Fire up the roof!
No cinema visits this week.
Miami Vice (2006)
People seem quite shocked that this is a real movie instead of a campy recreation of bad 80s fashion. But it’s exactly typical of Michael Mann to try for something new instead of rehashing the past, even though elements of the plot have been taken from certain episodes of the original TV series. The film is also audience unfriendly in that it starts in media res (like a number of other Mann films) and leaves it up to the audience to work out what’s going on. Plot points aren’t telegraphed with giant billboards. This was a summer movie for adults, and the little kids’ll just have to play catch up.
Hot Fuzz (2007)
Shamefacedly, I missed this at the cinema, but I did catch it on the day of release on DVD. If this film were any funnier, you could bottle it and inject it into comedy writers around the country and they’d be able to start writing proper sitcoms again instead of the garbage they currently think will do. This, Ben Elton, is how you write a funny comedy about the police. Packed with gags and laugh out loud moments in the first half, it gets even better in the last half hour when it turns into a pisstake of every action movie ever made. Love the Tony Scott tributes.
Thief (1981)
What Michael Mann is really up to is revealed by a viewing of his first proper cinema film, the unloved Thief from 1981. Mann has decided to focus on one subject, the relationship between the cop and the criminal, and all other subjects are regarded as unnecessary. They are to be discarded as callously as James Caan discards Tuesday Weld and his child when his relationship with the local mob boss goes downhill, just like he feared it would. Tuesday Weld plays the first of Mann’s damaged, underwritten female heroines, but because Mann’s focus is the cop and the criminal, that’s just the way it’s going to be. Colin Farrell may regret leaving Gong Li riding off on a boat at the end of Miami Vice, but a man’s gotta do what a Mann’s gotta do.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Trainspotting (1995) looks like a kids movie next to this film. It is a descent into hell with no escape for either the characters or the audience. People don’t mind being told that drugs are bad as long as there are a few laughs along the way, but they get really uptight if you attempt to tell them unrelentingly and with no attempts at humour that all forms of addiction are bad, show them the consequences of addiction unflinchingly and more graphically than you think they will, and include things like diet pills, television and caffeine in the mix. Cause they’re all right, aren’t they? What could be wrong with an addiction to QVC, or ITV Play? It’s not going to cause you any harm, is it?
Hey, let’s be careful out there.