val kilmer

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

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2015)

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I don’t really remember much about John Frankenheimer’s 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau. My parents rented it the summer it came to VHS, and, presumably ignorant of how mature it was, allowed me to watch it with them (of course, my father was and is the kind of person who really only objected to profanity and sex, while violence was ignored most of the time; it’s telling that they allowed me to watch this movie, but Miss Congeniality was banned in our house years later due to Sandra Bullock’s “foul” mouth). Most of what I remember is that Fairuza Balk, who I knew from Return to Oz, was in it, as was some hideous wheezing monster named Marlon Brando, whom my mother tried unsuccessfully to convince me was once a handsome movie star. This was a movie that had hyena monsters and a horribly graphic scene of a beast person giving birth, but I don’t remember those elements at all while Brando’s white-painted face haunted me for years.

But we’re not here to talk about that movie; we’re here to talk about what that movie could have been, or, more accurately, about the documentary about the movie that could have been, had original director Richard Stanley not been fired from the project, and all the myriad ways that fate conspired to destroy his vision. In Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, director David Gregory delves into Stanley’s fascination with H.G. Wells’s novel from early childhood and his lifelong pursuit of giving the book a film adaptation that lived up to the story’s potential. Following the successes of his cyberpunk post-apocalypse horror flick Hardware and his sophomore follow up Dust Devil, Stanley found himself in talks with New Line about directing a film for them. Due to his lifelong love of Dr. Moreau, he successfully pitched the adaptation; it was all downhill from there.

Lost Soul covers a lot of ground, with interviews from sources as varied as Balk, Stanley, New Line founder and president Robert Shaye, Moreau animal behavioral consultant Peter Elliott, and actors Marco Hofschneider, Temuera Morrison, Neil Young (no, not that one), Fiona Mahl, and Rob Morrow (who took over for Val Kilmer in the Prendick role when Kilmer’s insistence on fewer shooting days meant that Kilmer was shifted into the role of Montgomery, initially filled by James Woods; Morrow would also eventually bow out and be replaced by David Thewlis). Beginning with Stanley’s upbringing as the child of a single mother who was fascinated by occultism both academically and personally and following through to Stanley’s current career (spoiler alert: it’s not pretty), the documentary details how Stanley, a young indie director whose pet project suddenly became a multi-million dollar picture when Brando expressed interest in the title role, was eventually fired from the production when he found himself in over his head and beset by problems. The literal hurricanes that destroyed many sets were nothing compared to the setback caused by Brando’s daughter’s suicide during pre-production, making it impossible to film significant portions of the film for several weeks. Worse still were the mind games that Kilmer used to undermine and belittle Stanley; the actor was going through a nasty divorce at the time, but that doesn’t begin to cover a fraction of the horror stories of intimidation tactics and threats the cast and crew recall from their time working on the film.

Stanley was ultimately fired as the result of many things that were outside of his control, and this story is a tragic one. It’s not the most engaging documentary I’ve seen, and lacks the warmth and nostalgia of, say, Best Worst Movie, which also tackled the making of a notoriously bad feature. Still, it’s a fascinating look behind the curtain of one of the biggest box office and critical flops of the 1990s, and it serves as a reminder of how an artist can be destroyed by concerns, commercial or otherwise, that are outside of his or her hands. Stanley was propelled far beyond what he was suited and prepared for too early in his career and his talent and drive weren’t enough to save him or Dr. Moreau.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond