14 November 2009 5:30 PM, PST | The Auteurs | See recent The Auteurs news »
The Last of the Mohicans screened in Chicago on October 26 as part of Doc Films' Michael Mann retrospective.
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The auteurist defense of Michael Mann tends to overlook that his creative freedom came only after years of playing by Hollywood's rules and that even his most personal films exist within popular genres. Mann's debt to modern Hollywood is most evident in The Last of the Mohicans(1992), a film whose very conception—a big-budget action movie with specious literary pedigree—reflects the cake-and-eat-it mentality of the latter-day blockbuster. Over and over, it eschews detail that would allow us to better understand character, setting, and conflict in favor of violent action; and often, what remains of the former is perfunctory, and bound to cliché. I can’t attribute these faults entirely to Mann: IMDb reports that his original cut of the film was around three hours and that Twentieth Century Fox rushed him »
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