Things I Learned Watching "Miami Vice"

--“Go-fast boats.” Oh, come on. Just call ‘em cigarette boats like everyone else!

--You know, until I saw the preview for Minority Report on some cable channel this past weekend, I’d forgotten that Colin Farrell was even in that movie at all.

--The cinematography here is flat-out astonishing, resulting in a movie that’s a feast for the eyes – sumptuous darknesses and delectable colors as the action shifts from Miami coastlines to Hiatian slums to Cuban nightclubs to whevever the drug-lord plot leads – which makes up for the fact that it’s a struggle to follow what’s happening. Gong Li’s dialogue is next to inpenetrable, but that’s okay because everybody else is delivering their lines in baffling cop shorthand code-speak anyway. If it all seems needlessly bizarre and confusing, rent some DVDs of the original show and you’ll realize how faithful this movie actually is to its source material. Subtitles, yo!

--Someday, director Michael Mann will film a crime saga set entirely in a bustling, major American metropolitan-area coffee-shop. Dude so wants to do this; I can feel it, it’s palpable.

--A couple of years ago, cousins Kevin, Kandace, and I tried to take the edge off of our grandfather’s funeral by going to see Road Trip at an Edmonson Road theatre that no longer exists. I bring this up because it was the first time I ever heard anyone – Kandace – use the term “cruc” as an adjective, in sort of a slang dress-down of “crucial,” i.e. something necessary or indispensible. Would it be flippant of me to follow a similar course by shortening “palpable” to “palp” in casual conversation? Or would it just make me sound like a jackass?

--Alecia pointed out that Big Booty Trudy is played, here, by the CIA whatshername from post-tuxedo, post-Bond Pierce Brosnan vehicle After the Sunset – a slice of cinema notable for generating lame, studio-paycheck work for a ridiculous Don Cheadle, a not-yet-dead-by-OD Chris Penn (cameo), and Salma Hayek’s ample, heaving cleavage – which is something I never would have realized on my own.

--If real life were anything like this movie, the cresting crash of an Audioslave song would invariably signal the impending arrival of hot hetero booty action.

--Mann et al. deserve a great deal of credit for not turning this into parody/farce ala so many other 70s/80s TV shows gone big screen (see Starksy & Hutch, which was actually pretty, uh, cruc, and Dukes of Hazzard, which was a total waste of time). The sinister, malevolent gravity James Edward Olmos brought to the role of police (chief? captain?) Castillo is sorely missed, but forget that these are different actors and the milleu’s contemporary and this could double as a 4-part storyline from the show’s small-screen run. When I learned that Farrell and Jamie Foxx were gonna be starring as Crockett and Tubs, I was among those who cried BS. Surprise - they pull off these roles way better than imagined, right down to the so-intense-it’s-lethal stylized garbage (cf. Bloom County) chatter.

--Mogwai’s tasteful integration into the soundtrack = not as surprising as a Nonpoint cover version of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” during ye olde climactic gunfight face-off. Speaking of that gunfight, it reminds me of the running street cops’n’robbers throwdown in L.A. from Mann’s own Heat, which succeeds in making extended gunplay seem really boring, tedious, and confusing (moreso here because it’s happening at night).

--Mann loves him some gratuitous shower scenes, huh? Wow.

--Not feeling the Crockett mustache. Heavy stubble’s a no-brainer, but a stache? Nah.