Collateral

I love when I am told a story.

I have a handful of movies in my memory that do this. Most often, I see a trend, either by directors, or writers, or performances. With movies, so many people see big names and flashy lights, as Hollywood tends to flaunt. Some people are in it for the money, and some are really in it for their love... you can tell. They don't make movies, they tell stories... with every fibre, they tell stories.

Stories, they aren't always happy. Nor sad. Sometimes the best of them are neither all at once. They aren't prophecies or moral avenues, the good guys don't always win, the bad guys don't always get away, and you are left feeling just how human you are. They are the tales that make you look... that make you watch... that make you see... They are alive. They are real in their perfect unreality.

When I get a good story of this calibre, it's like a quiet kind of euphoria. I don't speak, I don't rant and gush... I sit there are watch the credits roll with only the faintest of smiles. It's like a low-grade epiphany of... nothing. No words. It's just there.

I thank my first year of college for introducing me to Michael Mann.

First Heat, a moral ecstacy and tragedy that made me write A-graded analyses and engraved its way into my all-time favourites list. It made me look at visual storytelling as more than actors and moving images... far more... It was beautiful. Harsh, brutal, and striding straight into reality. No superheroes, no heroes, no villians that are beyond our own grasp. Law and morality exchanged and blurred.

And now, of my own will, Collateral.

Both Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise are utterly brilliant in their roles. Brilliant. Cruise's Vincent is fucking terrifying and unrelenting, and Foxx's Max is as plainly heroic as any mortal man could be. Michael Mann's direction turns cities into living environments, into entities in which universes intermingle and coexist. The camera is a human eye... it sees and hides with your own level. Everything has a heartbeat and you forget that you're holding your breath with the scene in front of your eyes.

Both of them... they tell their stories with guns to your head and do not apologize.

I love it when I'm reminded that storytelling can be an art...

I want to write another massive analysis on this movie. It sucked me in and spat me out with this craving to reach out and touch that story with my hands.

I'll be coherent and geek-like later. Right now I'm sitting here with a very faint smile.

Awe.

Damn.