Miami Vice

[The Invunche]

Also, I hope Mann doesn't introduce a title credits sequence at the beginning...

He did.

[foggy eyes]

Also, I hope Mann doesn't introduce a title credits sequence at the beginning...

He did.

Rubbish. It's interesting, though, that he appears to have been braver with the theatrical cut. If this is the case, I'll be pleased that I got to see the superior version on a big screen.

[The Invunche]

It's interesting, though, that he appears to have been braver with the theatrical cut.

I think that's true. I just finished watching it and the movie appears much more conventional in the director's cut. It includes a lot of these short scenes of phone calls etc. that helps explain what is going on. Something I'm sure a lot of regular movie goers would have preferred. To me it would have made a lot more sense if the cuts had been switched.

I'm probably gonna order the theatrical cut now.

[jon]

Hmm, that is a shame. The sort of incomprehensible nature of the film was the only thing attractive to me, that and Gong Li of course!

[TedW]

Definitely a better movie in the longer version. Still not a good movie, but a better one nevertheless.

[souvenir]

Definitely a better movie in the longer version. Still not a good movie, but a better one nevertheless.

Thanks for the insight!

[TedW]

Hey, was that sarcasm?

Anyway, I'll elaborate a bit: the opening works much better now, as the speedboat chase not only establishes their undercover personas/skill sets, it also sets up exactly what the nightclub sting was all about. It feels less abrupt than the theatrical version and more coherent. Otherwise, there are a few scene extensions and extra bits and bobs sprinkled throughout that I felt, in the aggregate, fleshed out the relationships between the characters somewhat (Rico/Trudy, Sonny/Isabella, the reach of Jesus' operation, etc). I was more engaged here than I was in the theatre. Which is not to say I was engaged, mind you -- I still don't think the movie works. And I should've put "fleshed out" and "relationships" in quotes, because all that is terribly relative.

I believe he has also re-located the "In the Air Tonight" cue to its proper location, as a buildup to the final deal/shootout. This echoes its place in the pilot episode of the TV show, coming just prior to our heroes' final showdown with Calderon. The problem is, the new version sucks and the sequence itself doesn't have the emotional impact of the pilot version (you will recall, Sonny stops at a phone booth to call his ex-wife for some kind of absolution -- "It was real, wasn't it, Caroline?") because the audience isn't particularly invested in Colin Farrell, Gong Li, or their relationship. We can put this flaw squarely at Michael Mann's feet.

Anyway, like I said, better but still not good. If you like the theatrical version, however, I don't see how this version could possibly ruin it for you.

[Abulafia]

What's everyone's obsession with the film making sense or not. Visually it was breathtaking, the narrative highly entertaining and the film was fascinatingly structured (not in conventional way of course). Yes it cost about 80 million too much and was marketed as Miami Vice (the show) when really Heat II or Collateral II would have served just as well. Obviously the presell thing was important to the budget of the film remembering that Mann's previous efforts haven't exactly set the boxoffice on fire.

I realise that this film (along with many recent American films (The Village, The Departed, New World, Nacho Libre, The Island, etc)) has generated many conflicting views amongst forum members, but I think its another example of why 'Hollywood' today is still as diverse as ever before with movies that seem to fit the mold but actually break it at the same time.

p.s. the director's cut sounds far less interesting (how could they change the credit sequence (or lack of)!).

[TedW]

It's only less interesting if you find narrative incoherence interesting. And I'm not sure what you mean by the film having a fascinating yet unconventional structure -- it seemed pretty conventionally structured to me. Michael Mann is no narrative avant-gardist (and that's not a dig) -- he cut his teeth in television, for Chrissakes.

[TedW]

What's everyone's obsession with the film making sense or not.

I'm not really sure how to answer this, other than to say we must be from two different worlds. Let me try a bridge: You're saying a movie not making sense is... a good thing?

[John Cope]

It's only less interesting if you find narrative incoherence interesting. And I'm not sure what you mean by the film having a fascinating yet unconventional structure -- it seemed pretty conventionally structured to me. Michael Mann is no narrative avant-gardist (and that's not a dig) -- he cut his teeth in television, for Chrissakes.

Oh, Ted, there you go again. Didn't we just have this conversation four or five months ago?

What Mann did in Vice was to expand out from the basic demands of narrative based cinema. I've said this again and again but the achievement of the film and its enduring value is its investment in form as a thematic communication device, its salvaging of pure pop aesthetics. The intentional elisions and lack of "proper" character orientation forced a different perspective on admittedly shopworn material. The story is nothing new and, in fact, it needed to be as familiar in its basic architecture as possible so we would not be distracted by plot and standard notions of narrative development.

As has been said before, Vice owes more to Heat and Mann's astonishing TV experiment Robbery Homicide Division then it does to its 80's progenitor. It goes far beyond the series in that the series really does deal explicitly with the foregrounded question of altered identity and wavering allegiances. The movie exists at a point in which the question of salvaging identity has been lost from the start; the final image is a foregone conclusion, we just don't know it yet. The struggle is all an affectation at this point, as is everything else. These characters have no memory of a stable, undivided and coherent self to return to. That's the tragedy as man and his humane potential drifts and ultimately blends with the skyline. It's not that the movie doesn't makes sense, Ted, it's that you are privileging the less expansive approach to the material.

I'll close with this. I was just watching the interviews on The Proposition and John Hurt mentions that his character is a man of purely created, imagined identity. He now can no longer differentiate himself from his role and his affectations--the human soul is fully eclipsed. That's what Mann is after--the depiction of incidents in time and space unafflicted by inquiry or any resistance to indifference or longing grounded in the memory of what has been lost and how to return to it. Only the enactment of dramatic ritual remains.

[Abulafia]

The intentional elisions and lack of "proper" character orientation forced a different perspective on admittedly shopworn material. The story is nothing new and, in fact, it needed to be as familiar in its basic architecture as possible so we would not be distracted by plot and standard notions of narrative development.

What he said. And yes narrative incoherence is interesting in a 130 million dollar film directed by Mann (although to rephrase I do not think I would agree that the film is narratively incoherent, in fact I would argue that the narrative form of Vice is generally logical). What I meant to say was that everything doesn't have to make sense, that's not the point of the film. It's about how Mann shows his cards, not the cards themselves..... Also we are from different worlds.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

As has been said before, Vice owes more to Heat and Mann's astonishing TV experiment Robbery Homicide Division then it does to its 80's progenitor. It goes far beyond the series in that the series really does deal explicitly with the foregrounded question of altered identity and wavering allegiances. The movie exists at a point in which the question of salvaging identity has been lost from the start; the final image is a foregone conclusion, we just don't know it yet. The struggle is all an affectation at this point, as is everything else. These characters have no memory of a stable, undivided and coherent self to return to. That's the tragedy as man and his humane potential drifts and ultimately blends with the skyline.

Well said. I'd also add that Mann is a filmmaker who uses architecture, what the characters wear, the use of color and the composition of a scene to comment more on how character feels than what they are saying. Aside from the jargon that both criminals and cops speak throughout the film it is very Spartan language-wise because Mann prefers to convey what the characters are feeling through the visuals. So, he conveys alienation and isolation by framing a character in an expansive space that dwarfs them like many shots of Will Graham in Manhunter or uses the architecture of a given space, like the bars in Lector's cell to show how characters are trapped literally and metaphorically.

He does exactly the same thing in Miami Vice. You really have to pay attention to the visuals and how he frames characters, the colors he uses, the lighting, etc. and think about how it comments on the characters in a given scene. For a filmmaker who is making big-budget Hollywood films, he's taking some real chances in terms of content and style.

[MichaelB]

Michael Mann is no narrative avant-gardist (and that's not a dig) -- he cut his teeth in television, for Chrissakes.

Well, Alan Clarke is definitely a narrative avant-gardist (ever seen Elephant?), and not only did he cut his teeth in television, his most radical experiments were generally made for the small screen (though still broadcast on one of the main BBC channels). And Chris Petit directed P.D.James and Agatha Christie adaptations before becoming just about the most out-on-a-limb avant-gardist working in British film (which is why much of his recent work has been damn near impossible to see). And I'm sure there are lots of similar examples.

While I wouldn't necessarily call Mann a narrative avant-gardist, there's no doubt whatsoever that his films work on levels other than the surface story. When I saw Heat on its original release, in a giant West End cinema, I found it so overwhelming on every level that I barely registered the story first time round, and even now I'm really not too bothered about who did what to whom because the film's formal aspects were so fascinating. Who else would score a night-time stakeout sequence to Gyorgy Ligeti's cello concerto? Or a car chase to a Moby cover of a Joy Division song? And, as has been pointed out many times, Mann has arguably the cinema's strongest eye for architecture since Antonioni.

[John Cope]

Dennis Lim makes the point for us:

A SECOND LOOK
Plots are so 20th century
Mega-hit films are assembled more than written now, and sometimes style is enough.
By Dennis Lim, Special to The Times
December 3, 200




IN "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," someone calls Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow a "dying breed" — a rugged individualist who must "find his place in the new world or perish." The summer blockbuster may not qualify as an endangered species just yet, but more than 30 years after "Jaws," it is at least an embattled one, struggling to stay relevant in an altered and fragmented media landscape.

"Dead Man's Chest" and "Miami Vice," both out on DVD this Tuesday, are by no means among the year's best (or worst) films, but they may be its most significant blockbusters. In their own way, each pushes the envelope. "Dead Man's Chest," extending a foolproof franchise based on a popular theme-park ride, takes the notion of assembly-line repackaging to new heights of cynicism. ( "Miami Vice," one of the most expensive films ever to be shot on video, is the rare studio movie that is also a daring aesthetic experiment: a contingency plan for the imminent extinction of celluloid.

They also have more in common than is first apparent. The point of both films seems to be that narrative is beside the point. In "Dead Man's Chest," which is not so much written as diagramed, plot points function simply as cogs in the lumbering machine. The ridiculous convolutions, which involve missing keys and magic compasses and Davy Jones' beating heart, serve only to catapult the movie from one exhausting, effects-heavy set piece to another.

Story is likewise reduced to pretext in "Miami Vice," which director Michael Mann shot on high-definition video (the same format that he and cinematographer Dion Beebe used for 2004's nocturnal Los Angeles thriller "Collateral"). At 134 minutes, the movie has barely more substance than an average episode of the TV series. The drug-running plot complications are a tangle of straight-faced clichés. The performances are oddly disengaged (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, as detectives Crockett and Tubbs, have minimal rapport; Farrell and Gong Li's love connection is even more tenuous). And for all the geographical hopscotching (from South Beach to Paraguay to Colombia), there isn't much action — the movie is provocatively languid until a tense rescue effort and a frenzied shootout finally bring it to life.

Still, true to the original, this pensive, stripped-down "Miami Vice" is a triumph of style — though the style has of course been vigorously updated. The brooding, inky visuals could not be further from the sun-kissed pastels of the series. Divested of back stories and connective tissue, fixated on colors, patterns and textures, the movie is a zoned-out mood piece that flirts with disorientation.

"Miami Vice" is not what you'd call conventionally beautiful — it often looks grainy and murky (this is less of a problem on the small screen). Mann and Beebe understand the distinct properties of video and showcase them accordingly. The bleeding, heightened colors are deployed with the panache of an expressionist painter.

The term "auteur" — as it was originally used by the French critics of the 1950s — applied chiefly to the Hollywood filmmakers of the day such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, who smuggled a personal vision into commercial studio product. Mann follows in that tradition; "Miami Vice" is a genre flick that bears the signature of its maker.

The "Pirates" enterprise, by contrast, is the height of impersonality. If there's an auteur lurking deep within, it's not Verbinski, the poor man's Peter Jackson, but Depp, whose boldly conceptualized performances improve almost everything he's in. His fruity buccaneer, although less of a hoot the second time around, remains a surpassingly strange creation.

As the movies get bigger and more mechanical, the presence of personality is what redeems them. In other words, the vitality of the blockbuster lies in the hands of a ragtag group: the individualists, the auteurs, the Jack Sparrows and the Michael Manns.

[Antoine Doinel]

There is no excuse that would ever make me sit through Dead Man's Chest again. Even though Johnny Depp was great -- but what an awful movie.

[colinr0380]

I remember Mark Kermode saying something to the effect that he hated the Pirates of the Carribean films because it looked like everyone (including the director) had deferred to Depp in what Kermode considers to be his worst performance (he said it just beat out Benny and Joon for him!). He suggested that, while he considered Johnny Depp to be an excellent actor he seemed to give his best performances when his acting was controlled by a director with a strong story or sense of purpose. The over the top antics by Depp in Pirates, in contrast to Dennis Lim's opinion of his performance being 'boldly conceptualized' were considered by Kermode to be an actor running wild while everyone else applauds him on the 'genius' of modelling his role on Keith Moon.

Rather than feeling that "the vitality of the blockbuster lies in the hands of a ragtag group: the individualists, the auteurs, the Jack Sparrows and the Michael Manns", his take on Pirates was that the longer Depp was getting over praised for a wild performance, the more in danger we are in of losing one of the modern cinema's best actors, because the more praise or Oscar-nominations Depp gets for this role, the more he is going to think that is all he needs to do is act over the top (Kermode likened it to Brando's decline into self parodying performances)

I thought that would be an interesting counter-argument to throw in on the Dennis Lim piece posted above. I've no opinion either way at the moment since I haven't seen either of the Pirates of the Carribean films!

To get the discussion back on track a bit, Mark Kermode was less harsh about Miami Vice, and actually almost came to the same conclusion as Lim's "the movie is provocatively languid until a tense rescue effort and a frenzied shootout finally bring it to life."

Kermode's opinion was that the barely understandable mumbling was intentional to obscure a very simple storyline - he considered the first half to be terrible, but that the second half delivered all the Michael Mann elements and redeemed it somewhat. So he considered it a half-decent movie, but at least it was the second half that was good!

[Antoine Doinel]

Some interesting points, but to Depp's defence I don't think "subtlety" and "nuance" would've have worked well within the already over-the-top framework of the POTC films. However, it does seem that Depp's choices of late seem to lean toward the eccentric (Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Sweeny Todd etc). I hope he does return to the kind of films he build his career on. That being said, I find his quirky performances equally endearing.

[obloquy]

There's a whole segment missing in the uncut version: in the theatrical cut, when the boys visit Jose Yero the first time, they go to the hotel to wait for the call and then are sent to a meeting but are stood up; they return to their room and the baddies are there waiting for them. That whole bit is missing in the "director's cut" edition. Anyone know anything about why the change was made? It's not that I especially liked this portion, I just don't get why the longer version is missing scenes I saw in the theater.

I liked the director's cut more. The relationships/characters are better. I preferred the theatrical intro, though, like many of you. Still, even with the more traditional opening, I think this movie is far better than a lot of people give it credit for. I actually liked what people are calling "mumbled dialogue" and "incomprehensible jargon" (not direct quotes) since I feel that it adds to the hardcore professionalism Mann strives to convey. The same stuff is all over in Heat and is not actually incomprehensible, just dense. I think the trailer park rescue ranks among Mann's most nail-bitingly taut moments, despite being over in a few short minutes.

[Andre Jurieu]

Are any other Canadians having trouble finding the DVD for the Original Cut in retail stores? Last night I drove across my city to various stores and couldn't find one store that was carrying the original cut, so now I'm going to have to grab it from an online retailer.

[Arn777]

I was in New York the past couple of days, and couldn't find the original cut either, only the unrated cut (and the combo HD-DVD with the original cut).

[Galen Young]

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Can someone confirm -- is Michael Mann's commentary track only available on the "Unrated Director's Edition" and not the theatrical version DVD? If so, that sucks!

Yeah, it's only available on the Unrated Director's Edition.