Word: manne
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Michael Mann's The Insider is an epic-sized film based on the "60 Minutes" tobacco scandal of a few years ago; Mann succeeds in distilling a very convoluted and controversial story into a relatively taut two hours. However, his magnum opus is not without flaws and plays like an uncompleted character study, a film that stops just short of greatness...
...With this film, Mann proves that he is at the top of his form as an actor's director. Mann's cameras work in intimate closeness with his actors. And the cast works well with Mann's studied technique, which forces them into ultra-realism under the camera's close scrutiny. But the astonishing character study that dominates the first half begins to unravel when the film, inexplicably, changes its focus from Wigand to Bergman. Just as Wigand is entering his darkest period, becoming psychologically unhinged, the film cuts away to Bergman and his struggles with the brass...
...greatest strength of the film is in its actors but in the last part of the film, Crowe's Wigand almost disappears, and Pacino's Bergman is given scenes full of moral posturing that are completely out of character. After weaving a difficult and astonishing narrative, Mann begins to lose the thread; he sacrifices complexity for black-and-white morality and substitutes shapeless confrontations for emotional depth...
...Michael Mann loves bad guys. Loves their drive, the snarl in their stare, the swagger they have learned and earned. From his first feature film, 1981's Thief, to the 1995 Heat and his swankily corrosive TV shows Miami Vice and Crime Story, the writer-director has toured the underworld and found it a great place to visit...
...Mann and co-screenwriter Eric Roth want to make The Insider a suspense thriller and an art film. There are assignations under dark bridges, ornery messages snailing out of fax machines, snatches of arias on the sound track and enough slo-mo shots to extend the movie's running, or ambling, time to 2 1/2 hours. And those endless conferences! The viewer almost has to be a journalist--or a good editor--to sniff out the meat under...