Heat and Dust

This is fucking unbelievable. I'm feeling very angry now. I wish I was The Incredible Hulk so I could throw something really BIG through the window out on the road and watch it smash into a million pieces. I was writing a review of Heat. Work was progressing slowly. Slowly but well. I was even researching a little bit and had opened Wikipedia for the factoid that I had found interesting in the morning. Here it is: "Val Kilmer states on the special edition DVD (in the making of featurette) that soldiers in the military are shown the bank robbery scene, with emphasis placed upon the scene where Kilmer's character fires on the police, performs a swift and smooth reload, and resumes firing. Supposedly they say something along the lines of, "If you can't change magazines as fast as this actor, get out of my army!"

I had begun the post with how happy I was that Blogger was loading now so I wouldn't have to try writing on Notepad which I didn't like because of compelling reasons A, B and C. I had written what must have been more than 250 words when I wanted to try being Nerdy Boy in spite of knowing zilch about hyperlinks and html code and shit, and I highlited a line and hit "Reload this frame only" without saving it first.

FUCK!

And now it's gone.

I was going to describe in loving detail the diner scene with Robert de Niro and Al Pacino, the two Godfathers of Hollywood and title contenders for Greatest Living Actor face off. This scene alone is worth watching the entire movie for, although the movie itself is quite watchable too. But this scene... the more I think of it, the more I am convinced that this was one of the best ways of doing this scene.

Let's say you are director Michael Mann. Let's say you have achieved the impossible - you have managed to get Al Pacino and Robert de Niro to play your two main characters in the movie. Regardless of the way your movie goes, regardless of the requirements of the script, regardless of the original screenplay and story and artistic vision, you just have to give us a scene in which Pacino and de Niro talk face to face, Michael against young Vito, One Great against Another.
The fist instinct is to harness the histrionic talents of both these giants by creating a scene of immense power and intensity. But if you are a good director, you'll probably realize that it's nearly impossible to create a scene good enough to satisfy movie fanatics who will surely line up to see the two giants slug it out.

So Mann, being a clever director, creates a scene that is the most successful anti-climax I have ever seen. He creates a scene that's light and cool in a movie that is consistently the opposite. The scene had to stand out, and stand out it does, by being a scene where the audience who've been waiting for it bite their nails in anticipation of all the things that can happen next but that rewards them by allowing nothing to happen, except talk.
But what talk! This is Hollywood meta at a whole new level. Pacino talks about his failed marriages, de Niro talks about "the woman in his life". Pacino asks de Niro why he does it, and de Niro asks Pacino the same. Pacino says they may never meet again, de Niro nods.

If you are a movie lover every scene involving both Robert de Niro and Al Pacino takes on a deeper meaning. While the now famous diner scene abounds in references to the real actors, the others don't always. All the same the last scene in which the Pacino clasps de Niro's hand resonates with a meaning to it that people who don't know who these two really are can never understand.

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It seems I ended up writing something on the movie anyway. If you liked it, well, blame blogger for depriving you of the rest. If you hated it, you were spared a painful read, although why anyone who hated the above would have come far enough to read this line is beyond me. In fact, as a comment on the previous post explained, that was a fairly typical post and so is this. I must have filtered down to just those readers who like what I write, since I seem to be writing exclusively on movies these days.
Thank you for reading! Good night, and good luck.