The name is the same; everything else is changed.
Miami Vice is not an echo of the pastel-hued 1980s cop show. It's a distinctly darker vision, another of the striking, atmospheric crime dramas that have been the hallmark of writer-producer-director Michael Mann's career. His latest is a hard-edged thriller that carefully avoids resurrecting the pink T-shirted ghosts of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. With its gritty, disquieting video imagery and high-tech hardware, it's like a Bond film spliced with Cops.
The plot is not overtaxing -— it's about guns, drugs and money — because the real focus is the allure, danger and alienation of hiding behind an assumed identity.
PHOTOS: UIP
Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx star as the undercover narcotics team Crockett and Tubbs. Their bond is a matter of professional loyalty, respect but not personal friendship. These are solitary, terse men whose lives are defined by their jobs. Their way of telling a colleague that they care is by standing vigil at the hospital bed, not rambling on about it. Part of the appeal of going undercover, it seems, is the chance to cast off their inhibitions, take life-or-death risks, and run off at the mouth.
In the course of impersonating drug runners to infiltrate a South American kingpin's operation, Crockett is drawn into a relationship with the mobster's hot financial adviser played by Gong Li (鞏俐). His unexpected empathy for her bewilders him, and between back-scrubbing sessions in the shower he begins to feel conflicted about luring her into a plot that could leave her dead or serving a life sentence. Tubbs finds himself in a parallel situation when a seedy tribe of white supremacist meth dealers captures his cop girlfriend (Naomi Harris) and he must lead the perilous raid to free her. Neither conflict ends happily. In Mann's macho world, sex is a stew of pleasure, menace and regret. The male group ethic of dangerous work expertly done is the only reliable source of satisfaction for his heroes.
In Heat, Thief and Collateral, Mann set a high standard for inventive pacing, framing and movement, especially when staging gun battles. He equals his best work here with two nighttime firefights as well orchestrated as they are ferocious. Mann's cameras move through the barrage as if they were capturing battlefield footage in real time. At one point he puts us so deep into the guts of the demolition derby that the camera lens catches some red splatters. It might seem like an accident, until you remember Tubbs a few scenes earlier invoking Jackson Pollack as he threatens to blast a crime boss all over his wallpaper.
Mann doesn't deal in accidents. He's a perfectionist whose work demands, and rewards, close attention. His sequences are long, elegant, and tricky. But he doesn't waste shots. He tells us the least we must know to make sense of a situation, then insists we work out the rest for ourselves. I was halfway into the film before realizing that a bald bulldog of a man misbehaving in the opening dance club sequence was a member of the Miami-Dade police force; what seemed like an offhand moment was a deftly timed slow-release joke. Mann's meticulously detailed film is full of little Easter eggs like that, and you blink at peril of missing them. Without comment he shows us a population that turned its back on the stark natural beauty of costal Florida while creating stark, soulless multimillion US dollar condos for drug barons and menacing slums for their customers. Mann creates a jagged junkyard environment in which violence is as inevitable as the lightning we see striking time and again from the humid tropical skies.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist