What's John watching?

Collateral: My wife left an Ottawa Citizen article entitled "Filmmaker Mann delighted by digital" (subscriber only content) out for me, so this time around I was paying close attention to the backdrop of each shot. More than a few shots jumped out at me the first time I watched it - for example, the shot over the hood of the FBI car on the way to Fever, Pedrosa (Bruce McGill) clearly visible in the passenger seat, with the shop signs so vivid in the background - but this time it was awesome, in the most literal sense of the word.

Mann employed both Sony CineVista and modified Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital cameras. The tape-using Sony system was fairly agile, but the Viper had to be connected by thick cables to a separate hard drive, onto which it recorded directly.
--U-Press Telegram's City of angles

They go on to quote Mann saying that a conventionally-shot Collateral would've been "a boring movie. Literally boring. We would have had a bunch of defocused blobs and a couple of faces, and everything would have been dark." I don't know about boring, but it certainly wouldn't have been as impressive.

Note: spoilers follow...

Oh, and just to close the loop on the questions I posed earlier, I clearly heard the lead FBI agent say, "FBI on your left" as he approached Lim's bodyguard this time. Unfortunately, I still don't understand how Vincent (Tom Cruise) didn't even scratch Max (Jamie Foxx) on the Metro. ¶ 1:53:00 p.m.