Calling media "dated" as strictly a pejorative needs to stop. It implies that only contemporary works matter because they're about The Way We Live Now, ignoring the archival value of a cultural statement. Sure, there's a spectrum through which one can have this conversation, but it very often winds up as a dead-end. If there is a common complaint with Mann's work, it's that his attempts at staying in the vanguard of taste fossilize portions of his works in amber -- specifically with music.

So much of how we process and compartmentalize taste and our own sense of time comes from nostalgia, that created bridge between actual experience and remembered experience. That's how Will Graham inserts himself into the headspace…

88/100

Manhunter is a progression of a certain kind of movie making. After The Keep - an ethereal, vivid dreamworld horror - was torn to shreds by Paramount, it only seems fair that Mann received another shot at the same textures that The Keep exudes, even in its compromised form. Like Mann's previous effort, this adaptation of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon is the cinematic equivalent of a waking nightmare; clinical and horrifying even when the monsters are nowhere in sight. It's a film that plays with editing trickery and heightened illusions, contrasting a procedural aesthetic with eerie flashes of surreal imagery and laying a blood-pumping score over each deliberate footstep, but it remains tender; focusing on the central, protective dynamic…

Was an 88, now a 100

Is there a more dangerous Hollywood film than Manhunter? Not necessarily on an ethical/moral level of what it’s showing, but *why* - it conveys, on an allegorical register, exactly why we all stumble into a dark auditorium with a crowd of strangers and share in fantasies, dreams, desires, even more so than Vertigo or Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game. The film gives us nothing less than a neon fairy-tale of a man who is employed to hunt other men who delight in watching and murdering human bodies. The key is the record – the saved document of the act. An object as coveted as the act itself. Rewinding, unspooling, and letting them linger in the…

The character of Dr Hannibal Lecter or in this case Lecktor, reminds me of Joker. Why? Both super villains are 100% unforgettable, and both have been played to excellence by different actors. While Brian Cox’s Lecktor isn’t front and center in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, he does have a gigantic screen presence in his few scenes just chillin in a prison cell, while playing mind games with William Petersen’s Will Graham. I’ll save the debate on who’s the best Hannibal for another day.

To me, Manhunter is mostly about tortured soul, Will Graham, trying to get his way of living back.  Something very intimate was taken from him, a part of his body and soul most never recover from. He’s at…

I recently read a book called The Serial Killer Whisperer that my mother sent to me, about a man with brain trauma that found he could relate to serial killers via mail and get them to talk. What the killers mostly told him, from what was printed in the book, was generally aggrandized versions of their crimes, but even the most aggrandized versions of their crimes rarely came close to the theatricality depicted in even the tamest Thomas Harris adaptations that I've seen (admittedly, this is limited). But what Manhunter shows is leagues and leagues closer to what most serial killers are probably like than the television show Habbinal.

This is notable because both use rich, deep cinematography to draw…

Before THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) was Michael Mann's excellent and idiosyncratic 1986 adaptation of the first Thomas Harris book to feature Hannibal Lecter, RED DRAGON. Mann's aesthetic was firmly tied to his concurrent work on the TV series MIAMI VICE and CRIME STORY, but in glorious widescreen (DPed by Dante Spinotti) the use of bright whites, pastels and deep blues lends this psychological-cum-police-procedural thriller a hyperreal edge. William Petersen is terrific as Will Graham, who is pulled back into duty to profile a killer of entire families known as "The Tooth Fairy" (Tom Noonan). As part of getting himself back in the mindset, Graham approaches Lecter (Brian Cox, quite different from the later Anthony Hopkins and Mads Mikkelsen…