Thursday, July 27, 2006

The New Miami Vice: all accents, not enough bikinis

David Denby's got an amusing review of Miami Vice in the New Yorker this week. Usually the chuckle-worthy movie reviews are courtesy of Anthony Lane but this time around DD holds his own. A taste:
Mann’s narrative style in this movie is terse, abrupt, and fragmentary, his dialogue little more than advanced drug-dealer-and-cop jargon, verbal hardtack spat out of the corner of someone’s mouth, some of it by Latino and Chinese actors with accents thick enough to make you long for the bad old days when Americans played most of the foreigners in Hollywood films and delivered their lines in accents that any Missourian could understand. “Miami Vice” risks, and often achieves, a kind of clenched impenetrability. The movie must have six variants of an ugly ruffian speaking into a cell phone words like these: “The deal is going down now. Fifty keys at three thousand each. Only the location is changed. The second barge on the Gowanus Canal. You have twelve seconds to get there.” The picture turns dealing into a kind of expensive, high-speed scavenger hunt. Sometimes the geography is so confusing that we wonder how the film crew managed to show up at the right location.
This movie sounds flamingo-tastic!

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