The Michael Mann poll

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 own new-Miami Vice on dvd! Not the 'director's cut' though, since I heard it sucked so I bought the other one

YOU OWE IT AWE

^^ kudos

The Insider

i don't really care for his style. manhunter and the first 2/3rds of collateral are good too.

Police Story really needs to be in this too

I thought the same thing initially, but the best thing about Crime Story is the Abel Ferrara-directed pilot.

crime story is the best BY FAR but the pilot does stand out stylistically. wasn't the chase through the mall in the pilot?

I'm in sales and the territory I cover happens to be where I grew up. So when I travel to visit my clients I usually visit my parents and sometimes stay the weekend. They don't have any DVDs. Only VHS tapes. And of the VHS tapes they have, get this, Jurassic Park, Braveheart, and The Insider. That's it. Needless to say, there have been many times when I've been bored and will end up popping in The Insider.

And it never gets old. I think it's truly fantastic. ALL the performances are pitch perfect. That scene with Bruce McGill in the courtroom jars me every time. It's maintains the feel of a Michael Mann film but it feels weightier than usual, and not just because of the subject material.

Here's that scene I was talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdGqfhAt6yQ

Might as well post this one too :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIjpP-XngKA&mode=related&search=

I'd say definitely The Insider as well. He puts all of his visual, structural, and storytelling skills to use in something beyond a crime film. Pacino is excellent because, as in Donny Brasco, he plays a guy who basically has to pick a lock and can't raise his voice, and so forget about yelling.

Mann's films are some of the only DVDs I own, and I never get tired of watching them. The HD video on Collateral and Miami Vice is a real step forward.

Zodiac is clearly David Fincher going toe-to-toe Michael Mann.

The ending to Heat is dissatisfying.

Collateral clearly started as a very run-of-the-mill 1990s hit man dom-and-sub-male screenplay that Mann managed to make his own. I'm sure Ruffalo's path in the movie was Mann's rewrite.

There is great potential for a Best Cameo in a Michael Mann Film poll: Rollins, Tone Loc, Bud Cort, the Me and You and Everyone We Know guy.

Eazy, that's the exact thought about Zodiac I had. Visually and stylistically (whatever that means) they're pretty similar. What I just thought about, though, was that they're pretty similar thematically as well. In a way they're both about guys who are working to get a story out there but run up against institutions that are not motivated to tackle it full force. And even in the end the victory in both cases are almost afterthoughts.

hay alex in sf u a fucken faget

anyway here is my fav scene~~ http://youtube.com/watch?v=oa5z77EI8y0

So so hard, but I'm going to have to go with Miami Vice which is without a doubt the best looking film I've ever seen on a big screen, except for In The Mood For Love. Not seen the first two though.

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

Well, it's usually with a demented form of bad taste. I mean, deep down I can sort of forgive Alex because, well, he's a cool dude and all, but seriously you lack a few braincells when you discard every Mann film.
I picked Heat but after watching Collateral again I had a hard time picking between these two (and Manhunter). I simply adore his style. Miami Vice is grebt as well.

Does everyone remember this?

A Michael Mann moment

Zodiac is clearly David Fincher going toe-to-toe Michael Mann

Sure! If Zodiac had any juice!

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

Landlords and ex-girlfriends from the mid-1980s.

eh. Who needs em.

i like heat but ffs it's the insider by like a country mile, ppl. michael mann is kind of bad.

yeah i voted for the insider. I liked Heat and parts of Collateral tho.

If you want to appreciate Michael Mann, for the first time or once again, go see The Kingdom when it opens this fall. This could have been a fantastic movie if he'd made it (he produced it), but instead the characters/plot/visuals aren't as sharp, and it really goes off the rails in the last third. But the premise -- total MM territory.

smooth -- that's how we do it.

if i want to appreciate michael mann, i'm going to put on the insider, not go watch a middle movie!

middlING, sorry

Heh! Well, go see another movie at the multiplex in September and sneak into The Kingdom for a bit and see what I'm saying.

now THAT i am ok with

'ali' and 'the insider' are maybe his worst films. i haven't seen 'the keep'.

'crime story' is not the best 'by far', you smokin'. anyway mann directed like one episode. ditto 'miami vice'.

I own new-Miami Vice on dvd! Not the 'director's cut' though, since I heard it sucked so I bought the other one

-- mh, Wednesday, August 29, 2007 3:47 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Link

apart from more herc-from-the-wire at the start, there's no big difference.

What makes The Insider one of his worst? I'm curious.

Keep is my favorite. Not cuz it's great - it isn't - just cuz it's got monsters in it. Mysterious and creepy, too, with entertaining 80s Tangerine Dream score. I'll always take creepy w/ monsters over men w/ guns.

"seriously you lack a few braincells when you discard every Mann film"

Haha I didn't discard them! I've seen them all (except the Keep) and I even gave little reviews above. They just mostly suck.

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