Note: Minor spoilers ahead
Why or how I managed to go the last fourteen years without having seen Heat - I'm not quite sure. I think I confused it with Sly Stallone's Copland, and I'm only half-joking about this. Heat is a Hitchcock film for our time. It is not a revelation in plot, character, or really any other way; it's just a damn good all-around film.
Pacino/Deniro Scene: Deniro wins easily. Overall disappointing - unless I'm in a David Lynch film, I do not care about dreams in movies. I understand why their conversation went that way, and perhaps dreams were the best place for the chat to go.
Touch of Realism: There's always a kind of invincibility to characters on film - they tend to walk through storms of bullets, fire, etc. I like minor touches that remind us that these characters supposedly exist in the same world that we do - Heat has one such scene. Al Pacino pulls over Deniro's car on the shoulder of a major highway. Before getting out of the car, he looks over his left shoulder to ensure he won't be creamed by oncoming traffic. I don't even think this is normally worth commenting on, but it's a moment of tiny 'weakness' that films often remove. And yes, next up, I mention seatbelt usage and turn signals in Ronin.
Cool Setting: I normally dislike LA movies, since every movie that's set in no particular city is set in 'LA'. However, Heat makes use of the entire city, giving it a character that most films ignore. Coolest was the scene set at what appeared to be an abandoned drive-in movie theater.
Musical Selections: Gyorgy Ligeti's dissonant, tense music has been used to great effect in film (2001, The Shining) and has also been aped so many times (most recently in There Will Be Blood) that I was surprised to see in the credits that it was actually his piece used here. Moby's God Moving Over the Face of the Waters is a brilliant post-minimalist piece that ends the film perfectly.
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Like The French Connection, I know I really liked this one, but it's been so long since I've seen it that I don't really remember why. Does that happen to other people or is my memory especially bad?
ReplyDeleteI think I'm due for a rewatch on both.
no, i think it makes sense, especially if you've watched a lot of movies since. i'm not sure that heat is worth a re-watch; it's really long, and the whole 'cop is not different from thief!' angle isn't really that fresh.
ReplyDeletethe big shootout is pretty fabulous, too, though.
ReplyDeleteok, a bit more:
ReplyDeletei wouldn't put too much weight on the whole 'cop is not different from thief' angle in this case. a lot of movies that would try to make that point would be trying to make it in some kind of moral way, trying to subvert some kind of broad moral judgment we tend to make in favor of lawmen against criminals. i don't think this movie is trying to do that at all. neil, (a great thief) is in many ways similar to hanna (a great cop), and an extended character study of the two of them is supposed to show us this. but there's no special moral claim being made (waingro is really bad, no relativism suggested).
but that's just a long version of your initial point in the review: this is not, and is not meant to be, terribly deep or intellectualy innovative. it's a police procedural, a cops and robbers story, that shows unusual levels of interest both in the workings of the procedures and the cops and robbers themselves. doing both of those at once requires the film to be made with unusual levels of patience in the storytelling: hence the length.
do you think it drags?
the one thing i found somewhat disappointing about the neil/hanna connection was that many of hanna's intuitions re: neil had more mysticism than a reading of his logic, i.e. 'i feel he would do this'. i suppose the film needs that - but hanna comes off more like a wizard than a master logician. i agree that there is no real moral message with that portrayal. also worth noting is that this is one of the few films where i find myself rooting for the bad guy.
ReplyDeletei don't think it drags, but it's still obviously long - i tried thinking of a scene i'd take out and there really aren't any - i did think his step-daughter's suicide was a little thrown in (and how did she get into his hotel room, anyway? did i totally miss that?). i feel like we know that both men will ultimately choose their job (or sense of justice) over everything else in their lives.