foxtrot_sierra

All the President's Men (1976)
The Apartment (1960)
Assisted Living (2005)
Brazil (1985)
Breathless (1957)

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The protagonists in most of Michael Mann's films live by codes, codes which, with the exception of "Heat," are always unspoken.  His films are often driven by the breaking, repairing, or inherent flaws of his codes.  The protagonists long for domesticity and think their codes can achieve it, when, in fact, it is the code itself that prevents domesticity.  Here's what can happen when you live by your code, or you break it, or it's broken for you:

 

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."

Entire movie: 3 stars
Last 20 minutes: 4 stars
( 2006 review )

2009 thoughts: I haven't seen this movie since I saw it in the theater in 2004 with the wife and a friend. Even though we really enjoyed it, it's clear that "Collateral" is, in some part, Michael Mann licking his wounds after "The Insider" and "Ali." While those movies garnered 9 Oscar nominations, neither of them recouped their production costs during their initial theatrical run (according to BoxOfficeMojo.com). You can imagine the suits demanding that Mann return to his comfort zone of cops and robbers, and he obliged with his most gimmicky premise and middlebrow dialogue that spells out most of the movie's main themes. "Collateral" is by no means an artistic cop-out, though, with Mann expanding digital cinema in "Collateral" after dabbling with it in bits of night footage in "Ali." The dividends paid off, with "Collateral" earning more than double its $65 million budget. 2004 review after cut.
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So you got "Thief," "Manhunter," and "Heat," Michael Mann's first 3 crime dramas, and then you move to "The Insider," which is essentially a crime drama without the overt crime and shooting. But with "Ali" Mann makes perhaps the least-Mann movie of his career (or at least that I've seen, 'cuz I never saw "The Keep"). And it's disappointing that it and "The Insider" made two movies in a row in which Mann lost money. Afterwards, Mann retreated to the safety of the middlebrow crime drama "Collateral" and followed that with the badass "Miami Vice." I would never wish for the non-existence of those two pictures, but I wonder where Mann would have gone if "The Insider" and "Ali" had made money.

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The summer before last summer I kept having the same dream, over and over again.

Put aside for a moment "Transformers 2's" chimp-looking, jive-talking minstrel robots, complete with gold tooth.  Put aside the silliness of giant robots fighting.  Put aside the cynicism of soullessly cashing in on Gen X nostalgia.  Put aside the objectified women with flawless skin and too much makeup.  Put aside that this movie pretty much calls Barak Obama a giant pussy, by name.  Put aside the rampant militarism and truck commercial patriotism.  Put aside that director Michael Bay once again trots out suits and authority figures only to have them be completely wrong in the face of "people from the street." 
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Here's a recent comment from theamused that got me thinking:

"At the end of the day…the question [is] what DO you or I actually care about? The rest is easy."

He was referring to fiction. Now I'm going to about the things I want to make stories, songs, and movies about.

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Finding Nemo (2003)
The Incredibles (2004)
Cars (2006)

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The Black Dahlia (2006)
Day of the Jackal (1973)
Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Farewell My Concubine (1993)


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(2006 review)

Ask the Dust (2006, 117 min, R) **1/2 – Directed & written for the screen by Robert “China” Towne, starring Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, and Donald Sutherland. All over the place, but never boring. Farrell plays an Italian-American hack writer who goes to 1930s LA, determined to make it big and score with a blonde WASP; instead, he falls in love with a Mexican waitress (criminally-curvy Hayek) and gets involved with an unbalanced Jewish woman. He treats them like garbage because he wants to move up the social ladder, not down – the movie is kind of a parable about how each ethnic group about to be assimilated has to treat the unassimilated like trash. “Ask the Dust’s” chief allure is in watching Farrell behave terribly — he’s a walking social disaster and you laugh in horrified disgust as he sticks his foot deeper into his mouth or pours coffee over the tip he leaves the waitress. Their courtship roughly goes like this: “You cheap spic whore!” “You no-good son-of-a-dago wop!” Then they stare at each other with smoldering carnality. The first chance they get to consummate their lust, as she slinks across his bed, he says “I’m busy.” Director-writer Towne gives the movie an odd tone somewhere between a straight-up drama and a deadpan comedy, in which Farrell’s narration combines noir pulp tough talk with things only a true hack could write. A great title, too, although it calls to mind what you might say to a guy before kicking his ass.

(2006 review)

All the King’s Men (1949, 109 min, NR) *** – Directed & written for the screen by Robert Rossen, from the novel by Robert Penn Warren, starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Mercedes McCambridge, and Joanne Dru. Solid old Hollywood literary adaptation that starts slow but finds its stride about the time you start to know what to expect. There’s too much talking and some of the set-ups have that cramped 4:3 framing associated with mid-century American films, but it’s got energy. Fans of the book will enjoy its Cliff Notes hitting of all the high points and admire what characters have been combined and how many subplots had to be tossed aside to reach feature length. Most great novels can’t be made into great movies and most great movies couldn’t be great novels (“Andrei Roublev” as a novel?). Writer-director Rossen had much better luck with adapting a lower-brow novel like “The Hustler” and making a classic out of it, giving it breathing room and space. Warren’s book is a great 20th-century novel, full of sprawl, subplots, tangents, and general rambling, in which an ordinary man (Ireland) learns a lesson from watching the rise-and-fall of a larger-than-life figure (Crawford), not unlike the balance between Gatsby and Nick Carraway. In its broad way the movie captures the balance of the two men. I also like that the opening credits list the book as a “Pulitzer Prize-winner,” as if the film can’t stop hustling you even after you’ve bought your ticket and sat down.

Stolen from a random comment on IMDb.

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2009 thoughts:   Enjoyable and engaging middlebrow indie movies for grown-ups, in the style of the mid-90s, before "Indiewood" became obsessed with quirk and junk like "Juno" and "Little Miss Sunshine."

2009 thoughts:  Yeah, I'm surprised I'm writing about this movie, too.  Huge build-up, little pay-off.  An almost forgotten blip on the pop-culture radar.

2009 thoughts:  My favorite Truffaut movie usually the one I watched most recently, which means "Day for Night" was my favorite Truffaut for that brief period between "Jules and Jim" and "Shoot the Piano Player."  He can make a movie about nothing (and "Day for Night" may ultimately be about nothing) but he fills them with so much joy and energy.

2009 thoughts:  "Trash" is a description of style and approach, not of quality, although I usually don't like much trash.  Clancy and Grisham and all their imitators write "trash," functional and formally conventional and often humorless about themselves.  "Trashy" or "delightfully trashy" are usually good things, though.  "Trashy" implies decadence and self-indulgent wallowing, like De Palma or "Touch of Evil" or "Out of the Past."  This entry concerns trash, not trashy.

"Along Came a Spider" and "High Crimes" are a couple of thrillers I watched with annaschmidt while she was recuperating from her wisdom teeth.  They were part of a friend's giant collection of bootleg DVDs, many of which I'm sure he'll never get around to watching.  I think he's done with both movies (switching to TV like so many 28 - 32-year-olds) and with bothering to burn DVDs.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure both movies are based on trashy airport novels and they have solid, if unremarkable structures and the movies probably leave out what I'm sure are long, essentially non-fiction passages about how police, airports, hospitals, the military, or something else functions.  I would hazard to say the filmmaking is more clean and workmanlike than the prose, which is probably at best functional and clunky, but that's only a guess.  There's no need to see either of them unless you too are recuperating from something that makes "Last Year at Marienbad" or "Days of Being Wild" too much of a strain.

Worth noting is that Lee Tamahori is the director the moderately engaging "Along Came a Spider;" he also helmed a Brosnan 007 and the moderately engaging Nic Cage psychic thriller "Next."  I think his breakthrough is "When We Were Warriors" about Maoris in New Zealand, but most of his output since then can hardly be called from-the-heart.  I imagine him as someone who loves his work and wishes he could do more sincere stuff like "When We Were Warriors" but loves directing so much that he would rather get steady work making well-made trash than struggle to finance something more meaningful.  He'd rather serve in heaven than rule in hell.