I saw Miami Vice, it was decent but I wasn't super impressed. The lighting and framing were cool. A cool shot was when Bai Ling was being held by the Drug Kingpin on his bed. Behind them is a giant glass window with a huge tree trunk in it... Cool lighting on a number of lovemaking scenes --brillant light patches that glide across the actors faces when they move. A little long in the middle, a little weak on characterization, only a few action sequences. Average Mann flick IMHO. Here's a review I found:
Michael Mann: The Criminal Mastermind
Nick James - Sunday July 23, 2006
The Observer
The acclaimed film director - Hollywood's finest stylist - has revisited his cult Eighties TV series Miami Vice, the new movie reflecting his abiding fascination with crime and men who walk on the dark side of the street.
Twice Vice... Michael Mann (centre) has updated the 1980s pastel-washed TV series with Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty
First, there's the aptly masculine surname. No other writer-producer-director makes males more excited at the prospect of a new film - especially a cop thriller - than Michael Mann. But it's an anticipation that crosses gender and taste barriers, integrating art film buffs with the Friday night popcorn crowd. Fans look to this peerless creator of impeccably crafted films about existential male loners - films such as The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider - for a superior kind of big budget cinema, a hyperrealism that is simultaneously dumbfounding and realistic. He long ago left behind his early reputation as a flashy MTV-influenced director who prefers style to substance.
Mann's latest film has the familiar title of Miami Vice, but it looks nothing like the pastel-wash, sun-blasted television series of kitsch memory that Mann masterminded in the 1980s. The new film's imagery prefers shadows and the night. It stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as the undercover narcotics cop duo Crockett and Tubbs, a harder-edged pairing than Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the original. It's one of the key traits of Mann's cinema that he likes to transmute old material into new gold.
Take, for instance, the way LA Takedown, a flashy knock-off 1989 television movie about a West Coast cop and his master-thief nemesis, was remade as the intensely detailed 1995 crime epic Heat and enhanced with ideas that had appeared in rougher form in his earlier works. In Heat he brought together the two greatest actors of their generation - Robert De Niro and Al Pacino - and teased from them perhaps their last truly iconic performances.
Mann has the kind of authority that makes both the talent and the suits sit up and take notice. That's why there's always a feeling that a new Mann film will have something in it you've never seen before.
Mann is a stocky, sometimes prickly figure of 5ft 8ins who's fiercely protective of his privacy. Details of his two marriages and his children are hard to find. He seems to be the sort of guy who can talk fast cars all day with the studio suits, as if he were a suit himself. Yet his artistry is a matter of absolute dedication, making him perhaps the most extreme cinema perfectionist since Stanley Kubrick.
His upbringing was that of a classic workaholic achiever. His father was a Ukrainian emigre Second World War veteran who became a greengrocer, his mother a local Chicago girl. Mann was schooled in rough neighbourhoods during harsh times that eventually forced his father out of business.
While studying English at the University of Wisconsin, Mann began to experiment with film ('a sissy's profession where I come from,' he has said) and shot footage of riots in Chicago. In the mid-1960s he moved to London, in part to dodge the Vietnam draft, and did a masters degree at Mike Leigh's alma mater, the London International Film School. There Mann worked alongside 'a lot of guys who went on to work on World in Action', people steeped in documentary such as Frank Roddam, Gavin MacFadyen and David Hart.
He found work for a short time in UK advertising as a contemporary of Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne. In 1968, footage he shot of the Paris student revolt for a documentary, Insurrection, found its way onto NBC's First Tuesday news programme and he developed his '68 experiences into the short film Juanpuri, which won him the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1970. Then his career seemed to stall. Returning to the US after divorcing his first wife in 1971, Mann directed a road trip documentary for ABC, 17 Days Down the Line. It took him three years, however, to find a regular berth in the television industry. Hawaii Five-0 veteran Robert Lewin drummed story structure into the rookie while Mann wrote the first four episodes of Starsky & Hutch.
But the key formative experience was his time on a show called Police Story alongside cop-turned novelist Joseph Wambaugh (who wrote such groundbreaking realist cop novels as The Onion Field and The Choirboys). Police Story concentrated on the detailed realism of a real cop's life. 'People want reality in movies today,' Mann said at the time. 'They want the real thing, real people, real locations.'
Such a quest for authenticity is the basis of Mann's reputation as a director who goes for 'full immersion' into the subject of any film. The first real evidence of Mann's fascination with a world of men and his in-depth approach was his TV prison movie The Jericho Mile, made in 1979 and shot on site at Folsom State Prison in California. Mann learned the unwritten rules of the prison yard, the territory's strict division along racial lines between whites, blacks and Latinos, and the first coded language of many that would grace a Mann film. He put the actors in with real inmates and this story of a loner athlete dragged into a prison-wide racial dispute made such an impact that Mann is said to have received offers to make 22 different feature films in the three days immediately after it was broadcast.
Reputed to be hard on actors and a martinet on set, Mann had union trouble with his crew on his 1992 pioneer western The Last of the Mohicans, but he often gets near career-best performances out of the most inconsistent of actors - think of Val Kilmer in Heat, Russell Crowe in The Insider, Will Smith in Ali or even Tom Cruise in Collateral.
His debut feature film, Thief, released in 1981, has James Caan at his very best as a master jewel-snatcher whose own perfectionism and absolutist macho code attracts a local mob boss who wants to control him. Famous for its long sequences showing the precise industrial methods of safe-cracking, Thief has a similar grainy, funky look to near-contemporary films such as Taxi Driver and Shaft, and gives little hint of the slick, design-driven look of Mann's subsequent films - the ones which gained him the style-over-substance criticism.
The disastrous 1983 supernatural Nazi thriller The Keep was indeed superficial and it flopped badly. An abashed Mann returned to television to preside as executive producer over the new cop series Miami Vice, pouring much of what he had learned into the fast-cutting, sharply designed look and feel of what was then an innovative series, one that ran from 1984 to 1989 and that took great risks in its use of pop songs in dialogue-free signature sequences. Indeed, Mann's expertise in choosing pop songs and other music that perfectly adapts into the sound design of his films is famed. He also devised the less successful but much loved 1960s-period series Crime Story.
Ironically, it was Mann's superb return to film in 1986 with Manhunter that confirmed his pigeonholing. Yet this architecture-obsessed study of two serial killers is not just the first and best Hannibal Lecter movie, with Brian Cox fixing the laconic chill of the carefree super-intelligent killer long before Anthony Hopkins had even sniffed the character. It also gave under-rated actor William Petersen the role that would later make his career in TV's CSI - that of a detective who's an intuitive and empathetic collector of trace evidence. The Last of the Mohicans, by all accounts a gruelling 1992 shoot, was a much easier sell. It gave Daniel Day-Lewis his finest action role and put original vitality and, yes, romance into a moribund genre.
Heat proved to be a magnificent hymn to LA. Its dazzling follow-up, The Insider, a conspiracy thriller about one man's fight against the tobacco industry, won seven Oscar nominations only to lose out in every case to American Beauty. His ambitious but fragile attempt in 2001 at a biopic of Muhammad Ali followed.
Since then, however, Mann has returned to his first love, the crime genre. Aside from being a Tom Cruise movie that was somehow happily embarrassed to be one, and a smart twist on the car-kidnap movie, 2004's Collateral was all about the technical opportunity that high definition offers - accurately capturing the low-level lighting of LA at night.
The new Miami Vice is much more the real commercial deal, a film that's meant to demonstrate Mann's utter control of his medium and business. For unlike his most illustrious near-contemporary, Martin Scorsese, Mann is a worldly figure able to marry commerce and his muses.
If one were looking for flaws in Mann's films, one might suggest that he's rarely good at women characters (Diane Venora's and Ashley Judd's roles in Heat being notable exceptions) and that his films bear hardly a trace of humour. What's more, the way that he uses the cinema arsenal to overwhelm the audience can sometimes feel bombastic. His heroes, too, can be overbearing in their insistence on their angst. But these qualities are also somehow part of what attracts us to Mann's cinema.
If men are uncomfortable with the nature of masculinity today, Mann seems to say, then my cinema reflects that ambivalence, and reflects it in spades.
The Mann Lowdown
Born: Michael Kenneth Mann, 5 February 1943, Chicago, Illinois, son of Jack and Esther Mann. Married to Summer Mann, with whom he has four children, including daughter Ami Canaan, who also writes and directs films
Best of times: Mann devises the coffee-shop scene in Heat that puts cop Al Pacino opposite thief Robert De Niro for a masterclass in politely threatening behaviour.
Worst of times: Dire dialogue and creaky special effects make Mann's 1983 supernatural thriller The Keep, about Nazis trapped in a Romanian castle by a monster, a debacle.
What he says: 'Style is simply gratuitous form with no content; it's for commercials. So I don't think of myself as a stylist. My attitude is that the audience is a human organism sitting there in a dark room, and that everything affects the way people feel and perceive a movie. Style only gets you seven minutes of attention.' What others say: 'While his male characters tend to be tight-lipped ... the director's visual style and musical choices verge on the extreme ... Filled with incessant rhythms, washes of gaudy colour and heartbreaking beauty, the films boldly convey the passions and deep feelings the director's men rarely voice' - Manohla Dargis, the New York Times.
0 Replies Report to Moderator
IGN RSS Feeds
j_echo on 6/29/09 at 6:55 AM
Hey, in addition to the early reviews here on RT, theres this one over at Cinematropolis:
http://cinematropolis.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/movie-review-mann-alive-public-enemies-is-an-old-school-epic-with-new-tricks/
0 Replies Report to Moderator