action feel super present which i think adds to its coolness

I'm glad I can rent and buy it, thanks! Is that true for all of his other movies? That they're still available in their original forms? Or are they all at least designated as director's cuts or theatrical versions? That is, no DC has totally supplanted/replaced the theatrical yet, has it? I guess as long as the original versions are accessible, let the guy fiddle.

only for miami vice

manhunter, heat, and mohicans are afaict only available in their most recent edits (manhunter's being the scream factory release i think). differences and choices mann makes in these edits that i've noticed are so negligible and have so little impact on how i feel about the movies that once again imo whatever

one day i will see the rest

I need to re-watch Public Enemies (the one with Johnny Depp as Dillinger). I hated it when I saw it in theaters, mostly because I thought the digital really ruined the period atmosphere. But maybe I'll like it better now.

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.

It's annoying, I get why archivists and historians hate it, but it seems like most versions apply minor changes. Those don't bother me. The recent versions tend to be much worse because instead of minor tweaks that can fly by with little notice, he's making radical changes that impact the whole movie. I used Thief as an example partly because that's the worst case I've seen so far. No Hollywood movie from that era has the color palette that's been applied now - it looks like an awkward attempt to slather a 2010's look on to a 1981 picture.

Just to clarify that link, when you see the screenshots grouped in 3's, the top two are the exact same restoration re-colored by Mann. It's the third one at the bottom that's an HD transfer of the original film.

Jamie Foxx pretending to nut too soon then saying "psych!" was funny

not big on that movie but this is a great, great moment

I disliked MV at the time ("How can this fucker do this to MY city?") until I realized he treated Miami as if it were Narnia.

oh damn michael mann made everything blue

Wow, "earthier tones" is kind of underselling it a little, isn't it? The images look significantly, intentionally different!

only for miami vice

Blackhat director's cut has never been released to rent or buy afaik, just for cable TV

And even then, iirc, not regularly aired, which is one reason I was unable to even find a torrent of it.

Comparison of the nu-Heat transfer here:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film6/blu-ray_reviews_75/heat_blu-ray.htm

This seems a lot more subtle than "Thief."

thief was already blue