{"id":17955,"date":"2022-03-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17955"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:04","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:04","slug":"the-smeary-digital-brilliance-of-late-michael-mann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-smeary-digital-brilliance-of-late-michael-mann\/","title":{"rendered":"The Smeary Digital Brilliance of Late Michael Mann"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When Michael Mann\u2019s Blackhat<\/em> opened in January of 2015, it couldn\u2019t crack the top ten at the domestic box office. The movie barely stuck it out for three weeks in theaters and earned back a single-digit fraction of its $70 million budget. Yet somehow during the Sundance Film Festival that month, I found myself sitting in the storied Yarrow Bar at a table surrounded by some of the country\u2019s most formidable film critics, and despite the bounty of earnest, independent gems at our disposal, all anybody wanted to talk about was Blackhat<\/em>. Mann\u2019s electrifying, experimental cyber-thriller paid a little lip service to genre conventions; instead, it was an almost abstract symphony of sound and color smeared across the screen in crackling, corrupted digital cinematography meant to mirror the twitchy surveillance state in which its stealthy characters operate. Blackhat<\/em> is a Stan Brakhage movie with gunfights, providing the not unamusing vision of hulking Chris Hemsworth as an alleged computer genius hammering away on laptops with his massive, meaty fingers. (According to entertainment journalists at the time, the Thor<\/em> star had to learn how to type for the role.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seven years later, this unloved, artsy-fartsy flop is apparently a big hit on Netflix, at least according to the unverifiable data provided by the streaming service in their dubious, daily top ten lists. (Who knows? If people will sit through Extraction<\/em> maybe they\u2019re up for a Hemsworth movie that\u2019s actually interesting?) There might be something to these numbers though, as Netflix recently added Mann\u2019s Public Enemies<\/em>, another coolly-received exercise from the filmmaker futzing around at the bleeding edge of digital technology. This 2009 would-be summer blockbuster promised Johnny Depp \u2013somewhere near the zenith of his Captain Jack Sparrow superstardom\u2014as legendary, Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger against the Caped Crusader himself, Christian Bale, playing Melvin Purvis, the Fed who brought him down. It\u2019s a movie I admire enormously and in all honestly, find a little trying to actually watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a case of form following content, with Depp\u2019s Dillinger emerging from a nine-year prison stint to the brave new world of 1933, as this one-time cowboy can\u2019t adapt to a modern America interconnected by telephone lines and other inventions that have thrown a net around the formerly wild frontier. He\u2019s hunted by an identically-dressed cabal of interchangeable college boys from J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s Federal Bureau of Investigation, and his iconoclastic actions earn the ire of Frank Nitti\u2019s Syndicate, an organized crime outfit operating out of a high-tech phone bank that looks suspiciously similar to the FBI offices. This is no country for old men, and Mann signals modernity with an alarming, occasionally ghastly use of home movie camcorder aesthetics denying us the pleasures of period film photography. Universal Pictures spent a purported $100 million painstakingly recreating 1930s Chicago for scenes that look like they were shot on your phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a clever gambit, accentuating immediacy in ways that are also intensely alienating. (Boy, did looking at this movie make some people angry.) I feel like folks have eventually come around to the approach, as Steven Soderbergh expertly deployed similar tactics in his two seasons of The Knick<\/em>, conveying what it must have felt like to live on the ground floor for a century of innovation via a jittery, hand-held camera and throbbing synth score, catching familiar historical trappings from odd, unexpected angles. But Public Enemies<\/em> got there first, eschewing establishing shots to forge a constant sense of destabilization. Dillinger is a glitch in the matrix, a hotheaded disruption to the cool order of both centralized law enforcement and organized crime. The movie tries to position him as something like the first reality TV star. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depp\u2019s performance is a little too muted and aloof to quite pull this off. (There\u2019s a delicious, probably apocryphal anecdote claiming that Mann interrupted a scene by saying, \u201cOh, I see what the problem is. You can\u2019t act,\u201d sending his star storming off the set for days, only enticed back to work by threats of litigation. It\u2019s one of those stories that even if it isn\u2019t true, I like to believe it is because it\u2019s so funny and feels right.) But it\u2019s just as difficult to latch on to Bale\u2019s Purvis, a persnickety, company man conformist introduced shooting Pretty Boy Floyd \u2013 played a pre-fame Channing Tatum\u2014in the back, brooding in the background while his dumb, sweaty, cop colleagues beat a woman with telephone books until she pisses her pants so they can all gun down Dillinger in cold blood like a dog in the street.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I personally prefer the high-spirited espionage goobledygook of Blackhat<\/em>, where the nigh-incomprehensible plot takes a backseat to absurdly ambitious directorial bravado. Hemsworth\u2019s hacker \u2013 who we meet in prison doing pushups and reading Foucault \u2013 is given a pass to assist a U.S.\/China task force in tracking down an anonymous baddie manipulating currencies and blowing up power plants because of something to do with the price of tin. Look, the story doesn\u2019t matter much in Blackhat<\/em> and on the eve of its release Mann drastically reedited the film, moving a nuclear meltdown that originally arrived at the movie\u2019s midpoint into the opening scene. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(A flutter-cut montage contrasts news reports of the smoldering silo with old footage of the facility fully intact. Hilariously, some of the leading lights in film criticism at the time cited the \u201cstock footage\u201d watermark on a shot of the previously working plant as a mistake made by Mann. Thinking they had another American Sniper<\/em> baby on their hands, clever critics cited the caption as something a \u201csenile\u201d 72-year-old director had somehow forgotten to remove from the film, displaying not just a spectacular ignorance as to how Hollywood movies are made and edited, but also a fundamental inability to understand images. Good job, guys.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a Director\u2019s Cut of Blackhat<\/em> that turns up on FX from time to time and clarifies a lot of story points. But I don\u2019t like it as much as the original theatrical version, which puts all its emphasis on images and experimentation, designing sets and settings as symmetrical grids within which people move like the animated malware we see lighting up printed circuit boards in the film\u2019s opening sequence. Mann and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh do an incredible job placing these characters within vertical and horizontal mazes, whether juxtaposed against trains, escalators or lines of framed artwork on the walls. It\u2019s the dystopian endgame of Public Enemies<\/em>\u2019 FBI and the Syndicate, as nearly every physical space in the film is another pattern of order trying to trap or otherwise confine these characters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big joke \u2013and there are many in Blackhat<\/em>\u2014is that the only way to escape this grid is not through technology but through low-tech brute force. We watch elite computer hackers resort to walloping walls with axes and eventually stabbing each other with knives and sharpened screwdrivers by torchlight like cavemen. The final fight finds the characters walking the wrong way during a foot parade in Jakarta, framed by the filmmaker as irregularities marching counter to a latticework of humanity. Like most of Mann\u2019s characters, they\u2019re anomalies against the grid. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Public Enemies” and “Blackhat” are now streaming on Netflix.<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With \u201cPublic Enemies\u201d joining \u201cBlackhat\u201d on Netflix, we sing the praises of Michael Mann\u2019s messy 21st century digital aesthetic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":633,"featured_media":17957,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-17955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22034,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17955\/revisions\/22034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}