..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

A few notes on Miami Vice; a few bubbles from Scarlett Johansson about Scoop and nice, nice, nice Hugh Jackman; and also the vivid Lower City.

In the Dark of the Vice

Michael Mann's Miami Vice (** 1/2) is partly set in Miami, has the same name as the television show, and of the crime-busting duo, the black cop is named Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and the white cop is named Crockett (Colin Farrell), but the resemblances end there. Extending the high definition study of urban night (that was so hypnotic in Collateral) and Mann's thematic constant of the bruised, internalized hurt of the lonely macho who will likely wind up alone, Mann's assembled a terse, elliptical world filled "the type of stuff the CIA does in Baghdad," taking a pro forma undercover-infiltration-of-drug-cartel plot, and stocked it with wormy supermen, deputized wild men, gangsters and interagency mercs who seek annihilation in their restless, relentless derring-do the way some people breathe or procrastinate each day. Bombast ensues, but not with the deliriousness of Heat. The script also seems to have had almost of its narrative connections pared to the bone. At 63, Mann is still braving the wilds of high defitinon vdeio, forging his own esthetic from new tools, but also searching for ways to indicate emotion and capture beauty that are akin to the frozen time of visual art. ("Man, those are skill sets" is one of Mann's better epithets of admiration here.) Concussive would be a kind word for some of the abrupt, grave violence, and the love scenes between Foxx and Naomie Harris and Farrell and business-crook Gong Li have a muzzy, disorienting intimacy. The HD process is exploited mostly for a painterly scumble of vivid digital grain in the hardly illuminated night, but in simple summary, Miami Vice is Mann's foreseeable triangulation of Friedrich Nietzsche, linen-edge designers like Ozwald Boateng and distinguished painters of geometric abstraction, like the great Richard Diebenkorn. Mann's camera also seeks something from faces that may or may not be there in a given actor, but the process used here does love Gong's cheekbones and Farrell's wet brown eyes. Plus: the secondary cast is quietly superb. (For a radio essay I did for Collateral, click here.)

Scarlett Betters: Match Point

After airing out some Dostoevskian dudgeon in Match Point, septuagenarian distance runner Woody Allen goes for screwball froth in his second London-set feature, Scoop (**).

Scarlett Johansson plays a daffy American journalism student who lucks into "the story of a lifetime"-dark suspicions about a Tarot card-dropping serial killer offered to her by a recently deceased newshound (Deadwood's Ian McShane, playful even without swearing) whom she meets while inside a magic cabinet while onstage with dyspeptic magician The Great Splendini (Allen, in familiar spluttering mode, a kind of weak-tea Broadway Danny Rose).

After that primitive setup, Hugh Jackman plays the dashing suspect, in modest Cary Grant mode. Bumbling, fumbling and cocktail parties ensue. London is, again, a glossy rich person's playground, with much visual luxe provided by a mostly European crew, especially cinematographer Remi Adefarasin (Truly, Madly Deeply, Elizabeth). And, like Match Point, the acting sometimes fascinates just for the novelty of each actor seeming to be in a radically distinct movie, not quite drowning but certainly waving at different cues. What Allen missed is the chance to showcase a less strenuous form of spunk from Johansson. Toward the end of the movie, there are two shots in a row, one a long shot, another a medium shot, a surely unintentional evocation of Botticelli, involving a soaking wet Johansson, her biggest smile and killer delivery of a punchline that may have inspired the script. (Shots like that are why movies ought to be made: they can enrich, or even save, an entire movie.)

What we have, instead, is a new showcase for Allen's latest lady muse. "I think 'muse' is kind of a silly word," Johansson responds in her smoky-beyond-her-years drawl, "sort of the media's adopted it as a kind of darling word and, y'know, if you said that to Woody he portably wouldn't, I think he would think it was strange. Certainly, I'm friends with Woody and working with him has been like going to summer camp. You spend a year away [after Match Point] and then you come back, and everything's kind of like it was the summer before. I would be happy to work with Woody forever, for the rest of my career. It's more of a friendly relationship, y'know, than anything else."

Johansson's character, oddly, winds up sleeping with the subjects of her journalist pursuits. (Early on, a movie director gets her character drunk at the Dorchester). Is that youthful behavior? "I never think about the age of the character I'm playing. It's always roughly someone in their twenties. I just build a backstory, which has less to do with their age. I don't think of playing in a more mature or less mature way, I just use the script as a guide. It was a great character to play, y'know, she's what Woody would lovingly call a 'twit,' and she's kind of an idiot and she's really ambitious but totally out of it and obnoxious and all those things!" She laughs her husky laugh. "And lovable for some reason, this lovable idiot."

While the plot resembles the street-sweeping contours of Manhattan Murder Mystery, there's also a dollop of screwball and a few bits grafted from Hitchcock thrillers. "Woody had no real required viewing as far as Hitchcock goes. He did say to me, it's kind of like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Woody is very sentimental and has seen every film under the sun... that was made before a certain period of time and nothing after. Whatever his inspirations were, he never really shared them with me."

Much of the movie is banter between the pair, with Johansson constantly belittling Splendini's intelligence. "With Match Point, I so enjoyed Woody's company, I said, 'It would have been great if we could have acted together. We had such a connection in the banter between us. He said, 'I'll think of something.' Scoop is kind of just our banter, photographed and molten into a screenplay."

Hugh Jackman gets to play a bland, cheerily idealized version the impossibly handsome and generous and well-off English gentleman. "Woody doesn't do any rehearsal. It's like, here's the person you fall in love with. Of course, when it's Hugh Jackman, it's not that hard, y'know. He sits there... he's such a charismatic and charming and incredibly sweet, really, really sweet guy." So he's really, really sweet? "I don't have enough nice things to say about Hugh. He's just lovely. He's a real movie star."

Johansson slips into a lot of different vocal styles, but only a couple of times into the dread "Woody" cadence. "There's a lot of dialogue in this film so with this comes all kinds of intonations, especially when you're [playing] hysterical and especially when you're talking opposite someone and the conversation escalates. Melodic and loud! I certainly didn't try to mimic Woody or imitate him. I mean, that's how we are when we talk to each other. We're both from New York and we can really banter with each other. It just happens without even thinking about it, really."

Blood and Brothers and Drugs and Sex: Lower City

Desperate longings in the Brazilian underclass: SŽrgio Machado's simmering Lower City (Cidade Baixa, ***), co-produced by Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) and co-written by Karim Ainouz (with whom he'd written Ainouz's Madam Sata as well as Behind the Sun for Salles) is one of those movies that displays admirable craft while it unfurls, but its small variations on familiar themes seem at first familiar. Yet, by film's end, I was truly shaken by the results the jealousy-ridden love triangle between childhood friends Deco (Lazaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura, Carandiru) and stripper Karinna (Alice Braga) on the Northeast coast of Brazil's Bahia state. Deco is light-skinned, and Naldinho dark-skinned, which adds to the complications as well as the potential for clichŽ: "One of the greatest risks we run," wrote Machado, "is falling into stereotypes, like THE whore, THE Bahian hustler. The problem is that this is a fascinating world to the point that it's tempting to describe it and that would be a mistake... The film is not a chronicle of customs. It's a story of people." Lushly photographed, offhandedly humid, Lower City earns an ending that is both primal in its symbolism and shattering in its emotional impact.

July 28 , 2006

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