The Strawberry Blog

August 14, 2006

Considering my recent return to Hollywood from New Orleans, you were probably expecting the requisite entry on what it was like being back home in Louisiana after four months away.
Not so fast, buddy. We’re not that predictable.
Instead, waxing about visiting home is usurped by a Hollywood institution: a film. Ahem—a movie. Perhaps one of the most irredeemably awful movies I have ever seen. So bad it was…worse. Nothing to save it except as an excellent means for compare and contrast sessions in college film courses.
The steaming turd? Miami Vice. It’s a puzzler, this one. Though I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing it—it was another DGA screening so, though it took two hours of my life it didn’t take my money—I was up for a silly, flashy piece of light entertainment. It had all the elements of Collateral (incl. Jamie Foxx and and director Michael Mann), yet absolutely none of its success. It had name recognition, yet chose to muddle the Miami palette. No displays of sleek, Art Deco chrome and sculpted derrières beachside. Where were the pastels and sundrenched mojito bars? Instead, we got white supremacists in dark, dingy trailer parks that looked like Ohio. The only time I knew I was somewhere was when we were obviously in Cuba and South America. Otherwise, it may as well have been called Cleveland Vice.
And as for the jittery handheld camera/ Michael Mann trademark? How about using it for a reason, an artistic call, as character psychology—as they did in Collateral. Here it was just annoying. Dark, muddy, and reverberatingly hand held now just equals I Grow Weary of This Filmmaker.
Despite the production design misfire, I was hoping for some witty repartée, or at least some good looking male leads being good looking and snappy. Instead, what we got were a couple of la-con-ic actors saying some of the worst lines heard on screen since I sat at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre for Titanic, audibly groaning. This audience (mostly SAG actors) laughed aloud at unintentionally funny lines. I’d like to say that the women were strong but they weren’t; they were just one-note angry in that cartoonish fuming-from-the-orifices sort of way. And you couldn’t understand half of what the Japanese woman said. Therefore, I hated her.
Midway through this torture, I finally realized why Colin Ferrell’s character seemed so ill at ease. Wouldn’t you feel out of place in the 21st century…in a mullet? Jamie Foxx, well after delivering the funniest line in a sex scene (replete with let-me-lick-you-up-and-down contemporary R & B) also delivered the most unintentionally funny line of the whole, painful evening:
“Let’s take it to the limit…one more time.” The audience half expected Glen Frey to cut in for a solo. Patently ridiculous. But it gave us the first reason to be freely uproarious.
Colin Ferrel got the other line. With zero irony, he cocked his gun and said, “Let’s do this thing.”
Nobody says that. Not even in a movie.