Ali "running" shot

With scant new news on Michael Mann's endeavours (wimper), I came across this fascinating website that uses one of my favourite tunes of the moment: Arcade Fires "We Used to Wait". A website has been set up that has a fascinating use of HTML 5... it is full of brilliant surprises for the visually / musically / artfully minded! Be sure to put in your place of birth or it won't work. What is additionally great, is the superbly stunning opening film. It reminded me immediately of Michael Mann's Ali "running" sequence. A direct influence, possibly! But it looks stunning. So what the heck, I share it here.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

What do you think?

Michael Mann's Ali and Lister fight

It's interesting how boxing movies bring the "emotional" out of man. It is violent. Yet movies such as Rocky are packed with emotionally driven story lines. Enough to make a man weep. Boxing. As Mann describes the work of art, "Ali", he explains this concept of defining struggle through the man, not the icon.  Only then can we connect with the story, an inner journey of overcoming, and giving birth to something profound and hard fought for. It isn't the vacuous success that the mass media currently loves to attribute to pop star wannabes. Real talent comes out of something far more raw than just hunger for fame. I mentioned in a previous post Amy Winehouse. Her voice was beyond her years, her lyrics self written, coming from a deeply person place. Not some crude pen of a commercial song writer. Amy Winehouse became an icon, but the real person hood, the struggle, was what defined her journey and her ability to not only write, but to express it both in her voice and performance. Her journey, her story ended in tragedy. Fame and her life sometimes never looked so bleak. Yet her life was one also lived in uncommon brilliance.

Back to Ali. One scene that famously stands out is the one where we see Ali's struggle manifest into power and beauty. It is the Ali and Lister fight. In the making of Ali you can see Michael Mann alone with portable wide angled camera lens and body, getting into the thick of the fight, making his own "shots". Mann in a strange way becomes part of the fight. It is an even more tangible symbiosis of the craft of filming and the craft of acting creating moments that in this scene are poetic. To amplify the rise of Ali, we hear the notes of music stepping into the scene, heightening our sense of something great happening. It has Mann's spine tingling signature all over it. The red lines of rope and converging ceiling lights that blur in and out in different shapes energize our senses and give that sense of higher reality that transcends the external reality only the eye sees. Mann has this ability to use external visuals to create some sort of truth. The truth of the event happening. The music is what emotionally connects us with the visual message and what is happening on the actors' faces. It is an orchestra.

We will see similar shots used in the forthcoming "Luck". Mann wanting the cameras in the heart of the action. To put us in there, amongst the riders. It isn't just the action that Mann is interested in, it is the intensity of humanity that happens in those moments of high performance and what it feels like to be in those shoes (or stirrops!).

It is extraordinary to think that this scene is just that - one scene. Ali the movie is a broad canvas, and has so much more to offer.

The Making of Michael Mann's 'Ali'

For as long as it is allowed on YouTube, here is "The Making of Ali" behind the scenes footage. All three parts here for your convenience, especially if you don't own the DVD.

Michael Mann's eye for detail - Ali

For those now familiar with Michael Mann's movies, especially his biopic movies, you will notice his perfectionist eye for detail. Mann's lust for authenticity is unsatiable, and creatively vitally important to him. It is the foundation of his working philosophy. Without authenticity the movie loses resonance and the sense of reality that is needed to tell the story effectively. More importantly, detail is needed to convince the audience into the world of Mann's screen characters.

Whilst the 2009 film, Public Enemies, was made on actual locations where Dillinger's gang raided banks and uses authentic weapons of the period, this will not be the first example of Mann's vision for detail and documentary type reality. In Mann's biopic movie, Ali, we read from the article below of Mann's intense attention to detail. There are many articles about the movie Ali, this is just one comment a writer has made about this movie. You can see the full article by clicking here.

Impressionist
extraordinaire:
Michael Mann's Ali

by Anna Dzenis

Mann's desire to be true to the visual record of the decade, to historical memory, and his extraordinary efforts to accurately portray real life characters and events, are well documented. His cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki describes how closely they studied photographs of Ali's life and fights, scrutinizing “every detail – every lamp, every piece of furniture, and every window'. (3) Production designer John Myhre relates the way they rebuilt The Tiger Lounge in Chicago where Ali danced with his first wife Sonji. The former club had become a furniture shop, but “they pushed away the furniture, put up a couple of walls and shot the scenes on the site where Ali's first romance had blossomed”. (4) Key fights in Ali's life are recreated blow by blow. Even Howard Bingham, Ali's close friend and personal photographer, was enlisted as a consultant on the film. A production snapshot shows Mann intently holding a photograph of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in front of the actors playing these parts, and so on.