The Michael Mann poll

Two words:

http://www.tatteredcoat.com/images/heat-pacino-buggy.jpg

GREAT ASS!!!

He's such a crap director.

and so it begins.

"None of the Above," but if I have to choose, I'll say Collateral.

Miami Vice is like heroin.

Yeah Collateral.

That scene where Cruise beats the shit out of those dudes who think he's a pussy was A++++

xpost yeah, I could totally see that again. But I have to go with Heat.

MANHUNTER.

DO YOU SEE?

i voted for collateral but i think i meant heat

Miami Vice (2006) - awesome awesome awesome
Collateral (2004) - awesomer
Ali (2001) - good, but kinda pales in comparison to actual footage of Ali
The Insider (1999) - haven't seen
Heat (1995) - reputation better than it deserves to be - but still awesome
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) - haven't seen in ages, but didn't care much for it then
Manhunter (1986) - this one is actually pretty crappy
The Keep (1983) - waht is this?
Thief (1981) - very underrated

I'm voting for Miami Vice just because.

Isn't Rollins in Heat?
;_;

we get down if the play calls for it

"That's not what happens. What will happen is....what will happen is... I will put a round at 2700 feet per second in your medulla at the base of your brain, and you will be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won’t even twitch. Only you get that. So tell me sport, do you believe that?"

Yo Homies, is that my briefcase?

Thief (1981) - very underrated

OTM. James Caan is fantastic in it.

"There is 'undercover' and then there is 'which way is up.'"

"Dream much, Will?"

Yo Homies, is that my briefcase?

-- milo z, Wednesday, 29 August 2007 09:40 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^^^AWESOME, thx.

Miami Vice (2006) garbage
Collateral (2004) garbage
Ali (2001) pointless
The Insider (1999) decent enough
Heat (1995) good up until the last 45 minutes which are garbage
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) garbage
Manhunter (1986) some good performance, but mostly irritating
The Keep (1983) never seen
Thief (1981) nice score, but has James Caan starring in it.

The Insider because, thankfully, he had a co-writer.

Yeah I voted The Insider too.

there are people who hate James Caan? This is news to me.

What kind of heartless, fun-hating bastard hates Heat, Collateral AND Miami Vice?

Yeah they are people who hate bad overacting.

Tony Scott poll coming up soon, I think

The Insider's the only one that feels like he created and inhabited a world. Russell Crowe, Bruce McGill, and Diana Verona are all great.

(xpost)Oooh that's a good one!

Miami Vice would have been a classic if only they'd gone the Robert Bresson route?

The Thief score by Tangerine Dream is very nice, but is also so dated it gets giggles.

You gotta let Vice drip into your veins and FUCK your arteries.

Yeah, Rusty was good in the Insider, one of his better performances.

xposts

"Miami Vice would have been a classic if only they'd gone the Robert Bresson route?"

Haha possibly!

what Mann score isn't dated within two weeks of release? Worst part of Collateral is when they're rolling slow through LA to the sweet, sweet strains of Audioslave.

Miami Vice does make good use of Jay-Z/Linkin Park, though. The assault on the drug boats! So badass.

Miami Vice. The Insider is pretty tolerable, tho, for blatant Oscar bait.

'cept Al's shameless angling for the bait wasn't noticed.

I didn't really like Ali at all. :(

Me neither.

Collateralz
James Caan is great in Thief but the movie's not the greatest. the score is really good and really bad.
indsider was booooring. russell crowe looked like he was full up to the neck with feces

you could smell him?

Ali is the oscar bait, and it suffers because of it. Insider is great.

This one is tough.

I think everyone's misread what I wrote: I said "Al," as in, "Pacino." We really shouldn't discuss Ali in polite conversation.

miami vice the show should really be in there

I really liked the insider.

AH! I assumed it was a typo. Sorry.

to alfred, obv

"we've been made"

Miami Vice sucked. My rental DVD went kablooie when they were about to rescue the chick from the trailer with the fake-pizza-delivery-scam, and I didn't even bother asking for a replacement to finish it. Awful, awful, awful, and boring to boot.

I voted for Collateral.

fuck manhunter haters YOU OWE IT AWE.

i mean obviously they hired him to bring in the $$$ as ET noted just above but he is so badly miscast (and i like driver in some other movies)

People whose names seemed to predict their career or job [Started by Mormons come out of the sky and they stand there (Abbbottt) in September 2010, last updated twenty-five minutes ago by Josefa on I Love Everything] 3 new answers

lol

trying to reconcile these rumors of Adam Driver playing the young Neil McCauley in Heat 2 with how Robert DeNiro looks.

isn't Adam Driver a foot taller than Bobby D?

He offered to lose height for the role

brave

my wife when I start talking about Heat pic.twitter.com/10EZDCymGb

— Tom Reagan’s Hat (@RufusTSuperfly) September 11, 2024

Coincidentally we just watched Ali the night before and shouted "Kamala, boma ye!" a couple of times last night.

I can't quite recommend Ali when there's hours of Muhammad Ali clips just right there on YouTube but the first 45 minutes or so of Ali is some of Mann's best work. The Liston fight sequence is incredible.

How does it stack up against the Chris Rock fight sequence

I’ve still never seen Ali. Gotta get on that.

I've tried several times but have never made it to the end.

The Ali-Liston fight is still exciting even when you knew what the outcome would be

(xx-post)

I had pneumonia the Christmas week Ali released and spent it on the couch watching ESPN Classic's Ali marathon - fights, documentaries, specials about him and Cosell. Pretty much made it impossible for me to ever fully get into the movie (which is really quite good as biopics go).

I saw Thief for the first time and damn if that film isn't gorgeous - all the neon, street lights, welding torches, and string lights glowing so warmly out of darkness.

Caan is really good in this and I loved the soundtrack. The relationship with Weld and the baby subplot were kind of clumsy and underbaked.

The big bad Prosky? was so good - genial looking guy who was terrifying.

The shoot-em-up ending belonged in a tv show - in fact he used it on nearly every episode of Miami Vice.

Very enjoyable film.

It's almost unique in that it's a total thematic dry run for what he would return to again and again, pride and ethics of being good at your job, and yet successful on its own terms and scale.

he should have given it up after this one tbh

Mann gave a good interview about Thief last week.

Was just about to post that link. It's definitely worth reading.

michael mann went to school with the guy joe pesci played in casino

In the 1980s NBC series Crime Story, the character of mobster Ray Luca is based on Anthony Spilotro. Show creator Michael Mann said in a 2015 interview "The people who Crime Story is about are all people I knew. I went to high school with Tony Spilotro..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Spilotro

Crime Story is basically a much much longer TV interpretation of the Casino story told from the police/FBI pov. Andrew Dice Clay played the Lefty Rosenthal/Robert DeNiro character, his arc including both him becoming a TV personality and surviving a car bombing.

https://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/michael-mann-on-the-true-chicago-story-behind-heat/

Good lord, Crime 101 (Mann not involved) is egregiously Mann-derivative in dozens of ways, from little things like lines ("How about I buy you a cup of coffee?") to decor (spartan beachfront apartment for the thief protagonist) to score (not long before the end, a pretend version of "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters") to big things like an L.A. cat-and-mouse cops/robbers story. Overwhelmingly derivative, though Chris Hemsworth improves on his Blackhat and Ruffalo gets to be a completely different cop from his Collateral one and Hallie Barrie is pretty much a version of Jada Pinkett Smith's Collateral character 20 years later. Watchable, but holy moly, what a ripoff.

Does it have an urban fox wandering the streets?

Apparently it's based on a story (novella? not a novel, at any rate) by Don Winslow, whose books are mostly pretty good. I'm gonna watch it as soon as it's streaming somewhere.

I haven’t checked it out but the soundtrack by Blanck Mass popped up in my music recommendations

Thief getting 0 votes is insane.

was it hard to see for a while? I feel like it’s had a critical resurgence in recent years. awesome movie

New cut of Manhunter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR-29nRSbTw

Mann is like the king of post-release fiddling. He's a smart guy, though, love to listen to him.

Absolutely on both counts. The first interviews I read by Mann were for The Insider and I was impressed how detailed and intelligent his responses were - this was someone who didn't necessarily have to make films, he could've been a top-notch journalist, historian, investigator or anything else along those lines. Years later, whenever I heard his former collaborators and boutique labels talks about his work, it was painfully obvious that he has some strange hang-up where he can never, ever let a film go. Literally the minute he turns in what's ostensibly the final cut of a film, he'll already be thinking of a DIFFERENT cut. This even comes across is in his own interviews. I've never seen any other filmmaker that was like this - maybe D.W. Griffith who notoriously tried to recut an exhibition print of one of his films right before a repertory screening.

*talk about his work

Ironically, I think The Insider is the one film he hasn't fiddled with, or maybe legally can't?

I don't think he's messed around with Public Enemies, because who gives a shit?

True (on both counts), but apparently:

For unknown reasons, all Blu-rays other than the North American, United Kingdom, and Australian releases have 12 seemingly random seconds cut from the scene when John Dillinger is transported to Indiana and there is a media scrum at the airfield. The excised material is wholly in the form of tighter editing on certain shots. For example, the shot of the plane coming to a stop is 1 second shorter, the shot of Dillinger being taken off the plane is 5 seconds shorter, the shot of the man with the flare is 2 seconds shorter.

Literally the minute he turns in what's ostensibly the final cut of a film, he'll already be thinking of a DIFFERENT cut.

In interviews, he's always talking about films from 30-40-(in the case of Thief)50 years ago as if he's just made them and just finished doing the research and just finished the screenplay.

He's also really obsessed with the idea that the way movies looked when he made them is somehow discordant with the way movies look now. Wong Kar Wai is the same way, color-correcting or otherwise remastering his movies to make them look more "contemporary," whatever that means.

Ashes of Time is an insane example where there was at least three different cuts put out for its original general release, and what you got depended on where you were in the world and how you were seeing it (in the theaters or on DVD).

This new 4K Final Cut, overseen by Michael Mann, enhances the film’s depth, visual clarity and sound, offering audiences the ultimate immersive version. Shot in 1985, MANHUNTER was on a frontier in both its subject matter and film form, initiating an impressive list of subsequent films and series.

"This latest iteration is that version of the film with which I’m most satisfied.” - Michael Mann.

A retired criminal profiler (William Petersen) reluctantly returns to the FBI to help track down a serial killer of families and is forced to consult an expert—the imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox in a subtly chilling performance). The third feature written and directed by Michael Mann is a gripping adaptation of the first of Thomas Harris’s four novels featuring the iconic murderer, and benefits from the filmmaker’s typically striking visuals as well as a top-notch supporting cast, including Tom Noonan as the hunted killer, and three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen (The Contender) as his blind love interest.

4-disc limited edition collector's set

Includes original soundtrack - exclusive to this release

100-page booklet with new essays

New and original artwork posters

NEW Manhunter Revisited: New interview with Michael Mann

NEW In the Mind of A Monster: Brian Cox on Manhunter

NEW Restoring Manhunter

Inside Manhunter

Manhunter: The Look

Audio Commentary with Michael Mann

The Music of Manhunter

The Making of Manhunter: Interviews with Actor William Petersen, Joan Allen, Tom Noonan and Dante Spinotti

Stills Gallery

Trailer

If it's only the "final" cut, color grade me dubious. These are the specs for the UK version, btw; £35, not bad for this sort of thing. Says 4-discs, which I assume means the 4K, a blu, a blu with supplements and the soundtrack, but who knows. Ideally it will be branching like the "Apocalypse Now" set.

do you think there's a 20 minute insert in the middle with french colonists or something? probably just a few edits here and there

I had never seen this deleted scene from Heat before, although it's apparently on my DVD copy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ6Sc-YLoS4

xpost Owen Gleiberman saw and wrote about the Final Cut:

“The Final Cut” is actually the weaker cut. With rare exceptions, I’m not a fan of director’s cuts. There are two reasons for that. First, they’re hardly ever better; they’re almost always worse. (In the case of something like “Apocalypse Now Redux,” they can ruin a movie). But apart from the fact that directors restoring their pet lost scenes seldom adds much and usually subtracts, there’s a larger issue at stake. A great movie is a work of art that has an identity in the universe, like a novel or a painting. If you love it, you don’t want to see that identity changed.

The “Final Cut” of “Manhunter” that will be released on July 24 is the same as the Restored Director’s Cut of the film that came out on DVD in 2003. It adds a couple of minutes to the scene with Graham at the Atlanta police station (he now overexplains things; it was better when he just said, of the killer’s motive, “It’s in his dreams”), and there are a handful of added lines in the first scene with Lecter. The film also loses a few things (like the splattered condiments in the shootout with Dollarhyde — I missed that ketchup bottle!). But the biggest change is the addition, at the end, of a scene in which Graham, with his badly bruised face, goes to visit the next family. It’s an incredibly bad scene! I revere Michael Mann, but he made a mistake here. Beyond that, you don’t tamper with a movie like “Manhunter.” It is what it is, and what it is is sacred.

He doesn't say anything about the color, which Mann has been known to fiddle with (he did so with "Thief" and "Heat" at least, maybe more).

https://variety.com/2026/film/columns/manhunter-the-final-cut-the-greatest-thriller-of-our-time-1236815424/

the addition, at the end, of a scene in which Graham, with his badly bruised face, goes to visit the next family

The 2016 Shout Factory Blu-Ray (which I own) has the theatrical cut on one disc and the director's cut on another; the director's cut is "HD with standard definition inserts". I can't remember if I've ever watched it or not.

Yeah. I say fiddle with whatever you want, Mann et al, just please give us the original, too.

Mann says this cut "deepens" the psychological base of Graham and what he's trying to accomplish, with significant editing in the Atlanta PD scene. He also talks about strengthening the sense of what Graham accomplished at the end of the film.

Mann also refers to some "unfortunate lines of dialogue" he cut out. He doesn't specify which ones.

There's significant color grade changes: working with Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3, he's rendered the film into a visual aesthetic contemporary to the color palette available now. He talks specifically about creating "a radical, dynamic approach to color timing" using power windows, going for dramatic impact more than just the aesthetics. He talks a bit about how he's done the same thing starting with Collateral.

Some scenes with Lecter were lengthened to better capture Brian Cox's performance and the more of the dialogue from the original novel.

I love Mann, but you know what I thought was wrong with the movie the first time I saw it? Nothing.

Just take out Red 7's "Heartbeat" from the closing credits and swap in Russ Ballard's "Voices" and it's set.

For a dude whose color palette use in the 80s is absolutely iconic, it is insane he would want to do that. Feels like auteur theory gone too far when studios let these maniacs go and damage these films so badly.

He should regrade "Last of the Mohicans" to make it all '80s neon.