Mumble mumble mutter mutter
Miami Something Or Other
Well, it looks brilliant. But the problem with Michael Mann's Miami Vice is not the pictures, it's the sound. You have to admire Mann - he knows how to shoot a city. Miami gets the same star treatment meted out to Los Angeles in Heat and Collateral - just look at those twinkling lights and the cloudy purple widescreen skies, all grainy and unreal. Things get slightly queasy when we get under the artificial lights. It's all very impressive. Mann can do this. Why he's doing it to an 80s cop show that he executive-produced, I don't really know. He's lifted it out of the decade that made it iconic, put socks on Crockett and Tubbs, added laptops and mobiles, and removed every ounce of camp, accidental or otherwise. This is a very serious film. It's about drugs. The guns make a lot of noise, even when they're being cleaned. As do the "go-fast boats" and the helicopters and planes and cars. Perhaps it's all this extraneous racket that makes the dialogue so difficult to hear. I've seen this film in a big cinema with a state-of-the-art sound system and I still couldn't follow it - this is the fault of Michael Mann, not some bad speakers. Unless he is being postmodern and doesn't think we need to hear what the men and ladies are saying. Or unless the actors are bad speakers.
Worst offender is Colin Farrell, who may as well have been speaking, or muttering, in a foreign language throughout. I caught a few words - "boat" was the main one - but most of it was just sound. Can we blame Farrell for this? After all, he's just an actor, doing what he's told by the director. (It wasn't his fault that he looked ridiculous in that moustache either. OK, so there was a smudge of facial hair under his lip, but that's not a beard, it's still a moustache.) Jamie Foxx is mildly better in terms of comprehensibility, and the fact that Naomie Harris is English lets her off the hook a bit, as she is doing a broad, New York-style American accent, likewise Ciarian Hinds, who spits his words out like a mouthful of tobacco. Gong Li, for whom English actually is a second language and who must have learned her lines phonetically, we forgive. Her character, Isabella, the Cuban-Malaysian drug lord (or drug lady), is the weak link in the plot anyway - her salsa-fuelled romance with Crockett is both unbelievable and unpleasant. And slow. This is the 20 minutes they should have removed from another film that's 20 minutes too long. Michael Mann is happier portraying single men, ideally at work, away from pesky women. He doesn't like sex, hence the cheesy nature of the sex scene involving the heads of Foxx and Harris, but the bodies of some models.
Miami Vice is then, a beautiful-looking film of little narrative merit. You can just about follow what's going on - disco, drugs, shooting, explosion, drugs, kissing, disco, boats, shooting - but you won't know why it ends when it ends. It doesn't even have the excuse of Pirates Of The Caribbean 2, which was made back to back with Part 3 and operates like a Saturday morning serial. This one just ends, with some big synth chords. I won't ruin it for you. But I wonder if anyone else has seen it, and felt there was something missing at the end?
Great to see Eddie Marsan in a small role - he played Sunshine in little-seen sitcom Grass - I may have mentioned him in relation to Pierrepoint. Oddly, Naomie Harris calls him "sunshine" at one point. Spooky. (Hey! Unless I misheard her!)
posted by Andrew Collins @ 6:56 PM
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Has a general consensus been reached on remakes? Apart from The Hills Have Eyes I can't think of a single good one. I could be wrong.
I'm also dreading the remake of The Omega Man - I just reread I Am Legend and it's a seminal zombie/vampire text. I just can't believe they've got Will Smith in the lead role. If anyone fancies a gander at the script, it's here. They've ruined it:
http://www.godamongdirectors.com/scripts/legend.txt
Ooh, I've just ordered I am Legend from the library. Hope it's as good as everyone keeps telling me it is. Haven't seen any remakes I've really liked recently.
Hello Beth
It's the best book I've read in a very long time, but then I am a big fan of zombies. And these vampires act like zombies - in a herd. Hope you enjoy it!
I might watch Miami Vice simply for the reason that I am a former GTA: Vice City addict so I'll probably recognise some of the surroundings from there...
Miami Blues is the best Miami based film I've seen thus far.
I can honestly say that I agree with everything about Miami Vice in this review.
I really didn't like it, although the cinematography was really quite good.
I was also slightly worried that I was the only one who couldn't hear the dialogue, but am pleased to hear that it wasn't just me.
Piece of advice to anyone - don't go to see it. Wait for it on DVD if you really have to, it's not worth the price of a ticket. And at least on DVD you can just turn it off, I would have walked out of the cinema if I had anything better to do.
Maybe the DVD will have subtitles.
If Hollywood made a version of the Three Little Pigs they would change the pigs, the number of pigs, the wolf, blow the houses down with a big orange explosion and squeeze in a car chase. When a Hollywood film is based on a book all that remains is the title (I, Robot - Will Smith again - comes to mind particularly).
I watched the whole series of little-seen sitcom Grass 3 times. I missed some episodes the third time because it wasn't on at any regular time. So much-seen by me, shame I'm not 3 people. I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a sitcom. It was a comedy drama: All one story just broken up into half hour chunks. Was Auf Wiedersehen Pet a sitcom? Is it better to be the writer of a little-seen comedy drama or a little-seen sitcom?
Talking of sitcoms I often thought My Hero might be the worst sitcom of the last 20 years. Now the BBC have altered it slightly I am sure it is the worst sitcom for the last 20 years. I do wonder what constitutes "quality" in the mind of the powers that be, though watching Screen Burn is beginning to make it clearer.
The question I always ask myself now when I consider watching a film is: has Mean Girls met its match? I'm guessing it hasn't here.
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