You've all heard this before....*ahem* - Once I had a fortune. It said "leave now, life is short, time is luck."

Anyways, this is like - still the peak of digital photography in movies? NOTHING else looks like this. This is one of the most lyrical, abstract and oblique films to come out of Hollywood. German expressionism gone digital - of course this puzzled many when it first came out, Mann is like a silent filmmaker here - pictures tell us a story before actors do. Moods are denoted by shades of colours in neon. And whole pools, waves of emotions revealed by the near-abstraction in the formations of a cloud.

The last time we see Farrell prior to the…

Umpteenth viewing. One of the greatest films ever. Decided to give the director's cut another go after multiple recent re-viewings of the theatrical cut, as well as all of Mann's other films, while writing my profile of him for Vulture.

Here's the thing: While the theatrical cut might be "canonical," I really really love the director's cut as well. Yes, losing the cold open in the club is wrong, but other than that, there's a lot of stuff here that works quite nicely and fleshes things out. I particularly like the way the longer version fleshes out the two male-female relationships -- especially Naomie Harris and Jamie Foxx, whose romance winds up being slightly backgrounded in the theatrical.

Also, the…

The change happen at some point midway through Ali, but video certain bring it upfront: the rich detailed oriented world of Mann's 80s and 90s films mutate from the high novelistic accumulation of detail to one in which all that research becomes background, a clutch for world that remains always in the verge of dissolve. What matter in late Mann is just the permanence of the romantic/mythic gesture in the middle of such world. Mann remains the most Hawksian filmmaker of his generation, much more than self professed Hawks disciples like Hill or Carpenter, not because of his emphasis in professionalism as a stick to measure its characters so much as because his world is so heavily stylized: much like…