Heat. Up to 7 or 8 viewings now? (Filed under: Heat). Caught a few more “time” references this go-round. Hanna’s wife offers him coffee before he heads out – can’t, no time. The daughter’s anxiety attack is about being late for her father. And of course the parting shot when Hanna meets with the snitch. One other minor thing: the Pietà statue at the hospital at the beginning of the movie is echoed by our protagonists at the end. I might have to call this my favorite movie.
Heat. A half-dozen screenings and it keeps on delivering. One thing that really stood out this time was the use of the color blue with McCauley’s character.
For example, early on, there’s the famous shot at his house, echoing Colville’s “Pacific” painting, but saturated in a moody blue. This is McCauley as the cool, remote professional. During a following celebration dinner with his team, you see his appreciation and envy of his crew’s families. He goes to call Eadie. The shot of him on the phone has the frame split in half. He’s on the left against a cool blue background, the right side is warmer. In the course of conversation with her he steps from left to right. Later in the movie, McCauley is on his way to escape, home-free. He gets a farewell call from Nate, who also tells him where Waingro is. He dismisses the idea of going back, and keeps driving, content. The camera stays on him at the wheel, and we can see through the rear window. As he enters a tunnel the lighting is a bright wash… that transitions to blue. He turns grim and decides on revenge before escape.
Speaking of Waingro, interesting how his actions play up the appetites. In his introduction, he’s looking for more coffee before the score. After the heist, he’s smugly enjoying some pie while the main crew stares at him in disdainful silence. Later we see him with cigarettes, booze, women.
Last little clever bit: in the course of the famous diner meeting, McCauley mentions, “There is a flip side to that coin. What if you do got me boxed in and I gotta put you down?” At the final climax, we see McCauley escaping into the airfield, making his last stand behind a shed, backgrounded with its large checkerboard pattern. Boxed in, the chess match coming to its endgame.
Filed under: Heat.
Miami Vice. I love this movie. The pathos was stronger this time around, the resignation. On each watch I also become a little more resentful that Foxx doesn’t have a bigger role. His relationship with Crockett has something to offer the story, but we don’t see it much. I’d be up for another 12 minutes with the two of them on screen. Filed under: Michael Mann.
Public Enemies. I love how so many people get to “lead” in this movie, though Depp is still at the heart of it. Forgot about the brief Channing Tatum scene. The arrest/trasnport/imprisonment scenes have some nice echoes of Kit Carruthers, the charisma and confidence. “We’re having too good of a time today; we’re not thinking about tomorrow.”
Collateral. I keep trying to re-rank Mann movies and running out of #1 slots.
Blackhat. Some really cool moments and scenes, but a bit underwhelmed the second time around. (The first.) Updated Michael Mann rankings:
The Insider. It’s awesome, like all the rest of Michael Mann’s stuff. He’s got such a great handle on momentum within and across scenes. Great cast across the board. Love the mini-breaks just to gaze and reflect and get in their heads a bit. (Filed under: Michael Mann).
Do you have any Starsky & Hutch memories?
I remember writing that there was a robbery, and a car jumped the curb and went through the window of a car dealership. And then they shot it. I said, “Wow, this is crazy. I write this stuff, and they go and do it.” So then, of course, the ambition increased.
Neil and Vincent are orderly men, and Mann harmonizes their activities beautifully, but being human isn’t an orderly business. Opening up to other people means opening up to chaos and disorder.
And from the later forum discussion of Heat:
It struck me that, for all the ways Heat questions the macho code of non-attachment that McCauley and Hanna live by, it has a very old-fashioned view of the uses of violence. Both McCauley and Hanna deploy it very precisely. What’s wrong with Waingro is that he can’t control himself.
Blackhat. I really liked it, if my tweet binge is any indication. If you like Michael Mannerisms, you probably will, too. I like how the hacking here wasn’t just people tapping away at a keyboard, but also more general deceptive/intrusive behaviors like social engineering and burglary, and how technology is subverted for purposes good and bad. (Note how our hero goes into final battle with improvised body armor and weapons that reflect prison ingenuity.) I love that the big battle scenes have some geographical/tactical brains behind them, and the hand-to-hand fights are swiftly decided. It’s a movie willing to let its stars lounge in bed, or enjoy a nice view, and get you inside their head a bit. Filed under: Michael Mann
Stills from Thief. Filed under: Thief.
Thief. So great. This was the first time I’d noticed a couple cameos from Manhunter stars: Dennis Farina (Manhunter’s Jack Crawford) as a henchman and William Petersen (profiler Will Graham) as a bouncer at the bar where Caan is late for his date. A few other nice camera/editing odds and ends I appreciated this time around:
One last bit of awesomeness is Willie Nelson’s character, Okla, dispensing some perfect life advice:
Lie to no one. If there’s somebody close to you, you’ll ruin it with a lie. If they’re a stranger, who the fuck are they you gotta lie to them?
Collateral. My third viewing. (Ignore my comments after the second.) It feels like every time I watch a Michael Mann movie it becomes my new favorite of his.
This movie is seriously in love with LA, too. You almost never get this much richness in setting. The surfaces, the light, daytime and night. Passing scenes and shots of a Hispanic gas station, a Korean (?) newspaper, murals, traffic, strip malls, modest neighborhoods, airport boulevards. Crucial scenes in Latino and (mostly Asian) nightclubs.
This sense of place fits with one of the movie’s themes – presence. Our protagonists are Vincent (Cruise’s cool, decisive, efficient professional) and Max (Foxx’s daydreaming perfectionist). Max is dreaming miles into the future, but too hesitant or cautious (“It’s gotta be perfect.”) to do anything to get there. Vincent is skimming along the moment, zipping through assignments. (“We gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.”)
Two early soundtrack moments underscore the contrast, too. Early on, Max enjoys the nostalgic, old-school vibes of Groove Armada’s Hands of Time as he cruises through the city. Soon after, we see some of Vincent’s subway/disconnection speech (foreshadowing!) backgrounded with a cool blues-y rendition of Bach’s Air on the G String. Pure sophistication. It’s not until (after the missed-opportunity soliloquy in the jazz club scene) Max is forced into impersonating Vincent that he starts to show some real agency.
On this viewing the humor came through much more for me, thanks to Cruise. Lines like “Promise not to tell anybody, right?” and “Don’t let me cornered. You don’t have the trunk space.” and “What? I should only kill people after I get to know them?”. I could go on. What a damn great movie.
Manhunter. Safe to call Michael Mann my favorite director now? So very good. I wish I’d planned it consciously, but I ended up unintentionally re-watching this around the same time I was reading Manhunts. Another recommended pairing: Matt Zoller Seitz’s reflections (heh) on the mirrors, doppelgängers, doubles, duality, etc. in this and Mann’s other works.
Zen Pulp, by Matt Zoller Seitz – Moving Image Source. I was trolling the web, looking for some more stuff to read about Michael Mann’s work (as one does), and came across this great five–part video+essay series from @mattzollerseitz. If you’ve already seen his series on Wes Anderson, then you already know it’s good. If you haven’t, then watch that, too.
In a sense, every night exterior LA-shot film previous to this change is rendered a sort of anthropological artifact, an historical document of obsolete urban infrastructure.
Now I want to give Collateral another shot.
Miami Vice. This second time around, I was more struck with 1) the noir-iness of the whole thing, and 2) the emphasis on non-verbal communication (gesture, expression, eye contact exchanges, posture, observation & reaction) instead of dialogue. It’s pretty compact storytelling. My first review – I might bump it to number 4 or 5 in my Michael Mann rankings now. Roderick Heath’s review is a must-read.
Mark Larson 