Something to watch tonight: Thursday 15 August

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

This week marks the 20th 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.

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Where to watch Collateral