Month: August 2006

Released 17 years after his career-making television series went off the air, Michael Mann’s big-screen Miami Vice has much the same relationship to Mann’s original creation that Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins had to its comic-book origins: It’s a handsome, solemn, hyper-realistic reinterpretation that — sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse — strips its source material of much of its pizzazz.

With this movie, Mann has essentially broken his beloved, influential series down to its skeleton and rebuilt it. As the movie opens, an informant associate (John Hawkes in a brief but memorable turn) of Miami detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) has been compromised after a leak springs in a federal inter-agency task force investigating a crime syndicate. Since Miami authorities weren’t involved, the feds recruit Crockett and Tubbs to go undercover to expose the leak.

Posing as ex-con smuggling partners, the pair runs drugs and other contraband from South America to Miami, working themselves ever deeper into the guts of a criminal operation more vast than expected.

Miami Vice is beautifully cast. Foxx, a frequent Mann collaborator, was a no-brainer. But the real coup here is Farrell, whose scuzzy masculinity is perfect for the perpetually stubbled Crockett and who has never been more convincing. Kudos also to Mann for introducing Memoirs of a Geisha-phobic American moviegoers to Gong Li, who is delectable as the Chinese-Cuban financial fixer/gangster moll with whom Crockett falls into a dangerous liaison.

Mann provides none of the audience-pleasing buddy-movie humor you expect. That trope seems to have been packed away along with Don Johnson’s pastel T-shirts. This is a testament to the film’s integrity, a police-procedural verisimilitude that brooks no awareness of the movie’s TV past or cop-movie conventions. But it can also be a bit of a drag. These magnetic actors are so stripped of personality that there’s no lightness to alleviate the tension of the duo’s descent into the underworld.

What you respond to instead is Mann’s procedural precision and pure cinematic style. The policier elements, as always with Mann, are utterly convincing, and his style is as definitive here as it was in the series, if far different.

This Miami Vice looks and feels a lot more like Collateral than it does the television series. It’s similarly shot in hi-def digital video — grainy, gritty, and with a nocturnal tone even in its daytime scenes. Instead of white beaches and turquoise ocean, the film is dominated by blue-gray night skies: Peeling around Miami expressways in his convertible sports car, you can all but feel the heavy ocean air as it whips through Crockett’s hair.

With this grainy texture matched by hand-held videography and tight, close shots, action scenes sometimes feel like hyper-intense outtakes from Cops, especially during one of the film’s great set-pieces: a trailer-park raid on skinhead kidnappers holding Tubbs’ girlfriend. This sequence is flawlessly directed, tense and detailed and brilliantly paced. It’s matched by an earlier showcase where Crockett and Tubbs out-bluster a drug-ring middleman during a Haiti job interview. In between, Mann sends Farrell and Gong on a ravishing, romantic side trip to Havana.

Miami Vice is a gripping, attention-keeping experience, but despite its striking style and bravura sequences, the parts are probably greater than the whole. Mann’s 1995 crime epic Heat sticks with you even after a decade. Aside from a few virtuoso moments, I’m not sure I’ll still be thinking about Miami Vice even a few months from now.

Miami Vice

Now Playing

Multiple Locations

The 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams is one of the great films of the past 20 years. The new The Heart of the Game, which similarly follows urban high school basketball through several seasons, isn’t. But it might be a better sports movie.

To its credit, Hoops Dreams made you question your fandom. It was unsettling. The less sociological The Heart of the Game is — as its title indicates — a purer appeal to basketball fans, perhaps in part due to its crucial difference: It’s about girls.

Early in the film, a group of high school boys are interviewed, and they claim that male players just want to score and be seen, while girls play team basketball. This may come off as a bit of a WNBA commercial, but with less money, pressure, and corruption in the girls’ game, it does seem easier to keep the focus on the sport itself.

The Heart of the Game follows Seattle’s Roosevelt Roughriders and its new coach, tax professor Bill Resler, through six seasons. What begins as a focus on a colorful coach broadens with the introduction of a troubled star player, who enters the program in the second season and whose story arc eventually takes over the film.

With its series of tough losses leading to a big game with the Roughriders’ closest rival, The Heart of the Game feels almost scripted at times. But whether the filmmakers got lucky or fashioned this narrative through astute editing is immaterial. The end result is a gripping movie.

And even though The Heart of the Game can be inspirational, it’s never saccharine. There’s much truth and humor here: It’s a great joy watching these girls, all pimples and ponytails, dropping F-bombs and hurling other R-rated expletives in frustration or excitement.

The immediately likable Resler devises a “theme” for each season, such as “Pack of Wolves.” During timeouts, we see the girls in a huddle with their coach. Resler chants, “Sink your teeth in their neck!” and each time the girls respond, “Draw blood!” This might sound like the kind of hyper-competitive stuff that ruins kids’ sports, but in this case it isn’t. Each chant ends with players and coach joining together to shout “Have fun!” Most of the girls are near giggles during this routine.

“What rhymes with ‘bass pickin’?” Resler asks his charges late in one game. “Ass kickin’!” one girl chirps cheerfully. “I just saw one,” Resler shoots back.

“It’s so cheesy,” one player says when asked about her coach’s motivational techniques, “but I like it. It’s so Bill.”

I’ve only got one small complaint about an otherwise enjoyable and invigorating little movie: In packing six seasons’ worth of material into 97 minutes, too many potentially interesting elements get short shrift. The Heart of the Game might have been better as a short-run television series, especially since the big screen doesn’t enhance its camcorder-quality visuals.

The Heart of the Game

Opening Friday, August 4th

Studio on the Square

The trailers for The Descent trumpet its association with Saw and Hostel (all three films are distributed by Lionsgate), and it’s easy to understand why. Those movies were big box-office successes, and this horror flick with a no-name cast (the only face I recognized was that of Nora-Jane Noone, who starred in The Magdalene Sisters) and simple premise (women lost in a cave) needs all the help it can get to draw an audience.

But I can’t help thinking the ad campaign does a disservice to the film’s potential audience. Gore hounds might be disappointed by a movie less graphic (some might say less gratuitous) than expected. And those who are turned off by the full-scale, exploitation-movie bloodletting of Saw and Hostel might avoid the more restrained The Descent.

This film, about six adventurous friends who regroup one year after a terrible accident to bond and heal during a spelunking trip, is reminiscent at times of lots of other great horror movies: Deliverance, The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Those are classics. The Descent is merely a well-above-average genre movie, but it’s honest and effective enough to honor the comparisons.

After a credit-sequence shocker throws the life of young mother Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) into a tailspin, the film flashes forward a year, where Sarah’s extreme-sports-ish friends have set up a cave-exploring trip in the Appalachians. A rock slide traps the group inside the cave system, where, turns out, these women aren’t alone.

The Descent is ripe with foreshadowing and plenty of standard horror shock tactics using darkness, sound, and distraction, and if you’re even the slightest claustrophobic, you’ll find The Descent plenty scary even before the true horror elements are introduced.

Opens Friday, August 4th, multiple locations

Purchased by Miramax at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and adapted from Armistead Maupin’s autobiographical novel about an obsessive fan, The Night Listener is a slight psychological thriller that begins tediously but evolves into a fairly engaging mystery/suspense film.

Robin Williams stars as Gabriel Noone, a writer and radio personality who is contacted by a fan: AIDS-stricken, sexually abused 14-year-old Pete (Rory Culkin), whose memoir is about to be published. Moved and impressed by the manuscript — and perhaps unconsciously seeking personal material for his own work — Gabriel strikes up a long-distance friendship with the boy and his foster mother (Toni Collette) in Wisconsin, a relationship that takes a mysterious turn when he attempts to meet the boy.

Williams is subdued here, displaying none of the manic energy of his comedy roles, the icky sentimentality of his “serious” roles, or the actorly indulgences of his attempts to play against type. He underplays Gabriel’s homosexuality surprisingly and effectively, and though there’s a tension in Williams keeping his nervous energy under wraps, it suits the character.

The mystery that emerges about Peter and his guardian works in a TV-drama kind of way, and The Night Listener would be meatier if it followed through on the implications of Gabriel’s own motivations. This writer-as-exploiter theme instead gives way to more standard suspense tropes.

The Night Listener is more watchable than you’d expect from an idea as cringe-inducing as “Sundance drama starring Robin Williams.” But it doesn’t really amount to much.

Opens Friday, August 4th, at Ridgeway Four