I just got back from watching Miami Vice, the new Michael Mann movie starring Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell. I didn't think it was worth the $9.50 ($19, if you count my date) I paid to watch it. I thought Mann over-used the hand-held shaky camera effect (critics call this 'gritty') and purposely poor lighting. I felt that the first hour was more a documentary about a drug deal than an action film, and that the movie couldn't make up its mind between being an action film and a romance. Plus, Colin Farrell just looks tacky with a mullet and mustache. On the other hand, Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly was excellent. If you like Philip K. Dick, you will enjoy this movie. Paying too much to see this movie brings to mind the idea of variable pricing for movies. This idea has been discussed before, I'm not inventing it. Say Miami Vice flops its opening weekend. Don't you think it would be smart for the distributor to lower the movie price for the next weekend? I'm sure you could get one theater to try this with one distributor, and then see the results. There are bound to be people that would stay home if Vice costs $10 but would come in if it was only $5. I don't know that much about the movie industry, but this seems a smart idea to me.

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