I'm just gonna breeze through this in one pass, couple things I wanna get down in text while I'm still thinking about them...
A lot of people talk about the similarities between Michael Mann's "Heat" and John Woo's "The Killer" and how apparently Mann borrows heavily from "The Killer" in his relationship between DeNiro and Pacino's characters. I guess I can maybe see that on some level, how both movies stress a sort of tragic camaraderie between thief and cop, and a common respect for the older and simpler ways of doing things.
I'd been doing a lot of thinking lately about how much I like Mann's movies and his style (I think he might be a candidate for best high-profile American director right now) and I decided to rent one of his old ones, "Last of the Mohicans." Damn. It might be a little dated in some parts, but that is a dope flick. I highly recommend it. On the Woo/Mann tip, (what got me started on the first place) I noticed something really surprising; WOO BORROWS FROM LAST OF THE MOHICANS! There's a scene in MI:2, a movie which by the way I didn't actually hate the way most people think it deserves to be hated (though it's by no means good), where Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton (mmm) are cornered in the top of the evil biotech skyscraper thingy. Come to think of it, it was the scene that made me not hate the movie. There's gunfire, and they're yelling over it to each other, and Tom Cruise (realizing he has to leave her behind, because he only has an out for himself) is like "Stay Alive!" "I
will find you!" and there's just genuine chemistry and real drama and he bombs a hole in the wall and base-jumps away (yeah, yeah, i know...). Anyway, rewind to Mohicans, it turns out there's an identical scene in that movie where they're on a cliff face underhang thing under a waterfall being pursued by a Huron war-party with nowhere to turn, and Daniel Day-Lewis' character tells his love interest the
exact same lines then jumps through the waterfall in a similarly dramatic exit. It's seriously like the same damn scene give or take a couple centuries. A really, really good scene. Probably worth copying. Dunno if anyone spotted the graft though.
But I mean I'm not throwing this out there as like a Mann>Woo rebuttal for the argument that "Heat" borrows from "The Killer"... I like both of these directors for some of the same reasons, and I think they probably like each others' stuff as well. Each of them has a city in which their stories absolutely thrive; for John Woo it's Hong Kong, and for Michael Mann it's Los Angeles. Both of these directors give a great sense of setting and atmosphere in their city of choice, and you can tell that they both really appreciate what their respective cities contribute to the overall narrative (Mann: Heat, Collateral / Woo: everything before Hard Target). In fact I think the reason Woo's movies fall flat now is a divorce from this sense of familiar territory; his movies in HK were about simplicity and honor and fighting obsolescence in a new, complex, comprimised world. Now that he finds himself in hollywood, where PG-13 action reigns and American audiences are jaded towards the old obtuse dramatic action flairs that have informed and been improved upon by a newer generation of filmmakers since his day(Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino figuring prominently on the list), he's an old dog without new tricks. Audiences today prefer the sassy sarcasm of an Uma Thurman to the understated heroics of Chow Yun Fat... Even mainstay U.S. gunslingers like Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood (little time gap there, sorry) have had to reinvent themselves with changing American tastes. (RANT ALARM RINGING, better wrap this up) It seems almost fitting that Woo is to go out like one of his heroes, riddled with wounds from an unwinnable fight (Paycheck, MI:2, Hard Target, Windtalkers) but ready to be avenged by a capable successor (Mann!!!!!!) sniffle.kbyethx4read
Würk [Mowgli]
heehaw [Liam]
