Classic Movie Review Manhunter

Manhunter (1986) 

Directed by Michael Mann

Written by Michael Mann

Starring William Peterson, Dennis Farina, Brian Cox, Kim Greist, Joan Allen 

Release Date August 15th, 1986 

Published July 16th, 2024 

The visual simplicity of the opening images of Michael Mann's Manhunter are sublime. We open on a flashlight falling upon a flight of stairs. It's pitch black other than the flashlight. This could be a home invader or an investigator at this point. Toys are strewn across the stairs in the haphazard way that young children carelessly like to play. The visual signs of life in a typical American home are all present. As the person with the flashlight climbs the stairs, it's light falling on more signifiers of life, we arrive at the top of the stairs. The flashlight pans into what appears to a be a child's room, seemingly empty. 

A few steps further and we arrive in a bedroom where we see our first evidence of people. A woman and a man are in bed and for a moment, it's not clear if they are alive or dead. The flashlight begins to hold steady on the woman who finally moves to signify that she's alive. The flashlight, now unmoving, continues to hold on the woman as it becomes clear that she's waking up. The fog of sleep still in her mind she finally begins to rise and just as she might be about to react to the sight of a stranger with a flashlight, we cut to the opening title of the film, Manhunter. 

The clear indication is that this person with a flashlight is about to commit a horrific murder. That Michael Mann uses a signifier as simple as a flashlight to toy with us, to give us hope that perhaps we are arriving at an investigation and not an invasion is part of the building tension, the rising suspense. The way the flashlight falls on the woman in bed and holds on her becomes the unsettling implication of a terrible crime about to be committed. Mann's direction is simple, the visual storytelling is electrifying and yet it's still just a person with a flashlight and visual context. That's pure film language. 

Over the years, Michael Mann will come to be associated with a style that is more bombastic and far less subtle. No less skilled or polished, but somehow more modern and garish for having a bigger budget, bigger stars, and bigger ambition. I'm not the biggest fan of Michael Mann's blockbuster era. I don't love the kinetic, overwrought style of Heat. I genuinely believe his movie Blackhat is one of the worst blockbusters of the last 10 years, but I still respect Michael Mann. I know that at any moment, Mann can still do what he did in Manhunter and blow my mind with his simple, straight-forward grasp of the language of film. 

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) 

Directed by Ang Lee

Written by Jean-Christophe Castelli

Starring Joe Alwyn, Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, Vin Diesel, Steve Martin, Chris Tucker

Release Date November 11th, 2016 

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk stars Joe Alwyn as Billy Lynn, an Army Specialist who earned instant fame when his attempt to save a wounded soldier was captured on camera and went viral. Soon after Billy is back in Texas and he and his fellow soldiers on tour like rock stars complete with a Hummer limousine ride to their next gig, appearing at halftime of a Football game alongside Destiny’s Child (the film is set in 2003, before Beyonce left her friends behind).

The surreal nature of this rock star treatment is not lost on the men of Bravo Company. It is both intoxicating and repellent. They are joined by an agent, Chris Tucker, constantly on his phone attempting to sell the rights to their story and get the soldiers well compensated. Yet, they are also weary of the agent and the fame that threatens to rob them of the reality of what they experienced in war and all that they lost.

Surreal is a term that best fits Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Director Ang Lee shot the film at the highest film rate ever used for a mainstream feature film. That said, most of the country will see the movie in standard definition that unquestionably robs the film of the effect Lee is searching for. Lee wants moviegoers to feel how awkward and strange this experience is for the soldiers of Bravo Company by tearing down the cinematic walls to make us feel like we are in these awkward spaces with the soldiers.

You might think, as I first thought, that the high frame rate was intended to make the war scenes more spectacular and realistic but that isn’t the case. The high frame rate actually is combined with the awkward and downright off-putting way that actors address each other by staring directly at the camera to strip away the artifice of film and further put us into the mindset of Billy as he is having these bizarre experiences, going from hand to hand combat in which he killed a man at close quarters to standing behind Beyonce on national television and on to having strangers tell him how his story can be bought and sold.

Forcing us to see Billy so clearly and look directly into the eyes of the people talking to him, as ungodly awkward as that is from the perspective of how movies are traditionally made, unmistakably alters the way in which we experience Billy himself and how we identify with him. From that perspective the casting of newcomer Joe Alwyn also plays a unique role. Alwyn is a blank slate for us to project our own Billy Lynn onto.

Alwyn’s co-stars underline that odd perspective. Steve Martin, Vin Diesel, Kristen Stewart and Chris Tucker are actors that we in the audience already have opinions of and expectations for. We see these performers in specific ways and having them look directly at the camera while they address Billy furthers the surreal nature of the story being told. Yes, it takes us out of the scene but the effect is very much the same thing that Billy himself is feeling, a feeling being displaced from reality,  a place where 

Vin Diesel isn’t the muscle-headed action star but your inspiring Sgt. Where Kristen Stewart is your sister and not the equally beloved and reviled star of Y/A Vampire blockbusters. And finally, it’s a strange place where Chris Tucker and Steve Martin aren’t trying to make you laugh but instead using their oily charm to try and make a movie of you.

I could be over thinking the room on this movie but my genuine belief is that the very things I found incredibly awkward and off-putting were actually the things intended to be awkward and off-putting because they were awkward and off-putting as much to Billy as to us. Yes, in real life, people are supposed to look you in the eye when they speak to you and you to them but not at the movies. When actors look directly at the camera in a movie it is usually intended as a gag. Here, it’s intended to break us away from our passive observance of what is happening on screen, to what is happening to Billy. It’s forceful and pushy and showy but I cannot deny the effect it had on me.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is weird and surreal and wildly effective in how it connects us to the weird and surreal adventure that the main character is on. Billy Lynn is trapped on a bizarre rollercoaster of emotions from fear to anguish to unwanted celebrity, displacement from his family and deepened connection to his adopted Army family. It’s a never-ending whirlwind of extreme emotions that Billy is forced by duty and training to endure without comment, without overt displays of emotion. That Ang Lee captures that feeling and brings it to us in such a forceful way makes this movie rather brilliant, in an off-putting and uncomfortable sort of way. 

Movie Review Interstellar

Interstellar (2014) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan 

Written by Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn 

Release Date November 5th 2014 

Aside from episodes of The Big Bang Theory and a viewing of the Errol Morris-Stephen Hawking documentary A Brief History of Time, I have no real concept of physics. That’s not to say I am not curious about how science can assess the origins of the universe, or how time began, but rather to set up a context for what may be the most ignorant or silly piece of writing I have ever attempted.

You see, I am going to attempt to use my less- than-rudimentary knowledge of physics to explain my affinity for Christopher Nolan’s  Interstellar, a movie that I have wrestled with for a decade now. It's a remarkable movie, a towering epic in some ways and an intimate drama about fathers and daughters from a different angle. Much like Nolan's conception of physics, Interstellar is more than what it appears. 

Spoilers ahead: It's been 10 years. See the damn movie!

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is the living embodiment of the concept known as the Singularity. He is a point at which a function takes on an infinite value. Once Cooper enters the black hole he comes to embody the singularity which in this case is a fifth-dimensional space where he can communicate with the past via gravity, thus telling his past self where to find the new NASA that has gone into hiding in the wake of the global blight, a condition that is precipitating a seeming apocalypse in the film’s narrative.

Cooper must discover NASA so that he can travel into space, go through a wormhole and then enter the black hole, where he then sends messages to himself to find NASA. This concept only sounds circular. In fact, when I thought of it, I became depressed. It gave me the impression of a never-ending hamster wheel that essentially amounted to the life of all mankind.

Then I was thunderstruck by a notion: Time is not linear. Cooper is not repeating the same action over and over on an infinite loop. Rather, everything that Cooper is experiencing is happening all at once. Linear time — seconds, hours, minutes, days — are the creation of man. We created the calendar to give ourselves a sense of control; a way of harnessing time. The reality is, however, that time is infinite and every experience you’ve ever had is ongoing from the moment of birth to the moment you read this article. It’s all happening right now.

That sounds kind of hazy, doesn’t it? I feel like I’ve had a contact high sometime recently just trying to grasp this thought. Nevertheless, it’s the only thought that has made sense to me since I saw Interstellar, a decade ago. The movie would be entirely devoid of hope, optimism, and joy if I were not able to convince myself that Cooper wasn’t a hamster; that we are, in fact, not hamsters, simply following the wheel until we die.

The moments of grace and love in Interstellar would be meaningless if they simply existed to inform the next moment and the next, infinitely. The only hopeful understanding of the film is to see time laid out sideways with Cooper drinking a beer with his father-in-law (John Lithgow) happening at exactly the same time that he is nearly dying on a frozen planet after a fight with Matt Damon. Time is not an infinite, linear, explicable loop but rather an oozing morass flowing in all directions, with all of life’s incidents happening all at the same time while we choose how to experience it all.

Yeah, that’s what I learned from Interstellar after a decade of rolling it around in my mind. And you know what, It’s kind of hard not to love a movie when you come away with a personal revelation like that one. Each time I revisit Interstellar I find a new joy in the experience, a new complex thought about time travel, our memories, and the concept of infinity and time. Interstellar invites you to have these thoughts and never dictates to you what is right or wrong in your thought process. And I love that.