Archive for August, 2006

Despite getting poor reviews, this film was actually fairly decent.

Robin Williams plays some kind of homosexual, night broadcaster that creates stories rooted deeply in his personal life. Apparently, this makes his audience feel a little overly close to him. At a point in his life where things are starting to fall apart he gets a manuscript of a boy who underwent some kind of terrible trauma as a child, and who as a result is not quite ill. He soon develops a phone friendship with the boy and his foster parent over the phone. Soon, he discovers that the boy he thinks he knows might actually be a fabrication. This is where the movie gets good.
The story is not fantastic, but is just interesting enough to keep the film moving from scene to scene (the entire film is only 75 minutes). Also, thanks to some acceptable acting there was a fair about of tension that built up in a few scenes, and all this without a single “shocker” scene in the entire film.

If you don’t feel like watching one of the bazillion comedies or computer animations out there right now, this might be a decent alternative for you. I know the only reason that I saw this was because it was the only thing starting when I showed up, but it was worth the price of admission.

Michael Mann is officially one of the worst writers/directors of this era.

Last Sunday, I decided to get out of the house, and go to another air conditioned location. In this case, the movie theater. Now, nothing spectacular opened last weekend, so I was forced to choose from a narrow selection. Basically, I was either going to see “John Tucker Must Die” or “Miami Vice.” I knew that JTMD would be awful, and the only redeeming value would be looking at the scantily clad females laced throughout. Also, I knew that Heat was just a horribly boring film, but Collateral was decent, so I threw caution into the wind and went in to see Miami Vice.

I should have just went to see “John Tucker Must Die.” At least then the women in the movie would have been attractive.

Miami Vice…where should I begin. Let’s go with high definition; just like Collateral it looks like MV was shot using HD cameras, its easy to tell, because you get the “bright” backgrounds. Now, the problem with HD is that it will betray your lies. Throughout the film it is extremely easy to tell which scenes were shot outside, and which were shot inside a studio. In scenes were it is dark, when they are supposed to be outside (but are actually in a studio) the backgrounds are very dark, now to hide when they are outside they ran some kind of filter over the film to darken the background like the studio scenes. The problem with this is that it screws with the color hue and saturation so it looks extremely wrong. There is a specific scene that is just awful, where they go from a beautiful shot of a plane flying through clouds to a scene of Fox inside the cockpit against a fake background (which is clearly painted on a board or something that someone must be walking by the cockpit to give the illusion of movement).

Next, ugly women. I am not sure what the motivation was here, but the women features in this film were nothing special. I suppose it could give it a “realistic” element to the film, but the two guys are not “average” looking guys so I am pretty sure they could score some better looking ladies. To make matters worse, they even do some brief nudes scenes with these females that just make you ask, “why?”

Oh, and pacing. The pacing in the movie was just awful, awful I say. Anyone that has seen Heat, or Collateral, or any of this guys movies I suspect knows exactly what I am talking about. His films are always too long, and brutally boring. There are long wooden dialog scenes that just make you want to beat your head against wall. Sure there are some actions scenes, but they aren’t as good as they used to be. I know Heat has one of the best shootout scenes ever, and this movie has some decent actions but all the shots are so tight and quick that you basically miss everything that is going on.

Here is a quick question for you: what genre is Miami Vice? If you said action, you are wrong. If you said drama you are closer. It is more of a crappy romance with a couple of action sequences (not unlikely Star Wars 2, though SW2 might have been better).

Boring characters. I know my Mann experience is lacking, but I know at least in Heat and Collateral there were some interesting characters in the film that you actually were interested to hear what they had to say, and see what they were going to do. In MV this just is not the case. The characters are all boring, any of them could have been killed by some random person and I could not have cared less. Hell, it would have been great because something actually happened.

I believe that those are all the relevant aspects of the film. I cannot in good conscience recommend this film to anyone. So, if you were thinking about seeing this film feel free to save your money. And, if you have to get out to the theater, there are some decent things showing right now: Dead Man’s Chest and Clerks II.