Apparently CSI: Miami is the world’s most popular TV show. Moral: detectives in Miami = laughing all the way to the bank.

I’m not really sure whether I should mark this movie as worth consuming or not. With half an hour left in the movie, at the height of the action, the projector went dark. A few minutes later the sound cut out as well. Confused members of the audience stared blankly at the screen, wondering if the theater operators were going to fix the problem. A few minutes later the playback was restored, but they refused to rewind the film.

It was another 10 minutes before they turned the house lights back down. Disgusted viewers yelled comments at the screen. “What happened?”, “Turn off the lights!”, “This is no longer a movie it’s more like television!”. My favorite was when the undercover officer approached the bad guy hideout disguised with as pizza delivery guy: “It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno!”

The theater handed out free movie passes to everyone as we left the auditoreum, so at least this will pay for “Snakes On A Plane” later this month!

I was expecting lots of summer action and a thin predictable plot. I got the later and not enough of the former. What I got instead was a healthy helping of new camera angles, mixing of film formats (high film quality interspersed with home movie quality), and some innovative sound work. What struck me most about this movie was the technical aspects of the film making. Not the story. Not the characters. Not the action. That is ok for a film geek. Bad for the overall user experience. Give this one a pass.

the characters weren’t developed very well and the sex scenes/intimacy between couples felt contrived (especially with jamie fox) but there were visuals that stayed with me much longer than i thought they would and that’s more than i can say for most of the summer pap that’s out there right now. it certainly had more of a plot than superman.

as far as fusing music and visuals, well—nobody does that better than that non-oscar winning scorsese. (if you need a visual reminder of how this is supposed to work, check out goodfellas when the rotting dead bodies are turning up and the piano solo from “layla” is playing. effing brilliant.) it didn’t help that this guy used tired boring lame-o material from contemporary zillion sellers like linkin park. the music didn’t drive the action forward or augment it in part because it sucked.

I couldn’t really hear what the men were saying, especially when they were talking about drugs. There was a lack of character development in this movie. The scenes were a bit awkward in getting my attention. The chemistry was either casual or under developed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSdSz71LZU&mode=related&search=

There are some video clips (of the original tv show) on youtube. There’s a big emphasis on music here – I don’t know if the original show was like that. Whenever they show cars they are only showing the wheels turning. I don’t know how many times I’ve see that in the video clips.

Lately there has been some coverage of Miami in the travel section of newspapers. I’m keeping in mind that Miami isn’t what it is today when they were filming the tv show.