Word: mannes
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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...
Bergman is pleased with the film too. "It's not a documentary," he says. "It's more of a historical novel." But he's angry with his former colleagues at CBS, who are claiming that he was negotiating with Mann to make a film about the Wigand blowup even while it was going on. "It was apparent to anybody in the editing room," says Wallace, "that he was frequently on the telephone [to Mann] with a play-by-play while he was producing the piece for us." Bergman insists he didn't start thinking about making the story into...
...Michael Mann says he wanted Crowe to play the pudgy 53-year-old biochemist at the heart of The Insider--age didn't matter. At the time, Crowe was 34 and in fighting trim from playing ice hockey for the film Mystery, Alaska. But Mann had an inkling that Crowe could connect with the whistle blower Wigand at his most depressed and paranoid, when the tobacco industry was trying to smear him, when his marriage was failing, when he was drinking and eating too much. Crowe, without even meeting Wigand, nailed the part in a single reading, says Mann...
...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...