Something to watch tonight: Thursday 15 August

Michael Mann digital double feature: Collateral (2004) and Miami Vice (2006)

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of Mann’s Collateral being released into the wild. I was still in the cinema busi­ness then, rather than the review­ing busi­ness, so prob­ably saw it at the Australasian exhib­it­ors’ con­fer­ence on the Gold Coast and while I thought it was a crack­ing story, I was not a fan of the cinematography.

This was the early days of digit­al cap­ture for motion pic­tures – George Lucas’ Star Wars pre­quels were pion­eers – and exhib­i­tion still relied on 35mm film. Something about the trans­fer from digit­al to film meant that the res­ult was smeary, low-res, washed out. I under­stood that with Collateral, Mann wanted to shoot at night in LA and there was no way that film would be able to cap­ture decent depth-of-field in that kind of low light – and that enhan­cing with arti­fi­cial extra light wasn’t going to be prac­tic­al either.

I got it but that didn’t mean I had to like it. I thought it looked cheap, frankly, even though it abso­lutely wasn’t.

Two art­icles have been pos­ted recently that go into the tech­nic­al back­ground for why Mann (and cine­ma­to­graph­ers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron) chose to take this path – Chris O’Falt at IndieWire and Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com – and they promp­ted me to revis­it Collateral (and Mann’s follow-up, the reima­gin­ing of Miami Vice).

Collateral has been recently reis­sued on a 4K disc with DolbyVision (High Dynamic Range) pro­cessing and – heav­ens – it looks like a dif­fer­ent movie. That’s mainly due to the lack of inter­ven­tion from the inhos­pit­able medi­um of cel­lu­loid. On a decent digit­al screen (OLED in our case) the col­ours and con­trast are a rev­el­a­tion. I feel like for the first time what I am see­ing is Mann saw while he was fin­ish­ing the film and it’s gorgeous.

But it’s also because my expos­ure to (and appre­ci­ation of) dif­fer­ent cinema aes­thet­ics in the past 20 years mean that I am more likely to see these choices for what they are rather than what they aren’t. I’ve finally let the look of the film sup­port its storytelling rather than fight against it.

The tight one-night story of a Los Angeles taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) unwill­ingly drawn into the world of an ace hit­man (Tom Cruise) is superbly tense, the stakes stead­ily grow­ing as the night unravels for both of them. And this is just the icing on the cake:

Miami Vice has just been re-released on Blu-ray (fea­tur­ing the ori­gin­al the­at­ric­al and Mann’s director’s cut) but I haven’t warmed to it the way that I have with Collateral. It looks a lot bet­ter than I remem­ber – for sim­il­ar reas­ons as above – but the story res­on­ates much less for me.

I also wasn’t much of a fan of Colin Farrell in those days – des­pite us shar­ing a birth­day – but I’ve enjoyed this cur­rent stage of his career so much I am encour­aged to revis­it earli­er eras of his. Once again, I am betrayed by my former snobbery.

Where to watch Collateral

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on Binge, Paramount+ and Stan

Canada & Ireland: Digital rental

USA & UK: Streaming on Paramount+

Where to watch Miami Vice

Aotearoa, Canada: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on Binge

Ireland: Streaming on SkyGo

USA: Streaming on Netflix and Starz

UK: Streaming on Netflix and SkyGo