MikePadgett.com

J and I returned last week from our winter holiday in the United States.

Here’s the first instalment of photos, all of which were taken during the first few days of our trip at Miami Beach in Florida.

I’ll be releasing the remaining four instalments in the next few days, so watch this space! As I’m sure you’re waiting with bated breath, I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed.

In the meantime, heeeeeeeeere’s Miami! Check out the South Beach photos now!

• Director: Steven Soderbergh
• United States, 2007
• 

From far away you can hear the overhead lines crackling across the desert as they stretch through the arid expanses of Nevada toward the mirage glow of Las Vegas. That crackling, it’s the sound of Messrs Clooney, Pitt, Damon et al phoning their lines in.

If you put a scene’s worth of frames from Soderbergh’s movies on the wall, they’ll look lurid like a Warhol screenprint, so it’s no surprise that the neons of Vegas make Ocean’s Thirteen an orgy of colour and the barely trying cast is obviously as dazzled by the bright artificial as Raoul Duke.

This is a poseur movie for boys and girls who like to watch the boys and girls go by: since while Sinatra, Martino and the junior Davis brylcreemed their way through five casinos royale, these 21st century cruisers of the modern middle age are just too slick to make it stick.

• Director: Harold Becker
• United States, 1989
• 

There are similarities between Sea of Love and Adrian Lyne’s marginally superior Fatal Attraction, in that both feature uniquely edgy female leads and leading men who lack self-control at crucial moments. In both movies, that lack of self-control is vital to the plot, yet only Pacino in Sea of Love is able to turn it into a character asset.

Pacino’s haggard detective has given twenty years’ service, his domestic stability and his sobriety to the police force when he falls for a murder suspect. The movie then plays out a pretty straightforward “is-she-isn’t-she” storyline with a side order of buddy cop congeniality provided by the ever-reliable John Goodman.

Whilst Ellen Barkin’s Helen cannot compete with the unnerving excellence of Glenn Close’s bunny boiler Alex Forrest - a true movie original - she does bring a streetwise roughness to the relationship which rubs up well against the detective’s barely hidden vulnerability.

• Director: Al Pacino
• United States, 1992
• 

“A four hundred year old work in progress” goes the tagline to Pacino’s first feature as director and the film itself took four years and six editors to make.

But the result is perfectly cohesive: a kind of documentary about the highs and lows of doing Richard III, glued together by Pacino’s mesmerising performance as compère in the documentary and Richard III in the drama.

The rapid cutting between documentary and drama did leave me feeling like I wanted to see two movies. It will be interesting to see how Pacino deals with similar content as director of the forthcoming Salomaybe?.