Michael Mann

[godardian]

if videogames really are the future, i'm tapping out right now. consider this to be where the kids and i part ways. kubrick would never do video games.

oh, this is just to make money! thank god for inferior quality products. frailty, thy name is franchise.

I am completely with you on this one. I don't like movies that look like video games, and I don't like video games passing themselves off as somehow cinematic. Cinema should be kept separate from video games; the two things are not like peanut butter and chocolate.

[Split Infinitive]

I am completely with you on this one. I don't like movies that look like video games, and I don't like video games passing themselves off as somehow cinematic. Cinema should be kept separate from video games; the two things are not like peanut butter and chocolate.

I'm curious about your justification for the latter part -- why can't games aspire to be more cinematic?  I think history has shown the devestating pitfalls of game-to-film adaptations (though some visionary genius might shuck the trend; I highly doubt it), but a lot of the most popular games of the last several years have made great use of the cinematic aspects.  I recently had the opportunity to play a game called Shadow of the Colossus, an incredibly cinematic game, and found that the cinematic technique greatly enhanced my emotional attachment to the game.

[©brad]

i kinda agree w/ split.

i don't like movies that look like video games either, but what's wrong w/ video games that are adapting cinematic qualities? that's a good thing. 

[pete]

having cinematic qualities is different from an interactive movie though.  I'm not a video game buff by any means, but I see games right now that are very innovative in the freedom they give to the player and game play, but then I see games that are adapted from movies, that are pretty big-budgeted and shallow and are essentially high-concept projects between a few producers who do not even know how to make Mario shoot fireballs. 

[Gold Trumpet]

The video game revolution should have positive results for film. Like television in the 1950s, video games are trying to justify themselves by being more encompassing entertainment for everyone (the model, of course, is movies). And like television in the 1950s, it is attracting more people and better sales than movies. If movies start to look and feel like other forms of entertainment, a changing of the guard will happen again like in the 1960s. The examples are clear. In the late 1950s, there were 58 television westerns on TV. Television popularized that movie genre to such an extreme it became suffocated and subsuquently died out in 15 years as a popular genre. Before it did, though, the very best and most innovative Westerns ever made were made in 'The Wild Bunch', 'The Hired Hand' and 'Mccabe and Mrs Miller' and others. If people feel they are getting bad imitations of movies with video games like in television with the westerns, popular film will have to evolve again.

[MacGuffin]

Foxx, Mann reunite — again
Source: MTV

Don't look now, but Jamie Foxx and Michael Mann are developing an Alfred Hitchcock/ Jimmy Stewart-like dependency. They've worked together in 2001's "Ali," 2004's "Collateral" and the big-screen adaptation of "Miami Vice" and are planning to reunite again for "Damage Control," a drama about the perils of the sports-agency business. Now, after promoting "Vice," they'll return to the set of a Middle East military drama called "The Kingdom," directed by Peter Berg and co-starring Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper. "It's a serious film, produced by Michael Mann," Foxx said. The flick tells the story of no-nonsense government officials sent to examine a bombing in the war-torn region. "They're shooting it now; they closed down for a few weeks so Jamie could do [interviews for 'Vice']," Mann said. The drama is expected in theaters next year.

[I Love a Magician]

What if Michael Mann directed a Batman movie. Hm.

[pete]

they'd spend 30 minutes to explain how certain technologies are possible, and gotham will take place in compton.

[edison]

and Foxx would play Batman

[cron]

kubrick would never do video games.

i am not sure of this. while i think he would've never allowed his films to become mediocre videogame adaptations, he was a nerd, and he was also a businessman, and he might have ended up producing ideas for a unique device or a game thing, kind of like what shigeru miyamoto and hideo kojima do. he might've created what homer dreamed of in homer vs patty and selma.

[Gold Trumpet]

kubrick would never do video games.

i am not sure of this. while i think he would've never allowed his films to become mediocre videogame adaptations, but he was a nerd, and he was also a businessman, and he might have ended up producing ideas for a unique device or a game thing, kind of like what shigeru miyamoto and hideo kojima do.

Highly doubtful. Kubrick was a supreme believer in his films standing up for themselves. He refused to give commentaries. In the 1960s he refused to do seminars at Yale because he didn't want to organize his thoughts on filmmaking for others. He even had difficulty lending original prints to film festivals that wanted to salute an actor who was in one of his films. His contracts with studios stipulated all films would be under his ownership after so many years to ensue that his films would never be exploited. In so many ways he was a filmmaker who kept his thoughts and his films to himself. Umberto Eco once said the first duty of an author after they wrote a book was to die. The rationality is that it would stop the author from helping his audience interpret his book. I think Kubrick believed in a similar philosophy.

[cron]

all i was saying is that kubrick's imagination was so inmense that , had he lived more, he might have shown interest for the development of new technologies in a medium different to filmmaking, and a videogame could've been that medium. i see what nintendo's doing with its new console and i think you need the same sort of creativity kubrick had, to even imagine a thing like that and then make it work.  it's cheesy but whenever i see a cool and useful gadget i think  that kubrick would be proud of it.

[Gold Trumpet]

it's cheesy but whenever i see a cool and useful gadget i think  that kubrick would be proud of it.

Alright, I'll give you that. Kubrick forged ahead with electronica music in A Clockwork Orange and was on the cusp of the newest special effects when developing A.I. I think he could have found interest in video games, but I don't think he would have ever created one or allowed for any of his films to have developed into one.

Note: Does anyone else notice that a lot more people these days are trying to legitimize video games? It goes back to earlier conversations in this thread and others, but with the fanaticism of video games, serious filmmaking may take another step back in youth appreciation. It did so at the end of the 60s with the popularization of rock n roll and every new fad seems to dismantle more excitement for great films.

Segway: http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9116.msg230431#msg230431

[MacGuffin]

Columbia, Mann get into spy game
Studio picks up Litvinenko tome 'Dissident'
Source: Variety

Call it spy vs. spy.

Columbia Pictures and Michael Mann have entered the race against Warner Bros. and Johnny Depp to mount a film about Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko, the ex-KGB agent who was fatally poisoned.

Based on a proposal and a sample chapter, Columbia paid $500,000 against $1.5 million early Friday for the screen rights to "Death of a Dissident," a book that is being co-written by Alex Goldfarb and the subject's widow, Marina Litvinenko. The book will be published in late May by the Simon & Schuster subsidiary Free Press.

Red Wagon partners Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, who brought the project to the studio, will produce. Mann is in negotiations to direct. If that happens, his Forward Pass will produce as well.

Among the bidders for "Death of a Dissident" was WB, Depp and Graham King's Initial Entertainment, which had already made an option deal to base a Litvinenko film on with "Sasha's Story: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy". That book is being written by New York Times London bureau chief Alan Cowell.

According to sources, WB offered to match Col's winning bid, but came away empty-handed. Col topper Amy Pascal, Mann and Wick and Fisher were particularly aggressive and won the auction, which was conducted by CAA and London-based publishing agent Ed Victor.

This will be an espionage thriller, exploring the collision between deep rooted Russian power structure enforced by the KGB and its successor, the FSB, and the new wave of wild west capitalism that came on the heels of Glasnost. And the way in which Litvinenko got caught between those two colossal forces. From his deathbed, Litvinenko blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin and his regime for the poisoning, ruled to be from polonium-210.

Columbia will also seek to fast track a project that comes not only with "Death of A Dissident," but also the life rights of Litvinenko's widow, Marina.

According to the proposal viewed by Daily Variety, the book will contain first-hand information from the widow, and Goldfarb. A four-page proposal laid out the book's intention to describe Litvinenko's career as went from insider to outcast in the political epicenter of post-communist Russia. Goldfarb's close relationship with the ex-KGB agent is made clear in a 22-page sample first chapter that was part of the auction.

There are other books on the subject being shopped as well. Steve LeVine, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was Daniel Pearl's reporting partner in Pakistan, has a Random House deal to write a Litvinenko/KGB book that is tentatively titled "Polonium." That book is being shopped by agents Jody Hotchkiss and Tom Wallace.

And Litvinenko's own 2002 memoir, "Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plan to Bring Back KGB Terror," is about to be reissued in the U.K. Rights for that are held by Braun Media, a U.K.-based producer.

[MacGuffin]

Mann, DiCaprio team for drama
Film takes place on MGM lot in '30s
Source: Variety
 
Michael Mann has delivered to studio execs what he hopes will be his next directing effort, a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio.

Scripted by John Logan, the project is an untitled noir drama that takes place on the old MGM lot in the 1930s. DiCaprio is poised to play the kind of private detective studios once relied on to clean up the scandals created by its stars. He's hired to investigate whether a starlet murdered her husband.

The script was delivered by CAA to studios late last week, and sources said that a deal was expected to happen quickly. New Line made a bid of around $100 million, said sources, which falls below a projected pricetag of around $120 million.

Sources said the script is strong and the film has a period feel reminiscent of "L.A. Confidential." Studios were weighing that and DiCaprio's heat against the large budget, but other bids were expected before a deal is closed.

Aside from a budget, the film has a February start date. It will shoot mostly on soundstages, and it works in classic figures like Judy Garland and Bugsy Siegel. The latter is the centerpiece of a shootout scene that unfolds in the Trocadero nightclub on Sunset Boulevard.

Mann, who'll produce under his Forward Pass banner, has been quietly developing the script with Logan since September. DiCaprio has also been in the mix for several months. The trio last worked together on "The Aviator." Mann produced that film, but originally developed it with Logan and DiCaprio with the expectation he would direct.

Not eager to direct another biopic after "The Insider" and "Ali," Mann handed the script to Martin Scorsese so that the picture could go into production before several rival Hughes films that were being mobilized.

If a deal closes, DiCaprio would finally find himself before Mann's camera lens, after years of attempts. Aside from "The Aviator," they tried to team on a James Dean biopic and the fact-based drama "The Inside Man."