Saluting the Mann of the hour
Screenings honor Michael Mann, plus feminist satire of ‘9 to 5’ and Colin Higgins.
Michael Mann has already come up here a few times recently around the release of his new film “Ferrari,” still in theaters. The American Cinematheque launched a tribute series over the weekend, with Mann in person for a number of Q&As. The sharpness and vividness with which he recalls production details of his older films is riveting.
The series also brings into focus the ways in which Mann returns to certain archetypes throughout his work but always brings something new, whether technically in his craft or in his ongoing examinations of masculine identity.
The series began with a screening of the 1995 film “Heat,” which has taken on a life of its own through fervent fandom. It likely will be the movie remembered as Mann’s singular masterwork. The performances by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as, respectively, a thief and the cop out to catch him bring such intensity and power to the film. (“Heat” also plays in 35mm Thursday through Sunday at the New Beverly.)
As Kenneth Turan wrote in his original review, “No one sees as much epic existential heroism in the romantic fatalism of hard men and the women who try to love them as Mann does.”
Then came a double bill of “Ferrari” along with “Ali,” Mann’s 2001 portrait of boxer Muhammad Ali.
In a 2001 interview with Michael Sragow, Mann spoke about how he approached conveying the full sweep of what Ali had been through. “How did I come up with the structure?” he said. “Out of desperation, the way I come up with any of these things. I can’t possibly bring you into this movie with some expository scene. I have to bring people as much as I can into Ali’s life.”
“Collateral,” starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, plays at the Egyptian Theatre on Sunday, with a Mann Q&A moderated by critic Katie Walsh, who co-hosts the “Miami Nice” podcast that exhaustively examines Mann’s 2006 movie version of “Miami Vice.”
In his review of “Collateral” Turan wrote, “As a result of Mann’s craftsmanship and concern, ‘Collateral’ crackles with energy and purpose, a propulsive film with character on its mind and confident men and women on both sides of the camera. ‘It’s what I do for a living,’ Cruise’s Vincent likes to say when pressed. Making films like this is what Michael Mann does for his.”
Mann also was a part of our recent Envelope directors roundtable, which is now available to stream on YouTube and watch on Spectrum. As Mann said when asked to describe the job of directing, “It’s everything. You are the film, the film is you. You’re living every part of it, every component of it, and you’re trying to figure out what strategically, if I break down all the different tasks, what’s critical? What’s not critical?
Everything’s expressive, but how is it expressive? So it’s kind of symphonic.”
A COLIN HIGGINS DOUBLE BILL
The New Beverly Cinema will screen a double bill of films directed by Colin Higgins on Tuesday and Wednesday, 1980’s “9 to 5” and 1982’s “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” He’s an intriguing and undersung figure, the screenwriter of “Harold and Maude” before transitioning into a directing career that was tragically cut short by his death from AIDS-related illness in 1988 at age 47.
“9 to 5” stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton (in her film debut) as three office workers who find themselves taking over from their chauvinist boss (Dabney Coleman) after they accidentally serve him rat poison in his coffee and then kidnap him to cover it up.
In reviewing “9 to 5,” The Times’ Kevin Thomas wrote that the film’s stars “deliver the goods in high comic style, scoring some points for women’s equality in the office.” Thomas added that the film “appears to be an audience-pleaser that never missed an intended laugh. However, it strays so far from reality for so long that it threatens to become mired in overly complicated silliness and to lose sight of the serious satirical points it wants to make. Happily, it does pull together for a finish that’s as strong as it is funny.”
“The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” adapts the stage musical of the same name, in which a madam (Parton) and a sheriff (Burt Reynolds) run afoul of a TV personality (Dom DeLuise) and try to keep her brothel from being shut down.
In her original review of the comedy, Sheila Benson wrote that the star personas of Parton and Reynolds don’t mesh together well, “so we have two larger-than-lifesize images that float through the movie like those vast Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. They can’t do much more than bump into each other regally and drift away.”
Benson did give special notice to Charles Durning’s song-and-dance number “Sidestep,” saying it “might very well be worth all the rest of the whole petty-vulgar movie put together and almost worth the price of admission. … This shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise. But it is — a real, teardown-the-house showstopper, the sort of number you play over and over in your head, savoring his deft, tiny foot movements and that vaudeville trick of putting his hat on sideways, then changing direction under it, so it’s on him the right way. The rest of the film should have such life.”
DE PALMA AND SCHRADER’S ‘OBSESSION’
Though it is now something of a lesser effort in both of their filmographies, the 1976 film “Obsession” brings together Paul Schrader as screenwriter with Brian De Palma as director. With a score by Bernard Herrmann to boot, the film is a selfconscious riff on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”: An American businessman (Cliff Robertson) who has never fully recovered from the death of his wife and daughter 16 years earlier, falls for a woman (Genevieve Bujold) who reminds him of his late wife.
The film screens in 16mm at the Lumiere Music Hall on Thursday.
This article is taken from the Jan. 5 edition of Indie Focus, a weekly newsletter about a world of Only Good Movies. Sign up at latimes .com/newsletters