Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, and many more all had to do glorified tv movies that played to a trendy style at the time

Mann’s true self is found from Miami Vice onwards. The 80s and 90s classics from him all played to the studio trends at the time

So Mann and Refn are incomparable

But Mann, Spielberg, Fincher, and Cameron are a tight coherent group with similar backgrounds.

Yeah man. Uh uh

Like bro Abel Ferrara was making p*** before he got to make the films he wanted to actually do

Mann is far more similar to those 3 than Refn

Refn is an outsider who has never made a film for a wide audience before. He’s an art house filmmaker first

Mann has actually made proper big budget studio films and knows the DNA that goes into that and how to capture a wide audience

Nobody will ever give Refn the rights to do a Muhammad Ali biopic my guy

The films themselves resembling one another was a superficial comparison. What matters is their box office receipts!

not once did I talk about the box office

it’s clear you don’t understand s***

When you’re actually in the big budget studio system, you have an extremely different approach to cinema no matter how “artsy” you want to be than an actual arthouse outsider

Not that hard to understand

Out of curiosity, what similarities are you referring to? In my mind mann and refn have vastly different ideological approaches to filmmaking but there are definitely gaps in my knowledge

He basically thinks because they both focus on the aesthetics and vibes and are not as plot focused, they’re the same s***

5/5

Watch Miami Vice and Drive back to back. It's pretty self evident

I can forgive the Avatar hate off this post

It’s really not to me, so if you could clarify I would appreciate it

On a very cursory glance maybe the “aesthetics” are similar, but those movies are so wildly different in tone and message that idk how they can be compared in any other manner

I forgave your Avatar stannery off your Zerkalo/Master/Malick scores

agreed. refn working with a whole other tonal template.

I agree. For me I think Mann is a studio filmmaker who’s highly interested in the aesthetics and atmosphere behind a studio film over the plot. He’s more informed by the montage edit filmmaking you see in a Sergei Eisenstein or Tarkovsky

Whereas Refn is a lot more indebted to the slow cinema arthouse style seen in the east but he also likes to borrow pulp genre aesthetics from western filmmakers like Tarantino. The approach is almost directly the opposite if anything

Not even a PTA guy really but The Master undeniable

Incredible theatrical experience

"These two things are similar"
"But they're different as well"

Riveting stuff in here guys

so you don’t actually have anything to say, could have saved us all some time appreciate it

I know youre not

was half expecting you to pull a Dune and say its ass in retrospect lol

Boss Baby vibes

You jumped in 3 pages late and your contribution was asking me what we were talking about. Go back and read little brother. Feel free to respond to those posts with counterarguments or whatever. I'm not your ChatGPT

There's a Refn interview in American Cinematographer in which he explains that he drove Gosling around in a cool car while high on couch syrup listening to pop music all night. He did it to explain the movie and how the music was instrumental to the character. And he's just literally just doing the iconic Phil Collins scene from the Miami Vice pilot with Gosling. He wasn't talking about The Driver and El Samourai which have been floated forever. He's clearly a fan of Mann.

And you can call it a cheap imitation and point out the differences all you want. There's just not a more obvious successor to Miami Vice (2006) than Drive (2011) in that span of time. Refn literally switches to shooting digital in that gap beginning with Valhalla Rising. Bronson is his Kubrick riff. He doesn't really make his long descent into slow cinema until the film after Drive.

So leaving out any qualifiers about good and bad, without talking about Mann's career, there's still just an obvious timeline here for Refn. Call him a hack for it. I really don't care.