2009 thoughts: LOVE "Heat." Love love love love love. What boy wouldn't? Doomed romanticism, "I love you but I must kill you," characters photographed as inferior to their vast uncaring surroundings. And guns. Guns like you wouldn't believe, given glorious vent in the best gunfight of the 1990s. First viewing was a two-taper rental from "Blockbuster." The DVD really works out your speakers during the downtown shoot-out, in which you don't just hear gunfire but the echoing of the reports up the steel-and-glass skyscrapers.
"The Insider" is probably Mann's 2nd or 3rd best film, after "Heat" and maybe "Miami Vice" - fuck you and wipe that look off your face. After seeing it twice in the theater in 1999 - 2000, wife and I got the DVD recently and were blown away by Dante Spinotti's cinematography. With its high-contrast deep-focus alternating (often in the same frame) with extreme close-ups, "The Insider" is so beautiful it verges on the comical. The movie cost $90 million, and it's no wonder - the sheer cost of setting up all the lighting and deep focus for all those diners, hotel suites, offices, etc. for a 2.5 hour feature must've been staggering. It's no wonder that, in his subsequent films, Mann begins to shoot more and more on high-definition video: with "The Insider," he had "beaten" 35mm; he does everything that can be done with it and seeks new worlds and new colorschemes to conquer.
With "The Insider" Mann continues the trend of quicker-cutting in serious films, a trend that can be traced, by various routes, through Oliver Stone and the French New Wave back to Eisenstein. Would there be no Paul Greengrass or Bourne movies without Mann and "The Insider"? Possibly. But there's a shallow grit to Greengrass's images when compared to Mann's; a throwaway street scene in "The Insider" features streetlamps and traffic signals careening into eternity, while the images of the Bourne films seem to terminate only a few feet behind Matt Damon's head.
annaschmidt and I saw "Manhunter" for the first time on VHS at a friend's house years ago, possibly before we were married, and we recently re-watched it on DVD. The best parts of "Manhunter" are shot like an art-movie's take on an '80s fashion magazine, in which cops (all hip dressers, for 1986 standards) in perfectly symmetrical, high-contrast homes that are too cold and angular to actually suggest people living sanely. The movie follows a detective in danger of going insane in his willingness to protect the ideals of home and domesticity, thus rendering himself unwelcome in the domestic world. His role as protector begins early, as he and his son build a fence for baby turtles on the beach, and the movie ends with his son asking him "did the babies survive?" to which he replies, "most of them."