#miami vice (2006)

[power-chords]

Some Miami Vice Thots*:

Big Screen, I Notice More Stuff: That club is called MANSION. Linkin Park (from Agoura Hills, or what seems to me to be the Westchester, NY of the San Fernando Valley — Californians please correct me if I'm wrong), mashed up with Jay-Z (a Black billionaire from the mean streets of Bed-Stuy, the New New Gatsby/Big Joe Turner). Relevant to bullet point immediately below.

According to Michael Mann Miami in the mid-aughts is Age of Discovery (Digital Edition) meets Crime Family Feudalism in recursive recurrence, multiple timelines and identities inhabiting the same geographic vectors (everyone is always forever in motion). The very first interaction Sonny has with someone who is not a team member is a bartender who says she is from Lisboa, to which Sonny replies, "But you got your tan in Miami." This is what I read: She's the "reformed" Portuguese equivalent of the character in this Butch Walker song. She came from money, she lost it perhaps, but she's been since... repossessed? There's a more sinister interpretation under the surface, since she is under the roof of a powerful (and possibly related) employer whose business operations require unwavering loyalty + utmost discretion in exchange for protection (which in this case is also exploitation). Tan, in other words, as a form of Midas touch. Sacrifice to a sun(/SON!!!) god (or is Sonny more of a defecting Samson figure, speaking to an inert "Neon" Delilah who will only feign at seduction/betrayal, moving through the moves?). So already these two characters are speaking in code to each other, which is an amazing storytelling device on Mann's behalf, and you can shake so much out of that.

Derived from the above: "My Mommy and Daddy know me," hilarious line btw, becomes double-doublespeak, quadruple-speak! Not only is he pretending to tell the truth under a fabricated fundamental, the statement itself is yet another subtextual lie. His parents don't really know him, they just thought they did, which is why he's run off to become what he's become. Rico is the partner who acts out of duty first, love secondarily; Sonny is the Byronic inverse. Diaspora southern gothic. I like to think this is the mythic re-interpretation/inspiration Mann wishes a certain American population would draw from, in lieu of... current political/pop cultural figureheads.

Gina tenderly comforting the injured Zito... this shot is seconds long and yet captures my heart every time! Where is the backstory fic for these two!

Once again, the Rico/Trudy sex scene is a definite contender for the most affectionate, respectful, and sensual one in Hollywood history

Oh, Isabella. My girl Isabella. I overheard someone in the lobby call this film "such a guy movie." I don't know what drugs these people are on. Especially when counterpart to the hypermasculine satirical camp is the sensitivity and sympathy with which Mann portrays the situation of women, how we are exploited either way/anyway, deprived of romantic trust/human partnership by being put at risk by men and also by them denied the agency of taking risks for ourselves. There's both heartbreak and hypocrisy in how she attacks Sonny at the end, screaming "Who are you!" (The audience's heartbreak is: We have an instinctive uneasy sense of the systems that force her, and the rest of us, to live as hypocrites. Who are any of us, anymore, really!)

I was like MICHAEL DO THE GARMENTO CRIME DRAMA W/ ME and he was like "I made Miami Vice already, dummy! Pay attention!" Me: "OK!!!" [Pays a visit to Auerbach's Keller in Grand Central Terminal and then stays up until 5 AM playtesting West Village: Walpurgisnacht/watching the Chicago & Miami Postmodern Pseudepigrapha about Non-Recourse Factoring]

The "color coding" in this film is bonkers. More on that eventually, I'm still chewing on it.

The duality of Man(n)ager: the tragic pathos imbued to Alonzo vs. the vaudevillian coercion of Nicholas. "Why is this happening to me?!" cracks me the fuck up. This most powerful, literally biblical quandary of them all, the whole of Mann's filmography boiled down to its most singular and direct (I.E., truthful) expression, in the form of a persecuted exclamation, and it's played for laughs. Because what can you do except laugh! It's Job(/lowercase job) as circus performance, as a cabaret act. Job's poetry parodied into factional slogans and Shandyan-American dick jokes. I can't believe people think this is a stupid movie, it's pretending to be stupid!!!

*The appropriate spelling for this film in particular

[spencegeek]

collin farrel training for miami vice 2006

[assignmentimprobable]

Welcome to Miami.

(Miami Vice 2006 Edit

Track: Miami - Will Smith)

For @power-chords who gave me the brilliant idea 7 months ago to do a Miami Vice edit to the actual Miami song. Icon. Legend. Im giving you like 69 potato

The sheer difficulty of doing this because of Mann’s evenly paced directing style lmao. It was pure simpery for the cast that got me through this lowkey 😭 Definitely worth the obsessive 24 hour period spent scrubbing through clips on iMovie to get the timing right

[michaelmanns]

Miami Vice (2006)

Dir. Michael Mann

[grunge-samurai]

Me and who

[rebuildingrob]

Rob's Retro Review: Miami Vice

About a month ago, for reasons I do not remember, I stumbled up the 1980’s classic Miami Vice series. Having never actually watched the show, I decided to check it out. There. I said it. It’s true. As a child of the 80s, as a Gen Xer, I never watched a single episode of Miami Vice from beginning to end…until last month. Even if you never watched the show, you knew this iconic opening… Of…

[cappedinamber]

Miami Vice (2006)

Directed by Michael Mann

Cinematography by Dion Beebe

[steampunkforever]

Miami Vice (the 80s television show) was for 1980s pop music what Reagan-deregulated children's TV was for Mattel and Hasbro toys. Just as every Transformers of My Little Pony episode was constructed around a marketable children's toy, any given episode of Miami Vice would contain a segment featuring Crockett and Tubbs (delightful 80s detective names) that would effectively act as a mini music video within the episode. MTV was en vogue, and frankly 3-5 minutes of filler content is great for keeping your plots tight while meeting time limits. Plus, they're vibey.

Of course music has a much more impactful role in art than the latest GI Joe action figure release, but the point remains that Miami Vice was not a surprising pick for the cash grab feature length adaptations of 70s and 80s TV shows. The real surprise came when the 2006 Miami Vice movie actually ended up being good.

I'll attribute most of this to the fact that Miami Vice was directed by Micheal Mann, who not only directed landmark crime movies like Heat and Thief, but also produced the original TV series and therefore understood the soul of what Miami Vice is: about the vibes.

Jamie Fox aggressively talking into a flip phone. Twin-hull speed boat races. Colin Farrell with a mustache and mullet brooding into the sunset as his Banana Republic button down flaps in the wind. Ferraris, Cadillacs, Bentleys, cop cars, and Private jets. Police standoffs in shipyards. Nightclub stakeouts. FBI agents leaking intel. Beachfront mansions. It's all vibes, all the time. This is truly faithful to the formula. You could tell me this was an unproduced two part episode and I'd believe you.

Except this is 2006. The Ferrari is a 360, not a Testarossa. The Cadillacs are Escalades. The Bentley is now being manufactured by the VW group. The vibes are there, but the music is Linkin Park and Jay Z doing Numb/Encore, not Phil Collins doing In the Air Tonight. Driving fast cross country isn't the Cannonball Run anymore, it's the Gumball 3000. The drug war still rages, but now we face the consequences of past Iran-Contra mistakes. The real constants throughout are rich people doing drugs and immaculate vibes.

And they're spectacular. The whole thing is shot on Sony digital, done in a documentary style that screams the 2006 Paris Hilton trashy rich, not 1986 Grace Jones flashy rich, yet it captures the tone and soul of the arpeggiating synth and drum machine-soaked TV show even while replacing Dire Straights with Moby and Audioslave.

This is the difference between Miami Vice and other TV adaptations of the same era. Starsky and Hutch or 21 Jump Street leaned into comedy, while Charlie's Angels or The A-Team focused more on campiness to support their premises in the modern day.

Miami Vice does none of this, instead focusing on earnestness and pure vibes to produce a solid thriller full of cars, crime, and dramatic sequences of men staring into the sunset.

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Miami Vice (Mann, 2006)

I last saw this movie nine years ago, when my awareness of the original TV series only was through parodies like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and a general consensus I’d encountered that it was just some cheesy ‘80s cop show. And at the time I was pretty taken with its arthouse action movie stylings, if I can glibly summarize what the movie’s trying to do. So I was long overdue for a rewatch, especially after I’d spent the second half of last year going through the series. And listen, there’s no way I can be fully objective about any comparisons between the two, given that I could not shut up about the show the entire time I watched it and in the months since, and how obsessively I’ve rewatched the first encounter between Crockett and Tubbs and the subsequent chase scene on Youtube, and the fact that I still regularly listen to Jan Hammer’s score. So there may be a tinge of “this isn’t the Miami Vice I remember” fanboy whining to this.

But while this is on the surface a different beast, I don’t actually think it’s as divorced from the original series as seems to be the consensus. Michael Mann obviously has certain interests that he returns to, and there will be similarities in how you explore international drug dealing wherein Miami is a nexus, even if the particulars of how such crime is conducted differs across decades. But the sense of mood I don’t think is actually that divorced from the series, with its iconic music-video style needledrops that let you linger in feeling, it’s just now the music featured is way worse. (I’m a musical luddite and don’t listen to much past the mid ‘90s, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I do think Mann’s taste in music here is substantially worse than it was in the ‘80s.)

Mann is applying a mumbly distanced arthouse style to the dramatics here, which is a novel choice given that action movies about drug dealers tend to be high on the dramatics. But quite frankly I’ve lost my tolerance for mumbly distanced arthouse style over the years, and I think it’s an especially bad mix with most of the performances here, which this time around I found bizarrely hammy. John Ortiz plays the main villain like he’s in an SNL sketch, and there’s an especially embarrassing scene where Naomie Harris and Eddie Marsan shout at each other in their respective shitty accents. Some of the actors seem to be channeling their TV counterparts but doing it way worse, like Colin Farrell doing a bad take on Don Johnson’s growl but also dropping it with every second line, or Barry Shabaka Henley trying to evoke Edward James Olmos’ minimalism and precision but instead coming off as a sleepy nonentity. The only good performances here are by Jamie Foxx, whose charisma survives Mann’s smothering dramatic style, and Tom Towles, whose unsavoury aura pierces through it not unlike how the better guest stars’ presences would emanate in the original series. Others seem to be taken with Gong Li’s performance, but I found her dialogue too stilted, and whatever emotion is supposed to be there between her and Farrell I did not feel at all this time around.

All that being said, the visual style did still work for me this time around. A lot has been said by smarter people than myself about Mann’s use of digital cinematography. I will point out collapsing effect of the digital image, both in its sense of depth (which makes the over the shoulder shots in the action scenes especially immediate) and in colour (with lights becoming bright smears and shadows crushing in their darkness) and the tension between the movie’s stylization and verisimilitude are summarized somewhat poetically in the dialogue. “Fabricated identity and what’s really up collapse into one frame.” And the art direction here is much more muted than in the original series (not a lot of pastel or neon here), but I do think the way the digital image makes the texture of the fabrics shimmer makes for a pretty interesting visual flourish.

[deadendtracks]

i'm honestly jealous i didn't write this paragraph:

Thematically, there’s a pretty serious mismatch between the opening theme and the show itself. While Miami Vice is correctly remembered for its dedication to tropical art deco and a pastel color palette, it’s largely a story about the ways in which the system fails people, and the way money and power eternally get in the way of justice. Episodes often end with things worse than they were at the beginning, and we are frequently provided with little to no closure. Miami Vice takes place in a beautiful world, but one that is inherently fixed against the common man. If you’re looking for high speed car chases and Armani suits, you might get them, but they’ll be served with a side of nihilistic dread and a chaser of neo-noir surrealism.

[gjnrock]

[power-chords]

[spencegeek]

the insane levels of drip Michael Mann creates 

[grunge-samurai]

Michael Mann will forever be one of my favorite film directors of all time for his ability to seamlessly mix high octane, realistic action set-pieces with emotional vulnerability and sincerity. Think Michael Bay meets Terrence Malick.

[leofromthedark]

MIAMI VICE (2006) dir. Michael Mann

[captain-price-unofficially]

MIAMI VICE (Mann, 2006)