come anticipate Miami Vice with me

!!!!! omg

One of the famous things about Miami Vice was that it used lots and lots of popular music. Releasing it on DVD requires re-licensing all the music, apparently, and the record companies wanted scads of money to do that, apparently. It's typical stupid bullshit. Of course they stand to make much more money from people buying 80's music because they saw it on Miami Vice (albeit 20 years later).

And they might not. The RIAA needs to lighten up, though. If they didn't try to charge so much to begin with, everyone would make money. But there are plenty of threads on the complete lack of logic in record industry business practices.

(2) do you think they'll use that jay-z/linkin park song in the movie? ouch.

It looked almost cheap for a $120mln film.

sometimes (as in parts of "collateral") mann goes for artifacts and other "cheap" elements as part of the visual design. one problem w/digital is a sort of correlative to its ability to get a lot of detail in darkness: controlling the points of light in the mise en scene becomes potentially difficult, as any stray bulb can take a sudden prominence.

angela bassett in drag

Season Two gets underway with a two hour episode titled “The Prodigal Son.� The two part episode is nothing short of excellent and sets the season off on the highest level. Crockett and Tubbs travel to New York on the hunt of a Columbia drug ring that is killing off federal agents. Crockett walking the streets of New York at night as the Glenn Frey song “You Belong to the City� plays is hands down one of the best sequences in the history of the series. Another great moment involves Tubbs rushing to the airport as the Phil Collins song “Take Me Home� plays in the background.

also: steamy sexoring w/ tubbs & pam grier (to the sounds of the aforementioned phil collins song! best montage ever.)

ihttp://hitparade.ch/cdimages/don_johnson-heartbeat_s.jpg

You can't have the same guy playing Ray Charles play Tubbs, man. Foxx ain't as lionesque.

hum... let me think...

http://www.urbanzone.somborinfo.net/images/pit.jpg

Forgive Us Our Debts might be one of the most powerful episodes of the original series that i know of.

I've rewatched it yesterday for the first time since 2006 and it's funny because it had left no impression on me initially but right now, I think it's the most exciting and glorious movie ever !
Everything's been said about it in this thread but a little trivia : Gong Li was 11 years older than Farrell at the time. That must be pretty rare that the female is older than the male in a Hollywood movie.
And their boat trip to Cuba is so stunning.
Anyway, I might need to watch it again soon...

Just realized I've never seen the theatrical version of this, just the director's cut. Very strange and disorienting.

Some of these night scenes are grainy AF

I'm hardly a Michael Mann fan, but I love this stupid film

Which way is up

I miss the sweet boat race from the beginning of the director's cut

Starting in media res in the nightclub works better IMO

^ agreed

Tho that boat opening is cool n good, the exposition afterwards not so much.

Also I really wish he had a better handle on pop/rock music in this stretch of his career. Cheese then and time hasn’t helped.

Using digital video before it was truly ready and the “grain” involved actually a huge part of the aesthetic appeal for me. Love it.

The nightclub opening is better

John Ortiz has played likable dudes or cops in everything I've seen him in since.

Was nice to see him be a badass baddie in this. Tho dude needs to play more Battlefront or somethin, just walked out in the open and got shotgunned

I'm a disco guy

Did my annual watch of this last night, for the first time with some fancy-ass Bose headphones, which helped a ton with throwaway lines that end up being essential to the story.

So much of this feels like listening to a police scanner and trying to make sense of it.

The scene that suddenly seems ridiculously bad, for the first time, is when the Vice crew is badgering Nicholas in his penthouse to make the introduction to Yero. The lines, the editing, the information we're supposed to take in...all just bad.

Not just because of Farrell, was reminded of True Detective Season 2 this time: the ominous/serious tone taken to an audacious, the exceptional design on every level, the quips that pull you out of a scene, and what seems like obsessive research and accuracy of details that ultimately make both exceptional within their genre. That, and ridiculous moments that make both a solitary pleasure rather than having a hope of "turning anyone on" to them.

This was a better article than I expected it to be! Worth reading.

https://www.vulture.com/2021/10/miami-vices-journey-from-misfire-to-masterpiece.html

https://talkingcovers.com/2012/09/12/vintage-contemporaries/

An excellent history of vintage contemporaries paperbacks embedded in that vulture link

https://i.imgur.com/oyQnmIX.jpg

i'm long overdue for a rewatch. one of my favorites. that cold open is all time.

just the way the movie is shot is a lot of my appreciation, which I'm glad that article talks about at length.

I did enjoy how the 80s MV fanboys were up in arms about how "this ISN'T Miami Vice!!!". I love the show too but it and the movie are their own individual things.

Where is the theatrical cut available? I own the director's cut DVD but have never seen the theatrical version.

the director's cut is the first version I saw, and I like that speedboat opening

there's nothing wrong with the opening per se, esp since I saw it the week after I got home from SoBe and was amused to hear them reference some of the hip clubs there, but...

there was something really cool to the movie just cutting into the club with Linkin Park/Jay-Z "Encore" playing, and within seconds, you see Crockett and Tubbs. like I got an endorphin rush the first time.

I do recall having a difficult time following the movie the first time, but I saw it three times in week of release.

It's really more than that. You're dropped in en media rex, it's loud, you can barely hear what anyone is saying or tell what they're doing, just that they're in the middle of an undercover operation. And just as it gets going they get notified to drop everything, and the movie just shifts to something else entirely. I've never seen anything like it.

Because it can be hard to find:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qDC2X5j6yY

Except in the theatre it was super fucking loud and awesome, too.

yeah you don't even know what kind of operation they're on, you just get little hints of it based on context clues. the director's cut of course fills in the blanks of the operation, but you go in blind in the original.

there's also that one bit where Foxx physically strikes someone and immobilizes them in the midst of the club and manages to keep it discreet and under the radar, not just to the club crowd, but the viewing audience too.

there's a local professional Orlando theatre actor in the movie. I don't really know him, but he taught a few of my friends in an acting class, and I met him once or twice. named Stephan Jones, plays one of the Nazis, is the Nazi that gets shot at the end and drops next to his horrified buddy who watches from his left.

it wasn't for years after I saw the movie that I even knew Eddie Marsan was English.

The theatre was packed to the gills the Friday it opened. I had a mixed response at the time. I remember it as one of the last films fans bought on DVD/Blu-ray and watched over and over before the streaming era.

Tom Towles, who played the baddest Nazi ringleader, did a ton of theater in Chicago and seemed like a friendly bear in person. And the Russian who gets shot up during the early deal gone bad is one of Russia's great stage actors. (And Ciaran Hinds, who plays Castillo, does a ton of Broadway and London theater, too.)

I'm sure I've related the story in this thread, but I saw the movie if not opening day then perhaps that Saturday. I went to maybe the 2pm show, something like that, and it was only my love for Michael Mann that dragged me there, because it was sunny and gorgeous out. So I see the movie, love it, and then leave ... and I guess some time in those 2 hours there had been a *massive* storm I missed! Trees were down, it was dark, street lights were out, it was 20 degrees cooler, etc. I'll never forget it.

The other thing I remember from a Mann interview was his insistence that those giant Nazi guns sounded authentic, and how they went to great lengths to capture the exact sound one of those military grade rounds makes piercing the side of a car door.

watched for the first time in over 10+ years, loved every minute just as I always had. possibly even more.

"Only you get dead. do you believe that?"

it is the best movie ever made

Not related to the movie but not unrelated, the other day I heard this really shitty butt rock song by a band called Honeymoon Suite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKE59-VfrBM

Sort of like the Cars "Moving in Stereo" if it was totally and unconvincingly macho. I'd never heard of them before, but I guess they're Canadian, and had a knack for getting their bad songs into movies and stuff, like "One Crazy Summer." Then on wikipedia I came across this:

In 1989, "Bad Attitude" was featured in the series finale of Miami Vice, played during a Ferrari driving segment that mirrored one from the series' pilot episode, continuing throughout Crockett and Tubbs' final battle.

So I thought, ooh, it's going to be a lost moody midtempo AOR song! But no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOCI37y2umw

And that, my friends, is the difference between 1984 and 1989, and the first season of Miami Vice and the last.

American things

Not the band, though! Canadian Vice!

Which Canadian city is the most Miami?
This question has no answer

Halifax Vice?

I forget where I read it, but Mann’s original plan for ‘06 Miami Vice was to use the original Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight” (which could have been amazing) but then swapped in the nu-metal Nonpoint version instead (which does the job and fits the vibe).

what a weird project. i enjoyed the hell out of it tho

Halifax Vice?

― calstars, Saturday, November 6, 2021 1:53 PM (five minutes ago) bookmark flag link

Absolutely not.

i haven't seen a lot of Canada, but Vancouver? cocaine, waterways, central business district has noticeable aesthetic

"Vancouver Vice" is basically "The X-Files."

hahaha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3iBN8yz-2s

Sick. I never really considered it before, but this movie in relation to Michael Mann occupies the same space in my head as Twin Peaks: The Return does to David Lynch.

Amazed that Sonny Crockett can go undercover with this accent:

This speech. Colin Farrell telling Brendan Gleeson he loves him. The emotion. The charisma… Toxic masculinity found dead in a ditch!!!! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/xWGngZ9UId

— Meech (@MediumSizeMeech) January 11, 2023

Buht ye got ye tan in Meeami

avclub circling the drain - their clickbait article (i clicked) on terrible films by great directors includes Miami Vice