saw this yesterday with high expectations, because the miami herald gave it a resounding review, and one imagines the miami herald should know. but the miami herald, to which we are constantly cancelling our subscription in disgust and resuming it in desperation, knows nothing, least of all whether a movie allegedly about miami has anything at all to do with, er, miami.
let me quote here for you rene rodriguez of the miami herald:
The Miami seen in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is a drastically different city than the one most people remember from the 1980s TV show: It’s a still-seductive paradise on the verge of being run over by industrialization and rot. All the retro Art Deco buildings and South Beach vistas have been replaced by towering modern skyscrapers and downtown highways and underpasses; the pink and baby-blue pastels have given way to gunship-metal grays and blacks; even the sun seems changed, not quite as blazing as before, hazier and less revealing.
i have never seen as much as a second of miami vice the tv show, but i sure hope it portrayed miami a little more than this miami vice, which could take place in any american city, were it not for the fact that, as we are reminded constantly, we are a hop and a skip from cuba. this is a shame, because, for all its ugliness, miami does have a personality of its own, and i’ll be damned if any of it emerges in this film. first of all, all the locals are either anglo whites or anglo blacks. if you set a movie in miami, you’ve got to put in latinos, because latinos make up 60% of the population. and at least some of the blacks have to be of the caribbean variety, with a lovely, sing-songing ‘island’ accent. second, most of the scenes take place a) indoors, b) on the sea, c) in the air, d) abroad, and e) in some non-descript run-down, by-the-water location. so even though you can detect, once in a while, a skyscraper or a highway ramp, they convey absolutely nothing of the city.
this film, though, disappoints more than just in its failure to give us miami. it is a fairly predictable little movie, with a fairly predictable little story, which would have gained much from keeping romance well out. i like romance like the next person, but it just doesn’t work here. these are all meant to be hardy characters, and their romantic involvements feel completely fake. suspension of disbelief is not enough.
colin farrell is, i’m afraid to say, embarrassing, and jamie foxx is only slightly less so. even li gong, under the ham-fisted direction of michael mann, disappoints. the character i like the most is a female cop who doesn’t say much but makes up for it by blasting away a whole lot of nasty people.
Good enough for me! I’ll stay away from it now.
mr. mann gave a similar treatment to LA in his previous film. Apparently the fact that a coyote ran into the street (unscripted) and he wrote some dialogue about how to get from LAX to downtown made it a movie set in LA.
I also want to say that the over-marketing of films completely saps away any desire I have to see them. Even movies that I had an interest in based on trailers and cast and reviews (such as Pirates, Miami Vice). I throw up when stuff is shoved down my throat.
I thought both Heat and Collateral provided a rather atmospheric and precise sense of LA, especially those “empty” parts like downtown that rarely get much film time. As far as I can tell large parts, if not everything, were filmed in real recognizable LA locations.
i am not sure i understand why these movies have to be about the cities they’re set in (or name-check in their titles) in such concrete ways. recognizable settings and locations aside, i thought mann did a good job in collateral of capturing the feel of seedy l.a apartment buildings and the whole scary/chic club on a non-descript street thing. it is a different matter that mann’s films usually leave me cold. i am interested in seeing miami vice though–but mostly because of the ny times’ review’s emphasis on its painterly composition etc.. colin farrell’s stardom continues to elude me as well.
I actually didn’t hate Collateral when I saw it, on video, but I remember the reviews saying it was one of the best L.A. movies ever – that the city was almost a character in the film. That kind of thing. So I was disappointed that it didn’t live up to that kind of hype for me.
I did, as a kid, enjoy the TV show Miami Vice, and I have visited family in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area since 1980. I’m familiar with the character of the area and I’ve seen it change over 25 years, but this:
I can see that here in LA. And as a bonus, usually without Colin Farrell.
i thought about your objection, arnab, before posting. i asked myself whether a movie should feature the city it names in the title and whether L.A. movies (L.A. confidential, laurel canyon, what else?) dwell on L.A. as for the latter question, i think the answer is yes, for the most part, but i also think that L.A. is its own case, as so many films are set in it. but miami doesn’t get a whole lot of cinematic attention, and it seems to me that part of the attraction of this movie was in giving a sense of the city. there are cities like that, right? if you name a film lincoln, nebraska, we don’t expect lincoln to feature prominently. it’s just a socio-geographical signpost. but cities like miami, nyc, L.A., las vegas, san francisco, etc. have a place in the collective imaginary a director should not ignore if it puts their names in the title.
pictorially, this film has some stunning compositions, especially thanks to the video-like quality of the pictures, to the liberal use of hand-held cameras, and to the coldness of the colors. but you can’t sustain a film on pictoriality alone. also, i would have liked to see more poverty (i don’t mean it that way, silly). until two years ago, miami was the poorest city in the country, in spite of housing a large contingent of obscenely wealthy people. scarface gives a really powerful sense of this desperate, beat up, sordid mimai. but the miami of MV is so wealthy you feel a bit clammy under the armpits watching it.
there’s a scene near the beginning in which the camera dwells at length on foxx’s naked skin. the quality of the image is very grainy, and foxx’s brown skin looks like the bottom crust of a burned store-bought pie. i found this long shot unsettling. what’s with the close-up of a black man’s skin in a film that is markedly uninterested in naked bodies and sensual images?
anyway, i’m curious and eager to read what y’all have to say about this film, and a little bit sorry that i put mark off it, though it seems the advertising machinery had already gotten the headstart on that.
I’m sure that the “real” Miami is not like the show, but the one time I have visited Miami, it was exactly like the movies. I went for an interview at UM in 1989. The university booked me into a garish pink sandstone hotel that I recognized from a Miami Vice episode. The dinner with the search committee was in a restaurant I recognized from Cocoon (or maybe it was Cocoon II). The whole damn visit was like a movie, right down to drinking Becks in shirtsleeves on a floating dock at midnight after driving through a snowstorm to get to Logan for the flight. Is there a real Miami?
Sadly I’m in Britain where MV does not open for another week (though we get the teen action flick ‘Stormbreaker’ before the US), so I’ll have to wait ’til I get back.
BTW, did you know that most content filters prevent access to ‘WLTW’? I was blocked trying to read the blog at an ‘internet lounge’ in Birmingham, and again in Poole. Apparently there is pornographic content. I wish.
Chris
that’s another ambition checked off.
Did anyone other than Gio see this? I was somewhat disappointed for many of the same reasons as Gio. The pacing of the movie seemed a little off, far too slow for this kind of film. In fact, there was a drowsy character to many of the scenes. In a disco or a bar, the sound level of the music is dialled down so far that is barely more than a hum. All the character mumble. And very little happens. The romantic entanglement with Li Gong comes to dominate the movie, for no obvious reason, and someone as talented as Gong is reduced at the end to battering her fists helplessly against Farrell and crying out “who are you?”
The one main action sequence is very well filmed: grainy, the camera behind the shooters, a sense of chaos, the muted sound of automatic weapons giving some rhythm to the scene. Mann filmed the bank heist gone wrong in ‘Heat’ which I still think is the state of the art for taut action sequences.
Farrell is appalling — he looks lost most of the time — but I was more impressed with Foxx who at least maintained some dignity.
On the issue of how Miami is portrayed, I have to say that this is not a movie about Miami. I doubt more than ten minutes of the entire movie take place in Miami, and those are all at night and take place indoors. Mann is far more interested in the natural environment in this movie: spectacular waterfalls in Columbia; the Florida Keys seen from light aircraft or fast boats. And he also specializes in interiors: every scene in the ‘The Insider’ and even the interior of the cab in ‘Collateral.’ You see it again here, esp. in the assault on the trailer.
the buzz (which i haven’t verified, but picked up a lot in conversation and papers) is that a lot of this film was shot in miami — hence highway closing, blocked streets, etc. someone even told me that the interiors were carefully chosen among real miami interiors! i don’t know if any of this is true, but it strikes me now as funny, especially the part about interiors.
I had no idea the inside of a motel room in Miami was so regionally distinctive.
Haven’t seen the film but isn’t Miami known for its brash collection of high-end, refurbished Art Deco hotels?
no, i meant the glitzy apartments. and yes, miami is known for the art deco hotels (some of which are refurbished, most of which are charmingly run down), but MV eschews art deco in favor of gun metal and glass.
I haven’t much to add: after Gio knocked the film around, I thought better of paying to see it in theaters, and then a student of mine wrote a pretty fine paper on it raving, so I rented it, and … I’m closer to Gio. I frankly wanted to turn the sound off, because the film looked glorious, in so many particulars, and I very much enjoyed the relation between a real visual energy and dynamism against what G called its painterly compositions.
But then I’d listen to people talk, and this plot couldn’t have been more patently familiar, more patly flat in both its larger narrative sweep and its local bits of dialogue. I think Mann’s Insider one of the best films of the last 10 years, so… this was pretty damn disappointing.
ugh . . . I found it monotonous, dull, deadly, insipid; it was pretty though. I didn’t finish it.
also, reynolds is a poophead.