Miami Nice
Hey everyone! Given how slow the summer movie-going season has been, I was thrilled to have three movies out in an eight day period that I wanted to see and actually got to see. The third movie was Michael Mann's Miami Vice. Back when MV was a tv show, I never got to see it for the simple reason that we didn't get that channel. This happened a lot because for a very long time we only got one channel: KXII, aka CBS. However, I do remember that my friend Amy had a poster of Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett on her wall and he was very pretty indeed. This makes the look devised for Colin Farrell's Sonny all the more bewildering. His hairstylist has got to stop it with the long blondish hair that was first brought to screen in Alexander and makes another unfortunate appearance in MV. He's a good looking guy when he has short, dark hair (see Tigerland for proof). To top it off instead of sporting Johnson's five o'clock shadow, Farrell has a full-on handlebar mustache. This combined with his crazy accent - part redneck, part newscaster, part Irishman and I wasn't sure what to think. Luckily Farrell had great chemistry with his female lead, Li Gong. I imdb'd Gong and found that she was in Memoirs of a Geisha, playing the evil Hatsumomo, and in 2046, a movie I'm dying to see. She has a fairly thick accent so I couldn't understand everything she said, but Gong is stunningly beautiful, has great presence and is fun to watch.
That's the thing about this movie: it was fun to watch. Mann is unsurpassed in giving a movie a beautiful, distinctive look and feel. From speedboats propelling across the ocean to planes flying through the clouds to a stunning house in the middle of a rainforest, Mann's camera catches them all in an eye-opening way. I'm a dialogue kind of girl, but in his movies I'm happy just to watch whatever his camera touches on.
The movie is both simple and confusing, depending on how seriously you want to take the plot. Basically Crockett and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) go undercover to catch a druglord and uncover a mole. The druglord's right hand man is Isabella (Gong) and as expected, Crockett falls for her. There are many parties involved: Columbians, disco club owners, two kickass female detectives, all sorts of US agencies, confidential informants and white supremists. In the middle of the movie, there's a great scene where the police attempt a rescue. Surprisingly, this scene was the high point of the movie.
I enjoyed almost all of MV, but the ending which left me with an unfinished feeling. The finale was anti-climactic. There is the standard Michael Mann shootout scene, but it's not nearly as good as the ones in Heat or Collateral. The actors all did a decent job, even accounting for Farrell's accent, but as Creede and I were saying last night, this part should have been Matthew McConnaughey's. He needs to fire his agent now. The rest of the movie was cast it seemed straight from HBO: I spotted Sol Starr from Deadwood, Cesar from Rome and Herc from The Wire. Thomas noted that we never did find out who the mole was. But that wasn't really the point of this movie. It was more style than substance. But when Mann can present style in such a wonderful way, it makes the trip worth it.
Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: Ausralopithecus ends in us
-sunday
That's the thing about this movie: it was fun to watch. Mann is unsurpassed in giving a movie a beautiful, distinctive look and feel. From speedboats propelling across the ocean to planes flying through the clouds to a stunning house in the middle of a rainforest, Mann's camera catches them all in an eye-opening way. I'm a dialogue kind of girl, but in his movies I'm happy just to watch whatever his camera touches on.
The movie is both simple and confusing, depending on how seriously you want to take the plot. Basically Crockett and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) go undercover to catch a druglord and uncover a mole. The druglord's right hand man is Isabella (Gong) and as expected, Crockett falls for her. There are many parties involved: Columbians, disco club owners, two kickass female detectives, all sorts of US agencies, confidential informants and white supremists. In the middle of the movie, there's a great scene where the police attempt a rescue. Surprisingly, this scene was the high point of the movie.
I enjoyed almost all of MV, but the ending which left me with an unfinished feeling. The finale was anti-climactic. There is the standard Michael Mann shootout scene, but it's not nearly as good as the ones in Heat or Collateral. The actors all did a decent job, even accounting for Farrell's accent, but as Creede and I were saying last night, this part should have been Matthew McConnaughey's. He needs to fire his agent now. The rest of the movie was cast it seemed straight from HBO: I spotted Sol Starr from Deadwood, Cesar from Rome and Herc from The Wire. Thomas noted that we never did find out who the mole was. But that wasn't really the point of this movie. It was more style than substance. But when Mann can present style in such a wonderful way, it makes the trip worth it.
Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: Ausralopithecus ends in us
-sunday
posted by Sunday at
4:02 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home