Miami Vice in the 21rst Century

[shrinkboy]

i record MV from the Sleuth channel every night, and like to keep a nice library of un-viewed (recently) episodes at the ready for when i want to just sit with a huge silly grin on my face for an hour.

in its day, MV was what they now call 'appointment' TV. i loved the frigging thing, with Michael Mann's cinematography, the music, the iconic characters, the atmospheric shots of Crockett and Tubbs speeding along the coastal highway in the Ferrari toward some life and death showdown...it was triple layer media sundae ....loved it.

fast foward a quarter century, and i still love it, only now its in my 'guilty pleasure/so bad its good' column. watching it now, you can actually see how the sausage is made. actors struggling with lines just in time to get the scene cut and in the can in order to stay on production schedule (and lots of really, really BAD acting), sets just barely strung together, hokey plot lines, completely unbelievable characters. there are scenes that make me laugh out loud-- anyone ever seen the episode with Frank Zappa? the poor guy had no idea how bad he was. or, an episose the other night had a character whom Crockett was protecting from the 'bad guys'...he was 'punk rocker' who listened to the most godawful studio production imitation heavy metal and went to clubs where bands with gigantic mohawks played while kids pogoed...or moshed....or something. it was horrendous...and it made me laugh until my ribs ached.

and then, fast forward to the early aughts, and find the greatness of Michael Mann's 13 episode, the sadly failed Robbery/Homicide, starring Tom Sizemore.
what an awesome piece of mood, atmosphere, and character, with the crime plots simply being a grid for a reflection on the place of the individual in the 21rst century megalopolis.

Michael Mann has a shot he uses in all of his crime stories, from Heat, through Collateral which poses characters in front of floor to ceiling sheets of glass in high rises over-looking vast nightlit cityscapes. it always seems to me that he is saying something about our place in the world we've created.