Wednesday Night Movie Club
Spend an evening with Vulture, every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
on October 6 at 7 p.m. Head toVultures Twitterto catch his live commentary.
The damn thing juststarts.
Then, they watch helplessly as the devastated man steps in front of a tractor-trailer.
Dont look to get your bearings just yet, however.
All throughout these frenetic opening passages, scenes start too late and end too early.
If I could compare this to anything, it would be to a dream.
Michael Manns 2006Miami Vicefilm wasnt supposed to be anything like this.
Many assumedMiami Vice(the film) would reunite him with that aesthetic.
But the movie turned out to be nothing like the show.
It didnt really look hip by either 2006 or 1986 standards.
Mired in procedural details, the plot (much like the digital cinematography) sometimes felt murky.
Colin Farrell had goofy, greasy long blonde hair and a thick, unfashionable mustache.
Reportsfiltered outof a contentious set.
Maybe the movie was too ahead of its own curve.
The statement would have made sense in 2006; it makes even more sense in 2021.
One sees this happen with certain pictures.
Does this have a coherent plot?
Ever since I heard Stillman say it, I cant shake that expression:not-normalness.
Some classics seem perfect right out of the gate, likeThe GodfatherorGoodfellasorNorth By Northwest.
But then there are thosenot-normalones, the misshapen heirlooms of our cinema.
In the Cut.Strange Days.Speed Racer.Bram Stokers Dracula.
(DefinitelyBram Stokers Dracula.)
To their eternal credit, a few major critics did see the beauty.
Scott, put it.
At the time, video was still largely the domain of low-budget indies and documentaries.
Dark corners quickly became pixelated and abrasive, while highlights blazed white.
Mann found an unlikely beauty in that versatility and fragility.
Consider those famous cityscapes of his.
And quite appropriately, its characters operate mostly on impulse.
But Mann and his cinematographer Dion Beebe consciously chose not to ape the look of film inMiami Vice.
And instead of the intervening three floors, they made them the intervening 23 floors.
Im not interested in making it look like film.
The film is possessed with a sense of narrative drift that the reckless texture of video makes possible.
How could such indulgent tenderness exist in a cop flick?
These characters feel deeply, but they speak in fragments.
Its a modern-day variation on the hard-boiled delivery of noir, crossed with an extreme, 21st-century anguish.
And everyone is fluent in this clipped language that allows them to dance around their feelings.
The scene ends, to the strains of John Murphys melancholy piano, with a passionate embrace.
For my money, it might bethe most heartbreakingly romantic embrace in all of modern cinema.
And yet, what has ultimately been said?
(Ivebeen on, as you might imagine.)
Rather, the podcast serves almost as a confessional.
Usually, there comes a point when it seems that everybody has simply run out of words.
It is, after all that, a hard movie to nail down.
