Luck: Season One (2012)

Showrunners: David Milch and Michael Mann

 The death of a few horses behind the scenes led to the eventual cancellation of this show. This cancellation was unfortunate but also very appropriate considering how much this show adored horses. It's about a bunch of people who come together at this horse track because of their admiration and love for horses. Whether or not they are contradicting themselves by being at a race track and also loving horses is not the issue, but it is clear that the makers of this show and the characters are all big horse lovers.

Luck is filled with characters who try so hard not to show any weakness or sentimentality, but it is always the scenes where people are interacting with horses in which emotion, sentimentality, and tenderness come through. This poeticism that comes through is a result of David Milch's great dialogue and Michael Mann's amazing visual eye. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a show better than this from the standpoint of a sensory experience. It proves television does not have to be writer-centric forever, the show is filled with cinematic, visceral, and poetic moments that make sense internally even if they don't always make sense plot-wise. The story can be confusing, it's big, complex and filled with race track vocabulary that made it even more difficult to understand what was going on. This should have been more frustrating, but the show always knew how to make you feel what you need to feel. Like Milch's best show, Deadwood, I suspect the show would have been even better in the second season, maybe all-time great television level, but unfortunately we'll never get to see it happen.

Grade: A-

The Insider (1999)

Director: Michael Mann

 What could easily have been a conventional story about a contemporary social issue, is instead a genuinely powerful drama that looks both at the world we live in and also how the ills of the world affect individuals. The best part about this film is that it starts as a story about the ills of big tobacco, a subject that frankly is not so risky anymore, but it then turns into a story about the far-reaching influence of corporate power and their influence in the media, which is a subject that is far more risky and maybe more important today. The Insider is not a movie that focuses on the story that the whisteblower is revealing, but the whisteblower himself and the issues he must go through to do the whistleblowing.

It's a very relevant film to today in terms of the difficulties of revealing secrets (i.e. Wikileaks and Bradley Manning), but also the reaches of corporate power in the media and how that can affect journalistic ethics. It may not be the most accurate film when it comes to the details of the story, but it is very true in its message. Once again, Michael Mann uses some great filmmaking techniques, like music, great handheld camerawork, and an innate ability to thrill through his camera, to rise above what is largely a fairly conventional structure and story. It's hard to get affected by stories we see everyday, but Mann has this ability to infuse conventional stories with a real and powerful emotion.

Grade: A-

Heat (1995)

Director: Michael Mann

Auteur cinema in Hollywood is incredibly rare, especially today when Hollywood is just focused on movies with $200 million budgets. With budgets that size, the studio will be very involved, and film becomes nothing but a business. But there are a couple of directors I can think of that succeed in retaining their artistic integrity and still operating within the major studios of Hollywood. One of them is Martin Scorsese, and the other is Michael Mann (Steven Spielberg might be one too but I'm not so sure). Arguably Mann's most famous film, Heat, is a great example of just that.

Mann created an epic crime film that takes the conventional tropes of the police-crime drama and adds real meaning and emotions into it. He's not only great at taking those conventions and making them really effective (like the shootout), but he addresses them by having the characters realize the inevitability of their situations, both professional and most of all personal. Both Al Pacino's police character and Robert De Niro's criminal character know who they are in this game and what role they play, it's nothing new to them. Both are completely aware of the consequences of their work on their own lives. Mann also maintains a brilliant control of tone and direction that uses the music, the lighting, the sound, and the editing to emphasize the highly personal and fairly existential nature of this epic city-spanning movie. When it comes Hollywood genre filmmaking, nothing comes close.

Grade: A-