Collateral

I loved this movie. First, lemme describe the situation: I awoke at 4am for my work, figuring when I got off at 9:30 I would go straight home and back to bed to get some honest rest for a night planned with film school friends...instead I stopped at the Commerce Casino and played hold em with a bunch of jewish and hispanic men. One of the guys was a fairly young Latino guy, maybe in his 30s, gruff as hell - the best poker player I've ever played with. He had things figured on every hand and read me twice, taking two pots of mine.

I had my costume designer meeting at 1pm, did some errands for my 546, finally figured it was time I could get my nap in and I walked by the Los Feliz Theater showing Collateral at 4:15. It was 4:05. The matinee costs $4.50 there, and the prospect of sitting the air conditioned theater...well, I went in. Somehow the combination of spotenaiety, sleep deprivation, the newness of the theater to me, put me in the absolute perfect space to see the movie...

The first few minutes blew me away. I remember thinking - this the best movie of the year, honestly, I thought that in the few five minutes. Then some of the dialog with Jada and Jamie Foxx goes on a little too long and was too on the nose, and I was like, all right, maybe not. But then the movie gets started and we go on this brilliant ride with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. Mann does some crazy awesome shit with the camera, characters, music. I was bobbing my head and shaking my leg through part of the movie, a DJ experience in the theater. We have scenes shot in digital at night, we have the story being told through shallow focus, Mann focuses an element and moves to the character with his lens and without camera movement (beyond the little hand held shake). He focuses on little details, hand rails, sandwiches, all sorts of grimy, little elements of life.

The movie is tremendously exciting and plain fun to watch; funny- really funny in some parts. Tom Cruise looks amazing - he looks grey, his whole look is this soft grey, not an old-man grey, but this weird wolf-like grey as described in this New Yorker review, which is a good article.

But what the article doesn't address is Mann. He's the closest thing to a DJ of any filmmaker alive, music is vital to his asthetic, to his vision, it's purposefully mixed together - I'm positive he writes and reads scripts with songs in mind. He mixes in his head. He's obsessed with technology as a enabler and a crutch and how it intersects with our lives and existence. The entire train sequence is a brilliant techno-nihilistic ending, perfectly expressing perhaps what ought to be our greatest fear - never to be noticed. The cell phone running out of battries, advanced bugging techniques, computer downloaded hit lists, but not just digital technologies - cars and freeways, transportation systems, airports, power lines, city scapes, he paints them beautifully and pathologically at times. The final sequence, Tom Cruise reminds me of the Terminator, chasing and tracking down Linda Hamilton and Reese....look for the clues.

Mann is also obessed with examining the male condition. Male relationships are the primary relationships in all of his best work - Manhunter, Miami Vice, Heat, the Insider, and now Collateral. He talks about fathers. He talks about doing. Being a man of action, not words. He's obsessed with people who are competant - Jamie is a fantastic cab driver and is what draws everyone to him, Vincint and Jada. He view women through the lens of a MAN. They are beautiful, a source of strength and inspiration and vulnerability, and yet somewhat distant and puzzling. I love his examination of men and women, in Ali, in Collateral, in Heat.

The story fits together perfectly as well. Every scene is connected to ones around it. It flows beautifully through cuts of birds eye view of the cab roaming the city. But all the scenes come together, especially the end. Perhaps the most genius scene is when Vincent and Jamie are pulled over by cops after Vincent has killed his first victim. The cops are giving them shit and going to get in a shootout with Tom Cruise, but are called away to respond the the location of the murder itself, the place where Jamie and Tom had just come from. Brilliant.

There are also a couple of very sudden moments. Moments that come out of nowhere that you cannot forsee. These tend to be violent. The movie keeps you on your toes.

And Mann is the MASTER of action sequences. The end of Heat is still the best action sequence, to me, in any movie. We have his second best action sequence in this film, during a hit at a club, with a True Romance - endinglike, sets of different characters coming together, packing heat, a shootout in a crowded club. His action sequences go on long, and capture the moments before and right after the sudden violence...like the Jazz musician getting the blue note, the back beat.

A completely thrilling movie experience. I'd say best picture material.

More reviews:

NY Times: best point is Mann's other obsession with doing the job well, at the expense of everything else, women, etc. In this respect, he's more aligned with Howard Hawks than John Ford, whose mentioned in this article.

SF Gate: he makes an interesting point about Cruise's greyness as a mechanistic thing. This plays along with my Terminator theory.