Michael Mann's FERRARI

Out in theaters tonight (Christmas Eve). Been covered a bit in the Mann thread, but here's one for it.

Hoping to catch this Saturday (will check back in on the thread after)

I thought this was pretty good, not great but engaging and well made — and of course the car and race scenes were the highlights. I personally would've trimmed the personal story for another 10-15 minutes of racing. It's an interesting contrast to Maestro, which I watched a few nights ago, because Ferrari centers the thing that Ferrari actually loved — cars and racing — where Maestro never gives the same kind of sense of engagement with music. (Maybe because Mann really does love cars, and it shows.)

One time there were a bunch of movies about car companies

I keep seeing the name Troy Kennedy Martin in TV adverts for the film, "Ferrari", and I keep thinking, "Is he still alive?" But he isn't, he died on 2009.

― Nine Inch Males (Tom D.), Monday, 25 December 2023 00:09 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Did a guy who died 14 years ago really write the screenplay for this film?

yeah, the script is actually 30 years old.

In 1991, Los Angeles-based Penta Pictures — which had been jointly founded by producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori and then-rising TV mogul Silvio Berlusconi — bought adaptation rights to the book “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races” by Brock Yates that is the basis for Mann’s picture.

Cecchi Gori subsequently hired Troy Kennedy Martin to write the script  and when Penta Pictures was dissolved in 1995 the “Ferrari” rights went to its U.S. arm, Cecchi Gori Pictures.

Mann was also attached for several years to the project that eventually became Ford vs. Ferrari after he dropped out.

The accents are bad, like everyone says, but I guess I just don't get that worked up about that. Of course they're bad!

Ferrari centers the thing that Ferrari actually loved — cars and racing — where Maestro never gives the same kind of sense of engagement with music. (Maybe because Mann really does love cars, and it shows.)

Bradley Cooper loves awards and it shows. Michael Mann just has his particular obsessions, the stories he has to get out of his system, god bless 'im.

Yeah, maybe that's the thing Cooper identified with in Bernstein — the love of applause.

Adam Driver as a middle-aged Italian is very weird in the trailers. He sounds more like a Russian.

He and Woodley are not great casting. Driver's good enough that he puts it across, but could certainly imagine better fits for the role. Penelope Cruz is good, and the sort of Greek chorus of drivers including Patrick Dempsey are all pretty good.

I wish I cared at all about cars, or the people that make or race cars.

The racing stuff was great, as was Cruz. Driver was very good! Got a whole pile of notes about the film overall, which is probably a B- or C+.

(No regrets that I saw it, as a Mann fan.)

Please elaborate!

Well:

1. This should’ve been a 10-episode limited series. A story is told here but it might’ve been cool to have gotten to really know the drivers - for Ferrari, and the other teams - to give the race and its outcomes a bit more weight and heft and impact. A lot of the racers and Ferrari staff felt kind of interchangeable - a lot of faces and confusion. This didn’t feel like a problem in Oppenheimer but did here, and maybe that’s because…
2. … this movie features a lot of people speaking English with Italian accents. Yes, I know, it would’ve been hard and time consuming (and unrealistic!) but this movie would be 10-20% better if everyone was speaking in Italian with subtitles. Context and body language does some of the work but often I wasn’t sure what was being said, particularly in crowded scenes.
3. Sharlene Woodley. Why? Why?!? This is the first thing I’ve ever seen her in. She doesn’t sink the movie but this is not great casting.

I’ll save other thoughts for later.

*…speaking English with Italian accents with various levels of success

Oh, what the hell:

4. The pacing, particularly at the start, felt *weird*. (Particularly the first 15-20 minutes.) Everything seemed to be happening too quickly.
5. When you watch any movie, particularly in a theater, you want to be sucked into the reality of what’s happening. You want to hold your breathe. I never quite got there with this, and with the exception of some of the racing I was always fully conscious that I was watching a film.
6. There were some weird editing choices.

I do want to see it again on the big screen. Maybe having experienced it once things will gel better.

5a. When the race gets VERY intense (people who have seen it know what I mean), I fully snapped into the movie for the first time. It was like, OH. Yes. Fuck.

I stopped watching my screener DVD because the first 20 minutes killed me.

I don’t blame you, Alfred!

7. Things I pondered while watching: what if Mann had written this script himself? What if this was a Paolo Sorrentino joint?

Sorry for going on and on, it’s rare that I watch a movie in a theater and spend the time in the mindset of a studio executive drafting notes

Couple of good comments on Bluesky today -- first:

Big deal here in F's home city Modena, where a lot of it was filmed and where it is showing on multiple screens at all cinemas. Not seen it myself. Most interesting comment I've heard so far was by a retired Ferrari racing mechanic. He was unimpressed - not enough about the cars.

And from another poster about Troy Kennedy Martin:

I once spent a very pleasant afternoon drinking pints with Troy Kennedy Martin and he had some incredible insights to share. He was also weirdly happy that Three Kings had borrowed so heavily from Kelly’s Heroes, right down it stealing a sequence that studio brass had excised from his script....he was glad to see some of his intentions and political critiques inform another work. So magnanimous. He also told me he was working on a script about Blair and Iraq and that, even though he was sure no-one would ever make it, he felt compelled to write it.

I kinda wanna see that now!

That would be an interesting movie!

More about the cars would’ve been cool.

Looking forward to others’ takes, particularly Alfred and Unperson.

I wish I cared at all about cars, or the people that make or race cars.

Really, all you need to care about is marriage and interior design. The cars are third.

this movie would be 10-20% better if everyone was speaking in Italian with subtitles

I had that thought today, that the best version of it would be an Italian film, or at least an Italian cast.

Maybe the DVD/Blu/4K will have an Italian dub you can watch with English subtitles.

Looking forward to others’ takes, particularly Alfred and Unperson.

Honestly, I have no plans to watch this. Was having a conversation with my wife earlier — she tried to watch House of Gucci and bailed after an hour or so — and we decided that collectively the only things we've liked Adam Driver in have been Paterson and Logan Lucky. He's been so bad in so many things, he's moving toward deal-breaker territory.

For all my frustrations with Ferrari, it’s leagues better than House of Gucci was.

(I haven’t seen Driver in enough things to have a deep stance on him as an actor.)

An interview with Mann

https://www.oneheatminute.com/miami-nice-podcast/ferrarinicemichaelmann

Missing piece: an anachronistic needle drop.

Ferrari rocked but some Audioslave songs could have really pushed it to the next level

— Blackbird Spyplane (@BLKBRD_Spyplane) December 28, 2023

Definitely better than House of Gucci, which wasn't enough of anything.

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-directors-cut-a-dga-podcas-30176/episodes/ferrari-with-michael-mann-and-195201537

On the plus side, we all know there will be an inevitable director's cut, so maybe that will be more compelling.

i thought this was fucking great. however annoyingly terrible the accents are, the performances beyond them are fine imo. racing scenes made me long for death. film as a whole is a beautifully-shot lugubriously-paced deconstruction of toxic death-drive masculinity disguised (barely!!) as being the finest practitioner of your craft, aka a michael mann film. i understand raymond’s uhhh roadblocks—it is not perfect, it is often ridiculous—but it was pretty easy for me to get around them or even enjoy them. for instance i think it’s thematically appropriate that we do not really get to know the individual racers that ferrari conscripts into his death drive of glory

i did watch hunt for red october a few days before and enjoyed how connery did not feel the need to keep up the russian accent, more actors and filmmakers should just not do it and see what happens!!!

iirc that one has one of the better transitions from Russia to English.

mann also abandons his late style handheld digital photography for this film and the camera does few things so bold as e.g. the zoom into a computer’s inner landscape in the opening of blackhat. i think this was the right choice for this script, which features very dramatic scenes of penelope cruz signing paperwork at a bank

but god there’s a shot in the final race so goddamn incredible i thought i was in the car

To be fair I’ve been anticipating this for a long time, so maybe that impacted how I received the movie.

Gonna see it again this week perhaps