The Michael Mann poll

He's such a crap director.

and so it begins.

"None of the Above," but if I have to choose, I'll say Collateral.

Miami Vice is like heroin.

Yeah Collateral.

That scene where Cruise beats the shit out of those dudes who think he's a pussy was A++++

xpost yeah, I could totally see that again. But I have to go with Heat.

MANHUNTER.

DO YOU SEE?

i voted for collateral but i think i meant heat

Miami Vice (2006) - awesome awesome awesome
Collateral (2004) - awesomer
Ali (2001) - good, but kinda pales in comparison to actual footage of Ali
The Insider (1999) - haven't seen
Heat (1995) - reputation better than it deserves to be - but still awesome
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) - haven't seen in ages, but didn't care much for it then
Manhunter (1986) - this one is actually pretty crappy
The Keep (1983) - waht is this?
Thief (1981) - very underrated

I'm voting for Miami Vice just because.

Isn't Rollins in Heat?
;_;

we get down if the play calls for it

"That's not what happens. What will happen is....what will happen is... I will put a round at 2700 feet per second in your medulla at the base of your brain, and you will be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won’t even twitch. Only you get that. So tell me sport, do you believe that?"

Yo Homies, is that my briefcase?

Thief (1981) - very underrated

OTM. James Caan is fantastic in it.

"There is 'undercover' and then there is 'which way is up.'"

"Dream much, Will?"

Yo Homies, is that my briefcase?

-- milo z, Wednesday, 29 August 2007 09:40 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^^^AWESOME, thx.

Miami Vice (2006) garbage
Collateral (2004) garbage
Ali (2001) pointless
The Insider (1999) decent enough
Heat (1995) good up until the last 45 minutes which are garbage
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) garbage
Manhunter (1986) some good performance, but mostly irritating
The Keep (1983) never seen
Thief (1981) nice score, but has James Caan starring in it.

The Insider because, thankfully, he had a co-writer.

Yeah I voted The Insider too.

there are people who hate James Caan? This is news to me.

What kind of heartless, fun-hating bastard hates Heat, Collateral AND Miami Vice?

Yeah they are people who hate bad overacting.

Tony Scott poll coming up soon, I think

The Insider's the only one that feels like he created and inhabited a world. Russell Crowe, Bruce McGill, and Diana Verona are all great.

(xpost)Oooh that's a good one!

Miami Vice would have been a classic if only they'd gone the Robert Bresson route?

The Thief score by Tangerine Dream is very nice, but is also so dated it gets giggles.

You gotta let Vice drip into your veins and FUCK your arteries.

Yeah, Rusty was good in the Insider, one of his better performances.

xposts

"Miami Vice would have been a classic if only they'd gone the Robert Bresson route?"

Haha possibly!

what Mann score isn't dated within two weeks of release? Worst part of Collateral is when they're rolling slow through LA to the sweet, sweet strains of Audioslave.

Miami Vice does make good use of Jay-Z/Linkin Park, though. The assault on the drug boats! So badass.

Miami Vice. The Insider is pretty tolerable, tho, for blatant Oscar bait.

'cept Al's shameless angling for the bait wasn't noticed.

I didn't really like Ali at all. :(

Me neither.

Collateralz
James Caan is great in Thief but the movie's not the greatest. the score is really good and really bad.
indsider was booooring. russell crowe looked like he was full up to the neck with feces

you could smell him?

Ali is the oscar bait, and it suffers because of it. Insider is great.

This one is tough.

I think everyone's misread what I wrote: I said "Al," as in, "Pacino." We really shouldn't discuss Ali in polite conversation.

miami vice the show should really be in there

I really liked the insider.

AH! I assumed it was a typo. Sorry.

to alfred, obv

"we've been made"

Miami Vice sucked. My rental DVD went kablooie when they were about to rescue the chick from the trailer with the fake-pizza-delivery-scam, and I didn't even bother asking for a replacement to finish it. Awful, awful, awful, and boring to boot.

I voted for Collateral.

fuck manhunter haters YOU OWE IT AWE.

other people's unexplored fetishes are really boring

(unless, of course, you agree)

I love Manhunter. Red Dragon is actually not bad and closer to the book but Ralph Fiennes is completely wrong for the Tooth Fairy and I didn't buy Norton as Graham whereas Petersen looks like a shattered human being throughout.

Also Noonan as Tooth Fairy rules, even if his signature scene is a meme now

I saw both on dates with the same girl in my 20s (both were her idea!)

Noonan is chilling.

DO U SEE

Whereas Fiennes was a sexy, chiseled, fresh out of LA Fitness Tooth Fairy.

I actually thought (incorrectly) that he couldn't act after I saw him in Red Dragon.

Manhunter is just shot so well. Those scenes of Graham isolated in his hotel looking at evidence, with a look like "this might kill me this time"

My vote would have been the MV TV series

Once “Ferrari” has been out for a few months, can we re-poll?

Just watched the Ferrari trailer. Driver is kind of odd casting considering he's a full 20 years younger than Enzo Ferrari was when the movie takes place and needed to have his hair dyed gray for the role. (Or maybe it's a wig.) On the other hand, his last name is Driver.

Great actor but clearly a case of needing a big name attached.

the Frank Grillo Lamborghini film didn't exactly make waves even though "grill" was right there in his name.

Frank Grillo should get the McCauley role in Heat 2.

Can't wait for Bricklin featuring Tommy Lee Jones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grWQ6CZqtOE

Adam Driver reacts to someone asking about & criticizing the crash scenes in ‘FERRARI’ as “pretty harsh, drastic and cheesy.”

“Fuck you, I don’t know?” pic.twitter.com/MtmehVa6D3

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) November 12, 2023

that's right

Just got the shipment confirmation email for my Blackhat Blu-Ray.

hmm! mine hasn’t shipped but it’s estimating Monday delivery

I got the Neon box set last night with this film among them and the memory of Driver's accent in House of Gucci burned me and I can't.

Wait, what? The Ferrari movie is in the boxed set?

lol Josh, I almost posted the same thing until Zing warned me

Rewatched Thief last night. Haven't seen it since sometime in the last century and goddamn, WHAT A MOVIE. Things I never noticed before: Second City founder Del Close as one of the mechanics at the car lot. Willie Dixon as the fisherman out by the lake. Frank trying to light a cigarette before the conversation with Jessie at the diner before giving up and agressively/nervously playing with it.

Ms. T's comment: "did he just hire real criminals as the supporting cast? I feel like I'm watching the real thing." Yes, indeed.

Blackhat Blu-Ray arrived in today's mail; I just re-watched the director's cut and yeah, it's top five Mann for me.

1) Thief
2) Miami Vice director's cut
3) Heat
4) Blackhat director's cut
5) Manhunter

6) The Insider
7) Collateral
999) Public Enemies

I still haven't seen The Last of the Mohicans, Ali or The Keep.

Still don't get what y'all seeing in Blackhat

It’s a Borges story

Wait, what? The Ferrari movie is in the boxed set?

― Josh in Chicago,

yes

Yeah, I hated Blackhat when I saw it in the theaters. Tried the director's cut some months back, but I didn't make it very far, because 95% of the movie is the same and I just wasn't feeling it.

Actually, wait, I'm still confused. There's a Neon boxed set that contains Mann's "Ferrari," even though it hasn't been released yet?

I think it's a For Your Consideration box sent out to movie critics.

Oh, well, that makes sense. I thought it was some official Neon boxed set, not a box of year-end screeners.

people like the Miami Vice director’s cut better? I thought it didn’t really add much. Blackhat one is better for the plot, although I see why they reconfigured it for pacing reasons. the order of the hacks/crimes in the theatrical release is muddled

I prefer the theatrical "Miami Vice," which has one of the best cold opens of all time.

I have some fan-assembled mock DC of "The Keep" I'm been meaning to watch.

The DCs of "Ali" and "Mohicans" are both good, but I honestly can't remember the theatrical versions or what's different.

Haven't seen the Blackhat director's cut but Miami Vice's theatrical version feels superior to the director's version

miami vice dc has more 360 degree shots of boats so i prefer it. cold open of the theatrical is classic tho

The big thing with the revised Blackhat is that the sound was so much better. Saw the original in the theater two or three times, and the dialogue was so buried in the mix.

That's true; you can hear what people are saying in this version. And as always with Mann, in both cuts, when guns start going off you better hope your TV is bolted down.

Seriously, though, there's a car bomb scene in Blackhat that's one of the best edits I've ever seen.

great, career-spanning interview which I don't think was posted

https://www.vulture.com/article/michael-mann-in-conversation.html

Great interview, Mann is so smart and perceptive. I interviewed him a couple of times, years ago, and he just exuded intellectual curiosity. He wants to know how everything works: a car, a gun, a street light, a criminal, a city. Just really focused on the how and why of it all.

Miami Vice director’s cut is an abomination

O to be in L.A.:

https://x.com/katiewalshstx/status/1742284331618328860?s=20

rewatched the theatrical cut of Blackhat on blu-ray the other day and I have to give some credit to the foley artists for the stabbing noises in the climactic fight scene

Stories out there today about Heat 2 filming this year, with Adam Driver in one of the leads.

Also:

michael mann fans be like HOLY FUCKKK pic.twitter.com/2Pf6tpqGa6

— bee (@beepupkin) January 5, 2024

idgi

https://www.cinemamoderne.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/heat-still1.jpg

?

Yep, and Manhunter too.

The Mann-approved Criterion issue of Thief seems to have been dipped in blue tint compared with the old Anchor Bay DVD, too. He took the whole "Blu"-Ray thing very literally.

There are a myriad of reasons new releases have different color grading, but I think the overall trend (barring WKW and others making editorial choices) is to try to attempt to get closer to the theatrical grading/light presentation on blu-ray, especially with HDR

I was watching the interviews on the recent Blackhat release and the DP, Stuart Dryburgh, briefly touched on the fact that typically a director gives notes and the editor handles everything before final handoff, but Mann would take charge of the final lighting/grading himself when the editors had finished cutting. His opinion was that Mann had a light touch on the couple of recent things where they'd collaborated, but the anecdote definitely speaks to his concerns

I found a quote of his from 2017, I think, talking about changing the color grading of "Heat:"

EW: When it came to remastering the film for the Blu-ray, were there specific sequences you focused on?

Yeah, the whole film! When you go into Blu-ray, and you go to 4K, you're in a different color space. Meaning that what was magenta doesn't translate exactly. There's no logarithm you could use to make "magenta" still stay magenta, with that exact color. So you have to imagine everything, from contrast, to how black blacks are, to what the color palette is. The ambition here was: If I was shooting the film two or three years ago, what would it look like? That was really it. So we went into every shot.

EW: Your style in your more recent films has evolved from when you made Heat. Did that affect how you looked at this film?

Let me put this rather precisely. When you see an emotion on a human's face, how much of the face do you see? What constitutes fear? What constitutes apprehension? What constitutes suspicion?

Yes, I evolved, but also, audience perception evolves, and media evolves, year to year. If I shot this film two or three years ago, this particular film would be less chromatic. And the sense of tension would become more pronounced with greater contrast and kind of a more blue-black palette, than the film as I wanted it to be when I shot it in '94-'95.

EW: Are there any moments in particular that bring up what you're talking about, that as you're working with the 4K, any sequence in the film that you think is seen anew on this definitive edition?

The one that comes to mind is when Hanna is chasing Neil McCauley at the end of the film past the airport. All that is a lot darker. Primary reds are stripped out. The reflections in the metal—everything is substantially darker, if I showed you the before and after. They're big steps, they're not subtleties.

there's a second season of tokyo vice coming to max next week?
i generally enjoyed s1 despite the elgort factor but i did not think there was much demand for more of it from anyone