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208.58.2.83
On a 96 degree day I fo' sho' appreciated the AC!Unlike many I had no trouble following the plot, and like most I found Gong Li a joy.
However: Where was Miami? The TV show once went to Manhattan, but otherwise it remained beautifully local. This film had us more in foreign ports than in the old home town.
And what was the deal in Cuidad del Este? Unbeknownst to many, that town is the center of terrorist planning for the Americas and thus deserves some screen time, but the flash that was passed was shown to contain the police profiles of Crockett and Tubbs -- so I expected that info to pop up later, much to their chagrin, but it never did. (I have read that more shooting, as it were, was planned for C. del Este but budget restraints forbade it, so maybe MM just wanted to use some already-shot colorful footage.)
Also the two partners had zilch humor between them. You don't have to be a wisecracking Bruce Willis type to make light occasionally, as all partners do. But, nada.
No one has complained about the digital aspect. I do! I hate it! And dark as the exposure was, the digital defects were magnified; the definition was low and the grain was high. Fie!
I liked the Jose character. And he did deliver on his promise of, "You don't want to know how much I know." But who besides myself misses Izzy?
The opening disco scene looked real, Crockett's affair with dragon lady did not. Nor did I ever get an emotional connection with Trudi.
Overall, I managed to kill a coupla hours and get my money back; the print at the big AMC, after four days, was seriously damaged; the M.O.D. falsely told me there was no replacement available. In the old days our local operator General Cinema, who went under, could be called and they would get someone on the case immediately. Also the woofers in this THX house were bottoming out; the M.O.D. didn't believe me.
A letter shall ensue.
clark
Follow Ups:
You know, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Dirty Harry, etc... the wise-cracking, bigger-personality than life heroes breath life into those tongue-in-cheek films. What carries the genre is brilliant editing, innovative ways to blow things up and kill people.
Same with the Bond franchise.
Not MV.
Colin and Jamie are poorly cast, both individually and together: zero charisma, pizzazz, or chemistry.
Not one memorable stunt, no well-done shoot-outs.
No terrible, evil villain(s).
Poorly written, acted, filmed.
The producers should have shot the director and not this film.
Miami Vice bears the name of the Eighties television series -- fighting crime and looking cool doing it -- for the same reason that the social striver might don Armani. The drug sting in the film could have been pulled off by anybody, not exclusively Sonny and Rico and Co. If you're going to jettison the theme music and the ice-cream color scheme, why retain the proper names? Or to ask it another way, who wants a revisionist Miami Vice? You might as well just settle for Jacksonville Vice. The storytelling, in other words, is strictly generic...
My wife and I enjoyed it. I particularly like that when someone gets shot in a Michael Mann movie, they usually die, or at least are completely out of action. None of this heroic bullshit about carrying on a gunfight when the character has been hit 4 times.
I have one question; where the hell did the hand grenade come from?
Cheers,Graham
"Blue meters, big watts. This must be Heaven!"
MM has fallen in love with his own excesses. He loves fast cars and boats and coolness/toughness and according to some friends working on the project this was a heavily coke fueled production/post production process that was in dissary - as in he was making disorganized changes to the look and to the cut - until the absolute last minute before the release.The time spent going to and from and being in Havana (and loving the cars) could have been trimmed away to help the pacing and he made the main characters SO cool and so full of tough guy platitudes that it was hard to feel any connection to them.
And yes, the combo of HD and the darkness of so much of the film resulted in an unpleasant and noisy picture much of time.
"Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. " T.S. Eliot
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