jamie foxx

Return to The Mannosphere

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It’s tempting to think that since online movie discussions have migrated from IMDb message boards to Letterboxd rankings and Film Twitter squabbles, communal tastes have skewed a lot less macho.  We’ve supposedly been working towards a more inclusive online movie nerd community, leaving behind the white-boy Film Bro days of the late 90s & early 2000s, when the taste-defining IMDb Top 100 was wallpapered with dorm-room-poster titles like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento.  You can still hear bellowing echoes from the Film Bro days of previous decades, though.  It’s just now wrapped in a protective layer of self-aware irony, with prominent Film Twitter Personalities exalting the “vulgar auteurs” of “Dudes Rock” cinema, clearing space for meatheads like Zach Snyder & Michael Bay in rankings among the modern greats.  It’s a mostly empty, flippant exercise, but a few genuinely great filmmakers do get swept up in the momentum of it – most notably Michael Mann.  Clearly, Michael Mann’s most creative, vibrant work was his initial run of high-style genre films in the 1980s: Thief, Manhunter, The Keep, etc..  However, those are not the Mann classics that vulgar-auteur apologists cite in daily conversation.  In true retro IMDb message board fashion, Mann’s name most often recurs during conversations about The Greatest Films of All Time in the context of two sprawling, macho crime pictures about dudes who rock: Heat & Miami Vice. To get a clear snapshot of how Film Bro culture is still alive & well in a post-Letterboxd world, you have to venture into The Mannosphere and spend some time with that hairy-knuckled pair. 

To truly return to the macho Film Bro 2000s, you obviously have to start with 2006’s Miami Vice.  Consciously updating the titular television show’s extremely 80s style of crime-thriller filmmaking that he himself helped create, Mann leans into the flat, digital aesthetic of the early aughts in this undercover cop procedural, again attempting to define the visual style of a new decade.  As soon as Maxim babes go-go dance to Linkin Park in the opening minute, it’s clear that you have to harbor nostalgia for the bro-down flip-phone cheapness of the 2000s to appreciate Mann’s Miami Vice, or else you will continue to suffer for the following two hours.  Colin Farrell & Jamie Foxx play undercover cops who work to manufacture a grand mid-deal bust, aggressively grumbling through a series of anticlimactic phone calls & meetings but occasionally taking breaks to order mojitos and ride on “go-fast boats” to a butt-rock soundtrack provided by Audioslave.  Before the climactic drug deal inevitably goes wrong and concludes in a shootout, it plays like a DTV action movie without any action scenes, as if Mann had blown all of his squib & explosion budget on movie-star casting & SD cards.  Miami Vice is a lifeless, hideous film about men who greatly respect each other and work tirelessly to protect the women they’re currently sleeping with.  Mann’s embrace of the era’s jarring shift from celluloid textures to digital imagery was daring but unfulfilling; there’s no reason why a $150mil production should resemble an overlong episode of Cheaters.  He did pave a path for more successful actioners to indulge in the uncanniness of modernity, though, getting way ahead of titles like Tenet, Ambulance, and Gemini Man.  He’s undeniably a visionary, even when his vision is an ugly one.

1995’s Heat is a much more pleasant journey into The Mannosphere, one that will remind you that the major titles of the Film Bro canon aren’t individually “bad” by default; they’re just collectively limited by an overbearingly macho perspective.  Nearly three hours long and supported by a cast so stacked it has room to include Bud Cort, Henry Rollins, and Tone Loc, Heat feels like the final word on a very specific category of macho 90s thriller (in which I suppose Point Break was the first word).  Its cat & mouse game between a criminal mastermind (Robert DeNiro) and the harried detective on his tail (Al Pacino) is familiar in tone but epic in scale and sharp in detail, starting with an impeccably well orchestrated armored-truck heist and then spending the next couple hours provoking & profiling its many players (including actors as varied as Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, William Fichtner, Dennis Haysbert, Hank Azaria, Tom Noonan, Danny Trejo, Wes Studi, Jeremy Piven, and even a few people who aren’t men).  Unlike in Miami Vice, there are multiple action sequences in Heat, with plenty standoffs & shootouts keeping the adrenaline up between scenes of gruff cops & criminals venturing home to protect & bed their respective women.  Devoted fans of Mann’s Miami Vice will notice plenty of overlap with this earlier draft’s visual techniques, especially in its uneasy handheld closeups and in an awkwardly green-screened conversation held against the artificial backdrop of Los Angeles city lights.  Heat has all of the Dudes Rock virtues of Miami Vice without looking like a syndicated daytime TV series that couldn’t afford to shoot all of its scripted gunfights.  It’s even got Val Kilmer as a pretty-boy co-lead with awful hair, telegraphing Farrell’s role in the later, inferior film.

None of this reportage is helpful to the Mannsplainers of the world who are already deeply entrenched in The Mannosphere.  I’m only speaking from a place of curiosity about why these two particular titles continually come up in the current film discourse, despite feeling out of step with the general mood of post-Film Bro movie culture.  As a pair they’re instructive in how that culture has changed in the past couple decades, even though they land with opposing effects.  To get a sense of how much better the current cinematic landscape is now in comparison with the artless, bro-infested aughts, check out Miami Vice.  To get a sense of what might have been lost as we left that Mannscape in the rearview, check out Heat, which is an even more engrossing, entertaining thriller now that we’re not living in a world where every acclaimed movie appeals to the same audience. 

-Brandon Ledet

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

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You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted. 

In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye. 

There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.

Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition. 

They Cloned Tyrone is currently on Netflix.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

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I was very excited this past summer when, during that period when things were starting to reopen and I was able to go back to the theater for the first time since Emma. way back in March 2020, to see Black Widow. I managed to see two others in theaters before the end of the year, when threats of Omicron (Persei 8) means that many of us are once again sworn off of the in-person theatrical experience, Nicole Kidman be damned. For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to squeeze in a few last 2021 releases in order to soothe my conscience with regards to ensuring that my forthcoming end of the year list was sufficiently well rounded and informed, consistently texting Brandon that “I just need[ed] to finish Matrix Resurrections/The French Dispatch/etc. and then I [would] ‘call it.'” Many years ago, I wrote that no one could gaslight me like I could gaslight myself, and like Charles Boyer himself, I just kept moving those goalposts, until I think we are finally at an end, as I got the opportunity to see Spider-Man: No Way Home in a relatively safe environment courtesy of coincidental access to a GMC Terrain and Austin’s own Blue Starlite Drive In. 

Spoilers!

We open just where we left off in Far from Home, with our friendly neighborhood Spider-Twink (Tom Holland) having just had his secret identity as Peter Parker exposed by J. Jonah Jameson, once again played by J.K. Simmons, although this time instead of being an editorial-mad editor, he’s here running a Daily Bugle that, instead of being a decently respectable publication, is not-quite-InfoWars. Although no criminal charges associated with the accusation that he killed Mysterio manage to stick (thanks in no small part to Charlie Cox reprising his role as Matt “Daredevil” Murdock), the repercussions of the allegations ripple throughout his life. Peter and May have to move out of their apartment to avoid harassment from Mysterio truthers, and the controversy costs Peter and his friends the opportunity to go to MIT together. It’s the last of these that prompts Peter to seek out assistance from Dr. Strange to try and reverse the damage, but Peter’s second guessing causes the magic to go haywire, setting off a bizarre series of events. 

Seriously, spoilers. 

As a result, everyone who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man, even in other universes, begins to appear in New York. Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) from Spider-Man 2? Of course! Willem Dafoe’s hypnotic Sam Raimi-movies Green Goblin? You betcha! Electro (Jamie Foxx) from Amazing Spider-Man 2? Um, ok, yeah. Thomas Haden Church as Raimi’s Sandman and Rhys Ifans as Lizard? If, um, if you want, I guess. Aunt May (Rosemary Harris)?! Unfortunately, no, although I kept an eagle eye out for both her and Mageina Tovah. Peter manages to round up these accidental invaders with help from Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya), and Strange prepares to send them back. However, when each of them shares that the last thing that they remember are the moments leading up to what we the audience know are their deaths (give or take a Sandman), Peter decides that he can’t knowingly send them to their respective dooms without instead curing them so that they might live instead: repairing the broken interface between Octavius and his cybernetic arms, ridding Osbourne of the Goblin identity, delectrifying Electro, etc. It’s actually kind of nice, but of course, goblins gotta goblin, so it goes off the rails, which is where things start to get really interesting. 

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one. A few years back, the CW DC shows did a big multiverse crossover event that managed to incorporate a shocking number of appearances from “other universes” that were explicitly other media adaptations: Smallville, Doom Patrol, Titans, the 1990s Flash, Superman Returns, and even more esoteric examples like Lucifer. There were appearances from Huntress from the short-lived Birds of Prey series from 2002, Burt Ward reprising his role as Dick “Robin” Grayson from the 1960s, and having Kevin Conroy, who voiced Batman in the 1990s animated series (aka my Batman), appear in the flesh as Bruce Wayne for the first time. Watching it unfold was like a matryoshka doll of niche specificity; it was a much lower budget than this, obviously, but it was still fun. I knew Far from Home was planned as a big crossover, that would start off the multiverse thing, which was hinted at in WandaVision and would play a big role in the upcoming Doctor Strange and the Who Cares, blah blah blah. But following on the heels of the what narratively should (but obviously capitalistically never could) have been the finale of this whole enterprise with Endgame, I didn’t really think that another installment in the Disney money-printing machine would manage to elicit the same kind of emotional thrill that of four-color yesteryear. 

And then it did, somehow. Maybe? There’s no Disney logo at the beginning; when the Sony logo came up, followed by Tristar, I thought it was another trailer, until the ending audio from Far from Home played. But I’m getting off track. Pre-release, it was impossible to avoid the rumors. Would Tobey Maguire come back? Surely not. The rights alone would make it all so complicated. But someone saw, or said they saw, or maybe heard from the PA that you met at a friend’s party that Andrew Garfield and his Tumblr-famous jiggly puffs were spotted back in the old spandex. And somehow, post-release, even after a couple of weeks, I assumed that it must not have happened, since no one on Twitter had spoiled it (for me) yet, but yeah, here they are. And, like, it’s impossible not to feel a swell of something warm inside when they all meet here. 

It’s common to call reference-heavy, perhaps even fan service-y fare a “love letter to the fans.” I’m not usually a fan of that phrase since most of the things that are intended to be so—perhaps especially when it comes to my beloved Star Trek franchise—usually come out muddy at best and are frequently, sometimes infamously, bad. And this does run the risk of that, especially if one is too young to really remember or to have ever even seen the older films referenced herein. But sometimes, especially in trying times, maybe a little bit of nostalgia is all that you need. Sometimes, it’s more than enough. Spider-Man: Three Spider-Men wrang legitimate tears out of me, and not just because no one bothered, I assume, to see what Rosemary Harris was doing. After the two older Spider-Men recount to Gen-Z Peter how they respectively lost their Uncle Ben and/or Gwen Stacy, Amazing Spider-Man gets the opportunity to save a falling MJ here, and this time he succeeds where he failed before, and it’s genuinely one of the most emotionally satisfying things that this bombastic, bloated franchise has ever managed to affect. 

And that’s just the bittersweet stuff; there’s still plenty of humor to go around, although obviously not on the level of Homecoming. I’ve spoiled enough of the drama that I’ll leave the comedy unrepeated so that there’s something for you to still discover if you haven’t already seen this one. If there’s one big quibble that I do have, it’s that Jameson as no-celebrities-were-harmed Alex Jones doesn’t quite work for me. Firstly, there’s no way that Marvel could ever let J.K. Simmons ever go full Jones; Disney might take a couple of potshots at him by having Jameson hawk not-quite-nootropics, but a film under their umbrella is never going to have Jameson get involved with Pizzagate or get taken to court for calling the Battle of New York survivors crisis actors. Although the film briefly touches on what the equivalent of our own real world conspiracy theorists would look like in the MCU, it’s pretty toothless. Going soft on Jones with a parody that neither sees him get his comeuppance nor push his pathological adherence to his outrageous beliefs past the line where his charisma fails to walk him back … you just wonder why they bothered. 

I guess I should close by saying that although this was a lot of fun, it doesn’t really hook me on the franchise’s future at all. I didn’t stay for the post-credits scene, and although it’s true that I was, as stated, at a drive-in and that my bladder was full, I still simply couldn’t bring myself to care enough to stay. But, like, does that matter? Did it ever? Maybe. Probably not. As a capper on the Spider-Man series, this would also do, and it brings it all home.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Baby Driver (2017)

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In the few days since watching Edgar Wright’s latest at the theater, starting almost immediately after the screening, I’ve been suffering a very annoying case of swimmer’s ear. I can’t hear very well from the affected appendage, which is ringing slightly & swollen to the point of discomfort. I also can’t help but think that this sudden affliction is somehow cosmic retribution for not especially caring about Baby Driver, a film everyone seems to love without reservation, but only stirred apathy in me. In the film, a young twenty-something getaway driver with a heart of gold (named Baby, naturally) suffers from a near lifelong affliction of severe tinnitus. To ease the constant ringing in his ears, he choreographs his day around an endless stack of carefully-curated iPod classics, each loaded with just the right song selection to drown out the noise in his head & get him through his reluctant life in crime. Given how (mostly) great the soundtrack Baby selects for himself is (including tracks from artists as varied as T. Rex, Young MC, and The Damned) and the immediately apparent exuberance Wright shows behind the wheel, it’s downright sinful that I couldn’t manage to have fun watching this summertime exercise in action & style. Do not worry, though. My ear seems to have been struck down for the offense.

I don’t want to waste too much server space shitting on Baby Driver, since it’s bringing a lot of people a lot of joy. It’s easy to recognize what they see in it: stylized car chases, a killer soundtrack, playful action movie dialogue, etc. It’s just frustrating to me that a film with such an exciting premise (a babyfaced criminal timing his bank robbery getaways to pop music) ultimately feels so conventional & uninspired. It starts off sublimely committed to its central conceit too. Baby (played by real-life babyface Ansel Elgort) draws attention to himself by drumming on the steering wheel & lipsycing for his life to a blues rock diddy outside an in-progress robbery. His irreverence is immediately infectious. After establishing Baby’s skills behind the wheel in a show-off’s getaway, the movie establishes its main hook up front in the opening credits. While Baby strolls to a local coffee shop to cap off the heist, the music in his earbuds syncs up to the imagery onscreen, to the point where graffiti & street signs echo lyrics from the soundtrack. In this opening adrenaline rush, it’s easy to be seduced into thinking you’re watching a high octane, pop music-driven modernization of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a visually complex musical where every meticulously crafted detail in play is just an extension of the song developing in your ear. That’s why it’s such a letdown when the movie then reveals itself to be a much more conventional, instantly-familiar heist picture.

That’s not to say that a conventional heist picture can’t be a worthwhile mode of entertainment. Even while disappointing in ambition, Baby Driver features some exceptional performances from its actors. Lily James is absurdly sweet in her role as a diner waitress, feeling like a cartoolishly pure distillation of wholesome Americana. Jamie Foxx also steals attention whenever he’s allowed the opportunity in his role as the loose cannon criminal who can’t be trusted not to blow every heist apart into a bloodsoaked catastrophe, an unpredictable element of danger that helps the film’s “one last job” plot feel at least somewhat distinctive instead of mind-numbingly cliché. I’m a lot less hot on what Jon Hamm & Kevin Spacey are doing as Foxx’s criminal cohorts, which might get to the core of why I was underwhelmed by the movie as a whole. It’s not necessarily a fault with the performances, but more to do with Wright’s screenplay. Spacey & Hamm are tasked with delivering deliberately over-stylized, insincerely quippy dialogue that makes Baby Driver feel overall like a return to that deluge of mediocre mid-to-late 90s sardonic crime movies that followed in the wake of Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs. Even back then those overly-jokey, scripted-to-death crime pictures were already exhaustingly redundant & flat. In a 2017 context the effect is even worse, feeling about as try-hard & unfunny as Deadpool.

It’s possible my mood was soured before Baby Driver even began, given Edgar Wright’s snooty pre-screening PSA about how going to the theater is an essential cinematic experience, as opposed to to the slackjawed dimwit slobs who watch Netflix on the couch (i.e. everyone alive). Mostly, though, I just felt let down that Wright abandoned his central Action Movie Cherbourg concept so quickly after following it to its furthest end in the opening credits. Whenever stray gunfire or gearshifts sync to the music in later scenes, it just feels like a distant echo of a better movie that could’ve been. Without its defining gimmick commanding every moment, Baby Driver feels alternately like post-Tarantino slick action runoff & a made-for-TV mockbuster version of the equally mythic, but infinitely more stylish Drive. I probably shouldn’t be saying these things aloud, though, just in case it’s risking hearing loss in my currently uninfected ear. I hope you, Wright, and the pop music gods in charge of my hearing will eventually forgive me for the transgression, lest I need to start shopping on eBay for some secondhand mp3 players.

-Brandon Ledet