The film Miami Vice has been panned by the critics here in Britain, but I thought it was OK. The critics said the dialogue was hard to follow and it is true that the actors (like so many Hollywood folk today) forget the basic rule of “project, dear boy, project”.
However, modern films tend to be designed for a young audience (they are the people who buy most of the tickets)not for middle aged people like me (or most critics). The young simply have better hearing, and (much though it hurts to admit it) pick up things faster, they will have worked out what is going on in a scene seconds before someone my age will.
So if you are middle aged and decide to go and see this film you are going to have to concentrate (or be confused like the critics) – even though the young person next to you can watch the film without concentrating and still know what is going on. There are plot holes in the film, but it is still an effective (and quite intelligent) action movie.
However, the little touches of political correctness in the film did irritate me.
For example, a white racist group is shown. One of the characters actually asks why they would be involved in a major international drug enterprise – and it never is explained why the major drug players have got these people involved (white racists do indeed deal drugs – but they are small players, major players would not cross the street to piss on them). It was just an excuse for the standard Hollywood “look, evil white racists” bit.
Also it is mentioned, at one point, that some of the drugs come from the “right wing AUC in Colombia”, the AUC does indeed supply drugs (one of the founders of the AUC was tortured to death only last year for objecting to this) – but the (Marxist) FARC supplies far more drugs – why were they not mentioned?
Then one of the characters (who is pretending to be a drug transporter) says that he should not visit Cuba because “the Cubans do not like my business”… as if the Castro family had not been massive players in the drug trade for several decades.
In the credits at the end of the film I noted that one company was called “Che Guevara” pictures (or something). I suppose “Che” might have been amused by people choosing to name a private company after him (although he would still have killed of them of course). But is not about time the Hollywood crowd grew up?
Complete bankruptcy will be the only way to overthrow the Hollywood gatekeepers who control the purity of their oppressive ideology. It isn’t entertainment it’s indoctrination.
If we stop buying into their crap then they will be forced out of business.
Hollywood, by the way, makes all profit from foreign sales not domestic.
Let’s be honest, people go to Hollywood because they don’t want to face reality. So they’re probably not likely to be growing up any time soon.
What Hollywood needs is competition. The film industry equivalent of garage bands.
Really isn’t it time you just got over yourself with the whole “liberal bias in the media” crap. It’s a FILM! Not drug trafficking documentary but a piece of fiction.
I forgot that American TV shows never depict ethnic minorities committing crimes, have you ever seen COPS?
We’ve seen hispanic and black gangs done to death (pardon the pun) in films detailing the drug trade so the fact that once it is modern-day nazis is no need to get all paranoid about political correctness overtaking the film industry.
And the reason one of the characters says that Cuba do not like his business is that he is AMERICAN and thus persona non grata in Cuba who have a habit of locking up American drug dealers and throwing away keys.
So why mention AUC but not FARC then? Left wing bias? No, must be ‘artistic licence’, yes that must be it.
But only those Yaquis bad mannered enough to not be paying off Casto’s family first.
Well if they had mentioned FARC and not the AUC would your reaction have been the same? What do you suggest as an alternative? An equal portrayal in screen-time of both sides of the Colombian civil-war? No, don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s artisitc license to pick which ever drug dealing mafiosos you feel like and if right wing paramilitaries in Colombia dealing drugs to Nazis in the USA seems to fit plot wise then so be it.
Really Perry, this isn’t worth getting excited over. Take a deep breath and remind yourself it’s just a film. Michael Mann is not a propagandist of FARC or any other commie-pinko cabal and it’s actually quite a good film. Cops and robbers. Good and bad. Not a thoughtful insight into the pan-Americas drugs trade and the Miami gang-scene so don’t critique it as if it was.
It is not something I am losing any sleep over as I do not think Hollywood really matters that much. I think Paul is correct but as you say, it’s just a movie.
Ahh, why would you find any merit in a film which apparently supports the War on Drugs?
I wasn’t all that bothered by the Neo-Nazis. Surely they were just looking for someone everyone could agree to boo and hiss at in a simple cop movie. However, I am young and was with my even younger sister and cousin while I saw it. We couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was possibly the worst film I had ever seen (I can’t quite remember how much I hated Swordfish, and it might not have been quite as bad as that).
There was barely any dialogue, barely any narrative and no comedy whatsoever and precisely two good action scenes that were moderately fun to watch (the neo-nazi having a swift medulaectomy being one of them). But I suppose it sort of makes. It is a post-narrative movie. It doesn’t have scenes so much as a sequence of music videos along related themes that tie to together into some sort of undercover drug deal. Apparently that is in keeping with the TV series that was meant to be all about the scenery and the clothes. Or something.
Given the genre, this seems a relatively innocuous example. Most movies are designed to appeal, for established marketing reasons, to the mentally subnormal. They are made by people with the intellectual and moral understanding of a dead slug. Their progagandist content should come as no surprise. What does surprise me is that anyone older than a 3-month foetus can stomach them for more than the time it takes to reach a switch.
There, I feel much better now.
Yes, but that’s the problem, you see. We can all agree to hate neo-Nazis even without the drug-pushing angle. Why isn’t it as easy to get a crowded theater to agree to hate a gang of black street thugs who push drugs bought from a leftist organization? Both groups are equally odious, and yet only one of them is a safe bet as an enemy in a cop movie. And it so happens to be the one of the two we’re not as likely to see in reality. That’s frustrating to me.
In thinking about it, my beef wouldn’t be whether they mentioned the AUC or FARC, it’s the apparently gratuitous mention of the “right-wing” AUC. The political affiliation of the Colombian drug lords doesn’t seem to make a difference regarding to plot, at least as Paul makes it out. (I don’t like going to the local sixtyplex to watch movies, and much prefer watching old movies anyhow.)
I’m reminded of the commercials for the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”, where Denzel Washington talks about “rich people doing bad science”. It just makes me roll my eyes….
A drug dealer wears an IDF T-shirt too.
(white racists do indeed deal drugs – but they are small players, major players would not cross the street to piss on them). It was just an excuse for the standard Hollywood “look, evil white racists” bit.
That isn’t accurate, actually. There’s dialogue where Crockett tosses out the name “Nazi Low Riders”, amongst others. Mann didn’t just make that up. NLR moves so much meth that there are state and federal task forces assigned to them. So, while you may think it was political correctness on the part of the filmmaker, it was actually accurate research. Was the connection poorly made to the overall plot? Yup, but not for the reason you offer.
Sydney may well have a point about the importance of white racists – I may have an out-of-date view of the drug trade.
On prohibition generally: Of course I oppose it (and the war-on-drugs does not even have a Constitutional Amendment to back it up). However, that does not mean that drug dealers are nice people (making something illegal tend to mean it is controlled by the worst of people) or that one can not make a decent film about opposing them.
I missed the I.D.F. shirt – if that is true, what on Earth was the film trying to say? It would be hard to believe the shirt was an accident.
Actually there was quite a bit of dialogue in the film – but I had to strain to hear it, if a young person DID NOT hear it, well that would concern me.
I do not want to come over like a silly old Uncle – but you may have a problem (it might be worth having it checked out).
As for it just being a film – sure it was, but popular culture has an effect.
The left knows this – which is why they made such vast efforts to first set up and then get a strangle hold for the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild (and the other unions).
Antitrust laws were used to break up the (generally beneficial) intergrated studio system back in the late 1940’s, but the real monopolies (the unions) were left untouched – indeed they are the creature of the law (the various laws that favour them).
Of course the problem with the unions is not just political (the left have lost control of the S.A.G. in certain periods) – they make the cost of making a film vastly greater than it should be (not just a matter of pay – it is more a matter of the way they insist things have to be done).
As for plot holes.
I suppose the one that really stuck in my mind is where the head of security for the drug organization has the trailer where the hostage is being held under electronic surveillance – but he just waits whilst the white racists are killed and the hostage freed, only blowing the place up when the main characters have left.
I know it is sort of justified (by his waiting to know whether the drugs have turned up) – but I remember thinking “they will get out, bar the hostage who will leave last for no reason [of course real people would have got the hostage out first], then the place will blow up – and there will be a hospital scene later”.
Although I thought that the hostage would die (which she did not) the rest came out exactly as I expected – and it was silly.