Miami Vice

For some reason I had avoided Miami Vice. I don't know why. It's a film by Michael Mann, set in the night. I love Michael Mann films. Collateral, Heat, and to a lesser extent Public Enemies were fantastic films. Collateral in particular I go back to just to marvel at the intricate combat scenes.

To me, Miami Vice is kind of like Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. It takes some of the director's favorites and puts them in a different light. There are at least two returning actors from Collateral in Miami Vice. Jaimie Foxx in particular is not a nervous cabbie, but a cool and professional FBI agent. It's jarring seeing a role change like that, given similar settings. I liked him more in Collateral, which is an all-around superior film.

Miami Vice pretty much was what I expected it to be. It's mainly about people in fast cars, or fast boats, or fast planes, set against a night sky backdrop. There is some competent action, but Mann has done better work in Heat and Collateral. There is some competent acting, but there have been better performances, Tom Cruise in particular in Collateral. 

Mann seems to have gotten into nu-metal, Chris Cornell being a favorite of his to put in his films. I might even have detected Nickelback in the soundtrack. In the end, it was okay, but not spectacular. 

Munich, and he who lives by the sword dies by the sword

There's an incredible scene in Steven Spielberg's Munich when the protagonist, Avner, dismantles the room he is sleeping in. He killed a man with a bomb hidden in a telephone. So he dismantles his telephone. He killed a man with a bomb in a television set. So he dismantles the television set. There is no bomb underneath his bed. He ends up sleeping in the closet, gun in hand.

In these violent movies we get the fantasy of unbridled power. That is what a gun means. But the truth is that everything goes both ways. You can kill with a gun, but you are also vulnerable to a gun. It's not so much fun to have a gun pointed at you. And the truth is that you can just as easily be the guy with the gun pointed at you. Eventually, Avner's actions catch up to him and his group. They are hunted themselves by other clandestine groups. He loses friends. He knows how vulnerable people can be where they live and sleep, and he is a person, he is the same as his victims. So he takes apart his room.

Munich to me is the anti-Quentin Tarantino. I'm not the biggest Tarantino fan. Not at all. He has talent in his stylized camera action, but his characters are cartoony, loud and without conscience. Munich depicts a man thrust into a revenge movie plot, except this man flinches when he kills. He takes pains to only kill those who deserve death. He questions his mission, ultimately, and he cares more for the love of his wife and child than he does for revenge. 

This makes the movie more impactful. It's not a set-piece cartoon. The protagonist is human. He's down-to-earth, at his core he has humane values. He could be one of us. He's not someone out of a movie. 

The movie also has the Spielberg magic, the clever camera angles which draw you in and then with a subtle shift, take you somewhere else. You see explosions not being neat little fireballs, but chaotic unbridled and uncontrolled forces which spray glass on the street and pummel innocent bystanders. This might be the best action movie I have ever seen.

Harry Potter and writing Evil

I had a hard time watching the last four Harry Potter films. I've already read the books, and so I know what happens. All that remains to be seen is the creative execution, much of which is obviously CGI. There are some arty camera angles and silent moments, but the fundamental narrative does not deviate from the books. In fact, it mostly cuts out stuff from the books, due to movie time limits.

What you are left with is a teen drama about dating and school and stuff, and some really bad two-dimensional villains who basically cackle and do evil stuff that no one could really justify. The wonder of the magical universe is what drove the popularity of the books, clever things like hidden passageways, broomstick sports, newspapers with moving type. Such wonder seemed better on the page as opposed to the screen. Maybe because it was described in such a clever way in the books. And because CGI takes the wonder out of special effects. 

Voldemort is 2-dimensional. Rowling herself didn't really know much about Voldemort. He was created in order to give Harry a foil. A foil, by the way, is an interesting analogy. When I think foil I think airfoil, which on an airplane shapes the wind around it in order to lift it up higher. The analogy would then be that the narrative actually should center around the villain, not the hero, who is always scrambling to meet the machinations of the villain.

And so we see Harry Potter scrambling to stop the evil of Voldemort. The thing about Voldemort is that his motivations are kind of undeveloped. I get the sense that the final two books, especially the bit about Voldemort having 7 horocruxes that need to be destroyed, was sort of JK Rowling scrambling to come up with an explanation for the bad guy she created but didn't understand in the first book. 

But what annoys me is how bad the motivations are. Why is he going around killing people? Well, it doesn't really say. There's something about him being a racist, that unforgivable sin, something about him simply being a murderer, which would then make you wonder about how he got so many to follow him. The thing is, while Rowling says that she based Voldemort off of some of the most evil men in the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin, she seems to have a cartoon understanding of the two. She doesn't really understand the circumstances leading to them. The extreme poverty and injustice that they wanted to combat with their own peculiar ideologies. In JK Rowling's universe, everyone has everything they need, and so we're left with evil for the sake of evil. 

It's a very British thing, actually, isn't it? To ignore the injustice from say, taxes for a magical prep school. Instead to focus on some way the bad guy is inhumane and use that to justify the status quo. 

The Town

I've been finding that I can only really be truly contemplative while watching feature movies. I have two hours to focus my attention on a narrative. The web destroys my attention span. I know that it will be destroyed in about 20 minutes, as my impulses have a ready enabler.

I used to live in Fishtown, a working class Irish town, rapidly gentrifying, an old favorite of Edgar Allen Poe. I chose it because it was cheap and relatively safe. To this day, I probably find ethnic enclaves like Fishtown more interesting, more akin to part of my self-image, how I self-construct myself.

The Town is about these places. Charles Town in Boston is basically an ethnic enclave like Fishtown. Very clean, by the way, because it is rapidly gentrifying. I would have counted as a gentrifier.

It's an excellent movie, by the way. Authentic, to the Irish Boston that produced Staind and Godsmack. Tightly woven, excellent action. Every movie, every narrative, has to start with a bang, then some character development, a quiet moment, then the big finale. This movie hews to the formula and it works.

What I end up thinking about while watching this movie is something that I keep on coming back to. It is how the faces I see in the movie could be Chinese. That is, the different village types: the fat guy, the handsome guy, the guy with the big nose, the young guy with the undeveloped features, the girl with the hoop earrings whose emotions are worn on her sleeve. I saw those types when I visited the village back in Taiwan a few summers ago. In America not quite so much, for reasons I won't get into.

Another thing I thought about was how movie directors probably think alot about camera angles. I don't really notice camera angles, or even camera work so much anymore, focusing more on the story and arrangement of sequences. I often don't bother watching the video, preferring to listen to the story, and when I do watch the video I often just notice the technical aspects of the blu-ray disc. The attention thing, again.