Scoop and Miami Vice
Scoop, 2006. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Allen, Hugh Jackman, and Ian McShane.
Now showing in theaters around town.
Used to be that you could spot a Woody Allen fan wherever they could be found sulking. Nebbishes to an extreme, they often were seen in oversized corduroy jackets with leather patches, didn’t care that their glasses were out of touch with the trendsetters, and could be heard in the arcades and K-marts debating the merits of Stardust Memories against Manhattan with their Allen-loving friends. Too often they would steal away from their high school dances to watch Hannah and Her Sisters, marveling at their own intellectual superiority, returning home at night dreaming their dreams of New York City and how much more superior it was to lousy Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
But that’s just me. In the years since I’ve come to wish that I had gone to more dances and seen less of Zelig and Radio Days, decent films but no match for the girls I passed up because they actually enjoyed Night Ranger and St. Elmo’s Fire.
Still, there is some part of me that yearns for the old Woody Allen. I miss the guy who used to cast his muse/lover (Lasser, Keaton, Farrow) and gather his flock of fantastic supporting actors to wrestle with his humor and angst. And all this in the fantasyland of Manhattan, my personal Oz. For Manhattan in Woody Allen is so much more reasonable than Manhattan in real life.
Woody isn’t haunting New York these days, having moved his shrunken frame to the upper class apartments and country estates of London. For whatever reason, this has seemed to resuscitate him. For although Scoop is not a very original film, it is a very funny film, more enjoyable than his very good Match Point. Scoop has no weight or meaning, and doesn’t address moral and philosophical issues. It has plot fashioned from cotton candy, a cast that includes Allen doing his stand-up shtick from start to finish, and a fairly predictable ending. I loved it.
The facts: Joe Strombel (gravely-voiced Ian McShane) is an ace reporter who has just recently died. Lolling along on Charon’s barge, still baffled at his sudden demise, he meets a woman who claims to have found herself in the underworld due to poisoning. This poor lady was offed because she knew a dastardly secret: she discovered evidence that her employer, Peter Lyman, wealthy son of Lord Lyman, is the Tarot Card Killer. Lyman overheard, she had afternoon tea, now she’s dead. The math is simple.
Strombol still has his reporter’s wits about him, so he jumps into the river hoping to escape Death just long enough to get the news back to the living. Enter Sondra Pransky (Ms. Johansson), a student reporter on vacation with some friends in London. She and her girlfriend take in a magic show by Sid Waterman (Woody), aka Splendini!, and, while making Sondra disappear into his ‘dematerializer’, she comes across Strombel’s ghost. He reveals his scoop: Peter Lyman is the killer, and Sondra has to investigate. With Woody Allen in tow, they meet the dashing young Mr. Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and hijinks ensue.
And boy do they ensue. My wife loathes Woody Allen, and anyone who is of the same mind would do themselves a favor by staying away. Perhaps I’m reacting to a summer’s worth of virtually brainless fare, and am hungering for drawing rooms and jokes that equate Anthony Trollope with ‘trollop’. But I loved Allen’s shtick here, which is rolled on thick as wallpaper paste–it’s a nice reprieve from the jokes of You, Me and Dupree and the newest Pirates film, at least. I haven’t seen Allen do his thing for a good long time, and here he’s going for straight stand-up. His magic act is wonderful and spot-on (and I should know, my pop’s a magician), a combination of tics and stutters designed, like all great slight of hand, to distract.
Woody seems to have found a new muse in Scarlett Johansson, who pushes him around and exchanges rapid-fire banter without blinking an eye. Forced to act like father and daughter, they dig at one another throughout, but manage to stir up a winning chemistry that is never discomforting sexually (though my wife, without having seen the film or any preview, shouted ‘pedophile!’ when I mentioned this). Hugh Jackman is light on his feet, and the love affair between him and Scarlett could almost be the heart of a Gene Kelly musical, it’s so breezy. Allen remains perhaps the best director of women in America–in fact, he is perhaps only surpassed internationally by Almodovar.
Scoop flags a bit toward the middle, but then rights itself with a goofy ending that ties up its loose ends with magic tricks on the River Styx. There are some weird touches in the film, most notably the Diane Arbus-like characters wandering in the background, dwarves and hideously made up women. And I give kudos to a guy who wants to make his silly plots twist and turn on the word of ghosts. Hardly a masterpiece, Scoop is nonetheless a film whose maker cares about the people he’s written about, cast actors who can fill the roles with wit and energy, who’s still got his comic timing, and believes his audience has at least half a brain. The other night, that was more than enough for me.
Miami Vice, 2006. Written and directed by Michael Mann. Starring Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Li Gong, Luis Tosar, Naomie Harris, John Ortiz, Ciarin Hinds and Barry Shabaka Henley.
For God’s sake, this is playing everywhere…
I was never keen on Miami Vice back in the day–as mentioned above, I was too busy checking out Woody Allen to care about Crockett and Tubbs. The pastel tales of the Miami PD, not to mention that grating theme song that played everywhere, got on my nerves. I hear tell that the show had its fair share of humor and cool, that it left an influence on Miami even today, but there was always something about Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas… I think it was the fact that they both can’t act their way out of a dry cleaning bag. That’s a problem in a pair of leading men.
For whatever reason, Michael Mann has decided to resuscitate the TV show, but he’s changed the look and the style, and replaced two easily identifiable hams with two overpraised actors who are also easily identifiable hams. Sure, everyone knows Foxx and Farrell. But Foxx’s ill-deserved Oscar has sent him to the top of a heap he doesn’t deserve; Farrell is just plain lousy. Li Gong stands out as the lone actress trying desperately to give this soulless film some heart. And Michael Mann? Well, I have to wonder if ever a director has assembled such a daring collection of arresting images and visceral moments to support such a hollow plot?
Like most of Mann’s films, the facts don’t amount to a hill of beans: The film opens with Crockett and Tubbs involved in a big mess. A pair of FBI agents is brutally murdered by some kind of informer leak (I didn’t really get what was going on for all the confusion), shot to death by what appeared to be anti-tank guns in a parking lot by the Miami piers, disrupting no one (large booms and explosions are obviously the norm in South Florida). The boys go undercover to take down a giant drug cartel. They are, of course, dressed in the finest clothes, surrounded by other cops equally sharp, who stand around our heroes looking like the gangs from the novels of S. E. Hinton. Once undercover, Crockett and Tubbs meet a number of hoods with greasy hair, have the usual tough-guy standoffs, get betrayed, get smacked around, fall in love, and in the end there’s a big, Saving Private Ryan-style gunfight (spot-on sound effects, verite camera work). The pair are shown making love to their women and falling for them, which, as reliable as Chekov’s gun, means that the girls will get kidnapped and/or beaten.
Miami Vice is a gorgeous movie to look at. Mann’s cinematographer captured the sullen beauty of the Miami summers, with its endless thunderstorms creeping in from the ocean, the wide expanses of water that criminals can run and hide in like a jungle, and the highways stretching out to nowhere. But although Mann clearly seeks to make his film stand out above the rest of the usual action fare, Miami Vice isn’t worth caring about. What do the characters want from life? Is there even a society to protect? Their primary concern seems to revolve around lovemaking, shooting things, and keeping their Armani’s pressed. What is this movie if not a string of the usual cliches with a great score and top-notch costume design? But it doesn’t mean anything and moves too slow to be mindless entertainment.
Even worse, there is no chemistry whatsoever between the actors. “I trust you,” Tubbs says to Crockett, an obviously important statement since we don’t see it for ourselves. Everyone here seems to exist in a narcissistic bubble, staring ahead, looking grim, flexing their muscles as they walk.
Miami Vice is moderately entertaining–“Not as bad as I thought it would be”, my colleague admitted–but you could do better with a dozen other films in the theaters or on DVD. With its supercops and their superduds, Miami Vice says nothing about Miami, nothing about crime, nothing, even, about people. Failing all that, what’s the point?
