My second exposure to Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28) last night was no less pleasurable than the first — this is a great adult popcorn movie that’s about heightened realism and also about life on another planet — a planet I’d like to live on.
Viewing #2 was actually better in a sense because I was able to digest the first-act complexities with a bit more ease. Director Michael Mann throws you right into a very dense and layered situation at the very start, and it may take you ten or fifteen minutes to sort it through. (A movie that makes you work a bit is a good thing.)
A guy I spoke to after the screening said that a woman sitting next to him was having issues with the violence. Which seems silly to me since Vice‘s shootings and sluggings aren’t the least bit gratuitous — it’s just honest, and it has nothing as cruel as the Brandon Routh-getting-half-kicked-to-death sequence in Superman Returns.
A very smart, somewhat snooty industry woman derided the final 10 minutes of the romantic arc between Colin Farrell and Gong Li as “a Sydney Pollack ending”. (I answered that Sydney Pollack endings work for me just fine. )
Another woman I spoke to didn’t care for the Thomson Viper photography — i.e., the sometimes grainy, sometimes-not texture.
So it wasn’t all happy camping at the Arclight, but the after-vibe was, I felt, one of general satisfaction.