On crying during the Ferrari trailer.
For those that haven't seen it.
I managed to learn of the FERRARI trailer at exactly the right moment this morning: in the bathroom. My daughter was doing gymnastics in the living room while my son played in his play area and my wife was getting ready to leave for the office. Everyone was, so rarely, distracted. So I had the two minutes it took to watch it.
The trailer astounded me. Even watching it on the my phone, I was swept up by it. The choice to keep the engine reeving as we see flashes of Enzo Ferrari’s life as a business man and, crucially, a father, struck me hard. I had goosebumps.
It could be that Michael Mann has been on my mind lately. His stuff has appeared on streaming, so recently I watched HEAT over a two-night period (I’m a father of two young kids, so I can barely stay awake these days). Even last night, I was on my second night of watching COLLATERAL. Last week, a few podcasting friends of mine hosted a screening of Mann’s MIAMI VICE. I wasn’t able to attend the actual screening, but I swung by the drinks after and was happy to be around other Mann devotees.
As I write this, I see a pattern emerging that many face: that of being a movie devotee and a father. There are times my kids go to bed and I want to watch something intellectual and dense: an old French film I’ve never seen or an experimental documentary. Something in that vein. Rarely does that happen, but I aim for it and am only rarely successful, owing to exhaustion and trying not to hog the TV. Other nights I’m happy to watch cooking videos on YOUTUBE or an action movie from my childhood (which I often have to do for work).
Mann straddles those two worlds. His films are exciting and often action-packed, but they are also intellectually and emotionally complex. They aren’t hard watches, but they also certainly aren’t the easiest of watches. But they are almost always worth it.
So I am always trying to manage my desire to be a cinephile and consumer of culture while trying to stay well rested to wake up early. I’m hardly successful these days, but someday, in the not too distant future, that may change, and I have a model for that success.
My dad started showing me action movies at far too young of an age. Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Rambo, James Bond. All of them entered my brain around 8 - 10 years old. It was really a bonding opportunity for him and I on a Saturday night to head out to the video store and rent a film. He used to get annoyed at how long it would take me to pick a movie, so often he would go alone and pick something up. I can picture him, as I have started to do, weighing what he can show me as a young kid. At the end of the day, I’m sure he decided he wanted to see what he wanted to see, and brought it home. And him showing me stuff that was probably too adult lit a spark. Just a few years later, I would be picking out the movies we saw. And eventually, at probably the age of 13, I brought home HEAT from the video store (a place where I would eventually start working, to the shock of no one who knows me). I had either read about it in Entertainment Weekly or had just seen it the box at the video store.
We watched it together. We probably rented it a couple times. At some point, we bought the VHS. We also watched THE INSIDER together few times, because I loved that one. I think we missed ALI, but by that point I was in college and he had moved out, the beginning of the process of my parent’s legal divoce and his descent into major health problem.
We did see COLLATERAL together when it came out. COLLATERAL came out in late summer, and I remember going to the movies with him to see it. I don’t remember if he liked it or what he thought about it. We had definitely had long conversations about the other Mann films, particularly THE INSIDER, as my father was a very morally-minded man, and I think he admired the movie’s exploration of morality.
The reality is that I don’t think we talked much about Collateral because at that stage he was hard to talk to about anything. There was a lot of embarrassment and shame and anger floating around. I was growing up and trying to be a man, and here was the model of someone who had let his anger and range get the better of him.
But he also quite tender then, and very loving at that stage. Gone was the man who had raised his voice constantly, and yelled and screamed. I think he was just happy to be around his son, who hadn’t abandoned him.
For years, I thought the last film we saw together was MIAMI VICE, but that can’t be true. He passed away in August 2005. Late summer, usually around when a Michael Mann film came out. But there was no Michael Mann that year.
So COLLATERAL may very well have been the last film we saw together.
When the Ferrari trailer ended, I was overwhelmed for a moment. My daughter was begging for my attention, and my son was playing, but growing impatient. To be a parent is to have your thoughts interrupted almost constantly by children who need something from you. So I couldn’t be too distracted. So I just cried a little as I high-fived my daughter doing gymnastics. Then, I kissed my son on the head and went about my day very excited about Ferrari, but sad I won’t be seeing it with my dad.