Three films a day

#62, 7/28 – Miami Vice (2006) (tofw)

My goodness, I’m about to compliment a tv remake.

I could tell as I left the theatre that I’m swimming against the tide here, but I really liked Miami Vice. Since, to be quite blunt, I lost interest in the tv show faster than you can say “there’s an alligator on your boat, man”, I didn’t expect to really like Miami Vice. Or to like it all. But we’re talking about Michael Mann. You know, Heat. I don’t even need to say why I loved Heat (though I have before). If you’ve seen it, even if you didn’t like it, you know what I loved about it. And if you haven’t seen it, well, chances are you’re not interested in the sorts of grim and gritty thrills Michael Mann’s action movies can offer. (It’s not like I show up just to see characters nicknamed Crazy Pig.) And since Mann had a part in creating the television show, I figured maybe he would be smarter about this remake than anyone else who could have gotten the job would have been.

I found the movie oddly engaging at times, at least partially because it was sort of relentless. Have you ever walked into a movie and wondered what the projectionist did with the first reel? Seriously, for the first twenty minutes or so I found myself bewildered by the lack of prelude. You step right in and the movie tells you “Catch up, man. I ain’t got all day.” It worked for me. At a certain point I acclimated and soon understood what the movie was and wasn’t going to bother telling me.

That’s how I had my fun. I will concede, gladly, that Miami Vice is flawed. Very, very flawed from the Hollywood film standpoint. The plot is occasionally a blur and the characters are pretty much just sketches. The ending is not entirely to my liking and it’s really all quite silly if you take a minute to consider just how much leeway Crockett and Tubbs have. The dialogue is very hard to make out at times and maybe at 2.5 hours it does run a little long. People will find great fault these things and I can understand why. But there’s just something to it I liked. And that’s just the Mann way, I guess. Always something there. One day I’ll probably explain, for instance, why I think Manhunter is a better film than Red Dragon. (It doesn’t always work out for me, though. I really didn’t care for Collateral, though I think that’s largely because the amount I like watching Jamie Foxx is negated by the amount I hate watching Tom Cruise.)

Anyway, even if I’d hated the rest of the Miami Vice, the something here is best encapsulated in one simple scene of tense, unforgiving violence. No, I won’t tell you about it—and no, it’s got absolutely nothing on Heat’s adrenaline-packed moments of mayhem so don’t go in looking for something like that—but I’m kind of in love with Elizabeth Rodriguez now.

[@Village North Theatre ]

#61, 7/26 – Brothers (2004) (dvd)

I didn’t expect to find Brothers as engaging or heartbreaking as I did. I mean, sure, even twenty minutes in it was quite clear that this was not going to end very happily, but as things ramped up to their climax I felt almost overwhelmed by the quiet tragedy of the whole thing.

I’m wondering if it’s possible for me to watch a recent movie from Denmark without saying to myself half the time “hmmm, definitely a Dogme influence there…”. So silly of me. Honestly, though, I’d never heard of Susanne Bier before I saw this and now I’m very interested in watching what else she’s done. Her Dogme film—which she did just before Brothers, so ha! I was not wrong about the influence, after all—has gone straight into my queue.

Oh. And despite the fact that I tend to avoid her Hollywood movies, I really like Connie Nielsen. I think she really shines in this one.

#60, 7/23 – The Lady from Shanghai (1947) (dvd)

“When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me.”

What a great statement to open a movie with! (It handily applies to a good many other film noir protagonists, too. Yes, I’m looking your way, Harry Fabian.) And I loved the whole first scene, really. Better still, the famous final moments of the film—shot in a Fun House—are craftily done indeed. If I’d had any lingering doubts about Orson Welles’ genius as a filmmaker, there’s more than enough in The Lady From Shanghai to dispell them.

Still, I’m not ashamed to say I was confused. Stop, rewind and turn the subtitles on confused. And of course that just led to the sad realization that, OK, the subtitles aren’t really helping. Shame, that. I’m not sure whether my confusion was down to me (Google would seem to say I’m not alone, though), Orson Welles, or the one hour of cuts Columbia made to the picture. I’m betting it’s a combination of the three.

I enjoyed it all the same. Letting a basic sense of confusion dampen my enjoyment of a film isn’t a mistake I’m prone to make. The first time I saw The Big Sleep, for instance, I got well, well lost but at a certain point my brain just said “who cares?” and I ran with it. By the time The Big Sleep was over it was one of my favorites of all time, confusing or not. But you probably know my preferences by now: plot, schmlot.

Still, I wish there was a “director’s cut” of The Lady From Shanghai, because here’s a case where it would do quite a bit of good. I want to see what Welles wanted to make, not what Columbia decided to show.

Update: Oh, I’d totally forgotten to mention this. I’d only learned about it when I hit IMDB…. Wong Kar Wai is remaking this? How does a boy like me get to be so lucky?

#57, 6/28 – Superman Returns (2006) (tofw)

#58, 7/2 – Three Times (2005) (tofw)

#59, 7/8 – A Scanner Darkly (2006) (tofw)

I’m not one for the recent phenomenon often referred to as “reality television”. Were it not for Heather Havrilesky’s take on Paradise Hotel (one of my favorite articles about television ever), I’m pretty sure I’d have been much happier if that entire genre had never existed. Admittedly, I would have needed to find another way to fill those hours I spent watching The Real World (I only wised up half-way through the New Orleans season in, what, 1999?) but that’s hardly an impossible task.

It was only last summer when I realized something. When Hernan Crespo saved Chelsea’s blushes in the last minute of their opening-weekend match against the surprising Wigan Athletic, something in my head said “Oh my, sports events are the original reality television and they manage to exist without the pointlessly mean British guy”. Fine, spectators generally can’t help determine the outcome (i.e. no one could call in to vote Bjorn Borg out of Wimbledon, still, if you’re in the right place at the right time…) and you never got to see players being idiots after hours—unless they managed to get arrested as a result. But it is unscripted entertainment of the highest calibre, mostly (excepting professional wrestling which isn’t unscripted and Serie A soccer which is neither unscripted nor entertainment).

Anyway, for the last month I was watching really great reality television. I barely saw anything resembling great soccer (though it appeared in flashes, like with this utterly phenonemal goal), but boy oh boy was there a lot going on. When the exciting youngster Wayne Rooney got dismissed from the show for, as a writer for the Guardian put it, deciding that an opponent’s “testicles could be used as a landing platform”, that was high drama indeed. And on that same day Zinedine Zidane, the aging talisman of the French national team, put in a wonderful performance against Brazil as Les Bleus stormed unexpectedly into the Final.

But, well, Zidane found his way off the island, too. And at a most… inauspicious time:

All that’s over now and the world is beginning to settle back into its normal rhythms. Somewhere in the last several weeks I managed to see three movies. But no fiction, no matter how interesting, could really top the month-long spectacle which just unfolded in Germany. Last son of Krypton? Big freaking deal. Taiwanese movie which made my head spin? I’ve already forgotten most of it, alas.

OK, seriously, I liked Superman Returns quite a lot. I’d call it a return to form for the Superman series if I’d bothered seeing the movies which came after the (in hindsight) campy yet oddly satisfying Superman 2. I saw it because Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor was too interesting a prospect to pass up. Plus Parker Posey’s in it and Kate Bosworth, and so yeah. I liked it but I can’t readily identify why, exactly. I’ll say this much, though: the scenes with Lois and Superman are some of my favorites from my recent movie-watching. I wouldn’t call the movie a triumph, but it was certainly worth my time.

It’s safe to say I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for Three Times and I’m probably going to try it again at another time. I’m not sure a rewatch will do me any good, but still I feel I should try. I felt unprepared, actually. Not just for the speed of movie itself (why is it that Taiwanese movies always catch me off-guard with their pacing while, say, Tarkovsky movies never do?), but culturally. There’s an entire segment of the film which left me confused.

I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see A Scanner Darkly, truth be told, but still I had to go. I love Philip K Dick’s novels and A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorites (though nothing tops Palmer Eldritch for me, for reasons I cannot even begin to comprehend). I never would have pegged Linklater as the right director for an adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, either. Shows what I know. Not only was Linklater’s approach pretty faithful to what I remember of the book, the whole feel of it was reminiscent of… Slacker. Silly, silly me. How on earth could I not have considered that this was very much in Linklater’s wheelhouse? It was, and I’m happy with how he handled it.

Now please, someone… get to cracking on Palmer Eldritch? (No, I have no idea if it’s filmable, either.) Thanks.

[Superman Returns @ Village North Theatre]
[Three Times @ Music Box Theatre]
[A Scanner Darkly @ Century CineArts 6]