What goes around, comes around
Miami Vice...where to begin?... One tends to be suspicious of early idealized memories. At least, I tend to. So it helps when Michael Mann tells everyone that the Miami Vice movie has the Miami Vice series more as an excuse than anything else. Besides too much time has passed. You can't really expect anyone to look like the Sonny and Rico from the eighties without thinking...err..well, that they're from the eighties!
How do I find that this movie, notwithstanding having Colin Farrell starring, is a great movie? Well, for one, Gong Li stars in it and that pretty much evens Farrell's presence. So we can rule those two factors out. What next? Michael Mann, of course. Imdb.com aside we all know this guy. He can cook. And that's the most I can say for this film. That it's cookin'. And as in all great cuisine one is lead to neglect the ingredients, the blending and the mixing if it tastes really good. Later, we can think and reason about the shooting and the cars, the bodies and the beaches, the boats and the glamour but really, can we blame it? Any of it?
There's an essay by James Wood called hysterical realism, about a tendency in the great contemporary novels to puzzle and overcharge the reader with realistic details and unbelievable characters and situations. Enter Miami Vice. The Movie.
The story is strong and as it ends you can almost feel the taste of a good action movie in your mouth, the hereafter of the after kick you've just pumped into your system. This is how it goes. The drugs, the global crime, the undercover lunacy of being someone else to protect only god knows who. It's all there. But it's a movie, it's fiction. Come on. We're not seeing a documentary here. And so enters Love. Or passion. Or lust. Or whatever you want to call it that all great stories (and storytellers) call upon when the going gets tough. I.e. when there's too much reality in fiction. But here's the twist: you just show that you know what love can do. More. You just show that you know how a love story goes. But this ain't no love story. It's a war movie. And so it ends like one. Even if Trudy makes it.
Technically Mann knows what he's doing. When it's action, it's action but there's still time to blur the image, and play a couple of geeky tricks at just the right time and place. But that only helps to better set the mood. And this is a moody movie.
Series and films move in different worlds. One can't really capture the essence of a series in a movie. There's no way the continuum of a series, the momentum carried from one episode to the other can be replicated in a movie. And Mann did not try to do that. It only wanted to savour the moment and if this movie were a gigantic lost episode of Miami Vice, in some parallel world.
Finishing a great meal one is sometimes lead to believe that it has just partaken in something out of the ordinary. Out of our ordinary lives. So as with Miami Vice: it creates a mood (one could say it recalls it) and it is perfect within that mood, that world. One can not ask of great fiction anything else.
DM
How do I find that this movie, notwithstanding having Colin Farrell starring, is a great movie? Well, for one, Gong Li stars in it and that pretty much evens Farrell's presence. So we can rule those two factors out. What next? Michael Mann, of course. Imdb.com aside we all know this guy. He can cook. And that's the most I can say for this film. That it's cookin'. And as in all great cuisine one is lead to neglect the ingredients, the blending and the mixing if it tastes really good. Later, we can think and reason about the shooting and the cars, the bodies and the beaches, the boats and the glamour but really, can we blame it? Any of it?
There's an essay by James Wood called hysterical realism, about a tendency in the great contemporary novels to puzzle and overcharge the reader with realistic details and unbelievable characters and situations. Enter Miami Vice. The Movie.
The story is strong and as it ends you can almost feel the taste of a good action movie in your mouth, the hereafter of the after kick you've just pumped into your system. This is how it goes. The drugs, the global crime, the undercover lunacy of being someone else to protect only god knows who. It's all there. But it's a movie, it's fiction. Come on. We're not seeing a documentary here. And so enters Love. Or passion. Or lust. Or whatever you want to call it that all great stories (and storytellers) call upon when the going gets tough. I.e. when there's too much reality in fiction. But here's the twist: you just show that you know what love can do. More. You just show that you know how a love story goes. But this ain't no love story. It's a war movie. And so it ends like one. Even if Trudy makes it.
Technically Mann knows what he's doing. When it's action, it's action but there's still time to blur the image, and play a couple of geeky tricks at just the right time and place. But that only helps to better set the mood. And this is a moody movie.
Series and films move in different worlds. One can't really capture the essence of a series in a movie. There's no way the continuum of a series, the momentum carried from one episode to the other can be replicated in a movie. And Mann did not try to do that. It only wanted to savour the moment and if this movie were a gigantic lost episode of Miami Vice, in some parallel world.
Finishing a great meal one is sometimes lead to believe that it has just partaken in something out of the ordinary. Out of our ordinary lives. So as with Miami Vice: it creates a mood (one could say it recalls it) and it is perfect within that mood, that world. One can not ask of great fiction anything else.
DM
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