Hacker Cinema
Heat
1995 · Film · 170 min
Part of Heat Collection
Directed by Michael Mann
Obsessive master thief Neil McCauley leads a top-notch crew on various daring heists throughout Los Angeles while determined detective Vincent Hanna pursues him without rest. Each man recognizes and respects the ability and the dedication of the other even though they are aware their cat-and-mouse game may end in violence.
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86 comments on Hacker News
I agree with all of this, but I'm not the biggest fan of the way it gets framed. There are reasons for this beyond the common Internet sentiment that police are just evil bullies who became police solely so they can bully people. There was a shootout broadcast on live television in 1997 in North Hollywood between heavily armed and armored bank robbers and police, nearly an entire precinct and a SWAT team, in which the two robbers held out for nearly an hour in a parking lot, mostly because they so severely outgunned the police. They fired over 2000 rounds in the span of scarcely 20 minutes. It became pretty famous for being so similar to what happend in the movie Heat. This was only five years after the LA Riots, in which 63 people were murdered and the National Guard had to occupy the City of Los Angeles because the police couldn't handle the mayhem. Combining all the various criminal escalation of the 80s and 90s, major city police kind of started vowing that they might fail for other reasons, but they weren't going to fail simply because they were being outgunned by the criminals. This wasn't just police doing it of their own accord, either. Thanks to all of these events being televised and terrifying people, plenty of ordinary citizens and talking heads demanded the police do something. This wasn't like the American of today, when protesters block a street or throw a brick through a window and crazies of the Internet start talking about running them over with trucks and accusing them of rioting. These were real riots, with completely innocent people being pulled out of their cars in broad daylight and getting beaten to death with bricks on live television.
Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade.
As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard.
These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.
Michael Mann movies tend to get this right, Heat and collateral have really decent gun sounds. Turns out they are very loud.
Edit: just noticed you mentioned heat already, I need more coffee…
One thing I have noticed messed up in a lot of fiction (written/tv/movies/etc) is how loud guns actually are. Scenes of multiple people without any hearing protection emptying their guns that doesn't have any kind of supressors/silencer multiple times in a closed space (usually a single room) and then just casually chatting with each 5 seconds later.
In general the sounds of guns are very bad in most movies/tv shows (Heat from 1995 comes closest for me).
same! in the last couple of years i've seen these movies in a cinema: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, La Heine, Apocalypse Now, HEAT. and i already bought tickets for Run Lola Run, Clerks and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
it's especially cool as someone who's young and wasn't even born when some of these movies initially came to cinemas.
at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i saw at a cinema were multiple decades old.
Not op, but in Norway, so includes 25% VAT.
IMAX opening week is a lot, $25-35. After a while it can drop to $20 or so. Regular is more like $20-25 opening week and drops to $12-15.
I don't bother with popcorn and soda, it's grossly over priced. Like $10 for a small popcorn the size of a pint. I buy a 0.5L bottle at the grocery store next to the cinema and some M (our M&Ms), maybe $10.
Though lately I've been going a lot to the local cinemateque. Not only are tickets around $7 regardless, they mostly show classic movies so seldom worse than the new stuff. They show popular movies too, recently saw Heat there, first time I saw it at the big screen since the premiere. Still packed a punch.
It's clearly just a hallucination. Everyone knows there was never a movie called Heat, Val Kilmer did not play Chris Shiherlis in it, and he has always been pregnant.
It was bing as that is the default for Edge as supplied on my work laptop. It doesn't do this now, but it does do something else quite weird:
search: was val kilmer pregnant or in heat
answer: Not pregnant Val Kilmer was not pregnant or in heat during the events of "Heat." His character, Chris Shiherlis, is involved in a shootout and is shot, which indicates he is not in a reproductive or mating state at that time.
And then cites wikipedia as the source of information.
In terms of cognition the answer is meaningless. Nothing in the question implies or suggests that the question has to do with a movie. Additionally, "involved in a shootout and is shot, which indicates he is not in a reproductive or mating state" makes no sense at all.
AI as deployed shows no intelligence.
Last week I put "was val kilmer in heat" into the search box on my browser. The AI answer came back with "No, Val Kilmer was not in heat. Val Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis in the movie Heat but the film did not indicate that he was pregnant or in heat. His performance was nuanced and skilled and represents a high point of the film." I was not curious about whether he was pregnant.
We are not only not close to human level of intelligence, we are not even at dog, cat, or mouse levels of intelligence. We are not actually at any level of intelligence. Devices that produce text, images, or code do not demonstrate intelligence any more than a printer producing pages of beautiful art demonstrate intelligence.
The movie Heat addresses this scenario in the opening scene. A guard is shot 'accidentally' during a robbery even though they didn't intend to kill anyone. At that point they killed all the guards because 1 guard or 3 guards, it had become a capital murder crime so might as well not leave any witnesses.
I don't read much any more. Mostly magazine articles.
I did re-read "The Long Run" from Daniel Keys Moran (one of the very short list of books I've re-read, and this was #4 or #5).
"Were you taught to hate Peaceforcers?" "Taught? No."
The only new book that I read was "Heat 2" by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner.
It was "ok". It honestly felt like a mashup of "Heat", "Miami Vice", and "Blackhat". So, not as fresh as I would have liked. (Mind, I really like all of those movies.)
I'll see the movie when it comes out, but the book was just "ok".
And Linkin Park. In movies there's Heat and 13 among others.
Your article says it was life => art => life!
> Gang leader Robert Sheldon Brown, known as “Casper” or “Cas,” from the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, heard about the extraordinary pilfered sum, and decided it was time to get into the bank robbery game himself. And so, he turned his teenage gangbangers and corner boys into bank robbers — and he made sure they always brought their assault rifles with them.
> The FBI would soon credit Brown, along with his partner-in-crime, Donzell Lamar Thompson (aka “C-Dog”), for the massive rise in takeover robberies. (The duo ordered a total of 175 in the Southern California area.) Although Brown got locked up in 1993, according to Houlahan, his dream took hold — the takeover robbery became the crime of the era. News imagery of them even inspired filmmaker Michael Mann to make his iconic heist film, Heat, which, in turn, would inspire two L.A. bodybuilders to put down their dumbbells and take up outlaw life.
Actually, Heat was the movie that inspired heavily armed bank robbers to rob the Bank of America in LA
(The movie inspired reality, not the other way around.)
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/north-hollywood-shootout
But your point still stands, because it goes both ways.
This is a phenomenon I call cinetrope. Films influence the world which in turn influences film and so on creating a feedback effect.
For example, we have certain films to thank for an escalation in the tactics used by bank robbers which influenced the creation of SWAT which in turn influenced films like Heat and so on.
I just asked Claude and if I capitalized "Heat", it knew I was talking about the movie, but for lower case "heat", it got offended and asked me to clarify.
I don't know if it stumps every model, but I saw some funny tweets asking ChatGPT something like "Is Al Pacino in Heat?" (asking if some actor or actress in the film "Heat") - and it confirms it knows this actor, but says that "in heat" refers to something about the female reproductive cycle - so, no, they are not in heat.
Semi-related in the same vein of background ambient music:
For fans of the film Heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHP4qbgAN6s One of my absolute favorites to work to.
That movie was such a foundational document for me, and (obviously) for many other nerdy GenX kids.
I found this site years (decades!) ago, and was happy to discover it's still there:
https://monkeybagel.com/culture/movies.html
The blurb there for _Real Genius_:
"The most accurate portrayal of geeks in the wild I've ever seen. The geeks in Real Genius LOOK, ACT and TALK like geeks. And Jordan gave me hope that I'd someday -- just maybe -- kiss a girl on the lips."
I remember a discussion of this film on a long-running private listserv back in the late 90s or early 00s about possible real-world antecedents for some of the characters, including and especially Jordan. A proto-web site existed for this person where she elaborated on her connection to the writers of the film, and more or less confirmed that she was "Jordan", or at least the inspo for it, but of course I can find no trace of this now.
Anyway, between TOP SECRET, REAL GENIUS, WILLOW, TOMBSTONE, HEAT, and TOP GUN, he's about as inconic as an actor can get. For a dose of maybe less blockbustery work, seek out 2002's THE SALTON SEA where Kilmer is joined by Adam Goldberg, Luis Guzman, Anthony LaPaglia, Peter Sarsgaarad, BD Wong, R. Lee Ermey (!) and in a spectacular turn Vincent D'Onofrio.
I love _Heat_, EXCEPT for the ending. (Spoilers) It just feels too forced as "the good guy has to win". So, I always stop it when the good guy cop says "He's gone!". It's much more in character with the bad guy; basically his entire career up to that point was being conservative and playing the long time, and I just didn't see the motivation for him to go after the cop and reverse his core policies. IMHO, it's a much better movie that way.
Man’s movies tend to have great firearms display and sound. It’s one of the things he is known for, and I think Heat took it to the next level.
I liked Val Kilmer in most films, but specially on Heat (1995). I think it was his best acting ever.
Heat is one of the best action movies of all time
I super randomly mentioned this movie last night (as being unwatchably cringe, even as a fan of the genre), so it was pretty eerie to see this news today.
I'll be watching Heat instead of this :)
There are actors I developed an affinity towards. I don't know for sure whether it was their role or acting in that role. I don't think so. I just think I saw some of them when I started exploring cinema from the world, outside my country, and hence in the beginning that meant mostly from the USA. I think it is just early familiarity. Kilmer is one of them.
And - they never seem to age to me. Maybe it's the makeup or what not. I remember him from Heat and even in subsequent films somehow he stayed that old or young - like in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or Salton Sea, there was this with Michael Douglas, and some more. don't remember Top Gun for Cruise, hell I don't remember any Tom Cruise film for Tom Cruise. If I noticed him in a film I'd just assume I'd like that film and that kinda seemed irrational but I did like the film. There was something about him. There are few more actors like him. It's sad. They never look older to me, they just die one day and that becomes more shocking. In a way it reminds me of my own mortality harder compared to maybe if I would have noticed them steadily growing and looking older. I will miss him.
To me what sets Heat apart from any other action movie is the realistic sound of gun fire.
One of a kind movie.
Heat, Ronin and the Ocean's series are the trinity of heist movies. "For me the sun rises and sets with her, man."
For any Heat fans reading this comment, Michael Mann co-wrote a novel, Heat 2, that focuses on his character, and the entire time I was reading it I imagined it being Val the entire time. It's very good - a worthy follow-up.
> I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly.
At the start of the movie Heat, one of the hot head robbers kills one of the guards. De Niro, the leader of the robbers, immediately kills the other guard and says something along the lines of 'it's capital murder either way so may as well not leave any witnesses'. Ultimately, it's Di Nero being non-rational and driven by emotion that leads to the final scene in the movie.
This is just some guy's top 50 favorite movies. And if you'd gone just one year further, to 1995, you'd have gotten Heat, Braveheart, Casino, 12 Monkeys, The Usual Suspects, and Toy Story. The Basketball Diaries doesn't hold up, at all, but Apollo 13 was great.
(I will stick up for Heat, but my god, the shoulder pads).
The American Alien(s) 1,2 and 3 Limitless The Bourne movies Heat Leon
It's not about the movies themselves but for example with Bourne or the American, it's certain scenes that get me in a mood. A single professional or group doing his / its thing, it's kind of calming.
Feel free to suggest movies in a similar vain.
Same here, regarding movies- we preferentially watch films under two hours, ideally 90-100 minutes, because that both fits between our child's bedtime and ours, and it's a better economy of time for a story in that format, rather than an indulgent marathon.
I doubt I will ever watch Heat again, unless over a couple days, and unless my child wants to I won't watch the Lord of the Rings again (and especially not The Hobbit movies; that was largely a waste of time, though I will gladly read The Hobbit at least once more before I die).
Mad Max: Fury Road (Black & Chrome version) I watched for the third time recently, but over two days.
Engaging conversation, though? I recently had the luxury of time and privilege of talking for three hours straight with a well-read college student. Not being a high school teacher anymore I'm out of touch with young-adult perspectives, and I have so many follow-up questions now.
Real-world moment from the "Heat" movie script.
This was a fun one to lookup. eBay 2001, Amazon 1999 (first order was a book I needed for high school as well as VHS tape for the movie Heat), but my winner is Yahoo Mail 1997. I'm sure my AIM account would be older but is long since deleted.
I suspect it's most content and not just some. I may prefer to watch a specific movie, like Heat (1995), but if it's not available on the streaming services I currently pay for I'm more likely to watch something else rather than pay 15 bucks (or whatever) for it.
I feel the same about GTA V. When I'm driving, and the sunset comes, and the song "Pure Shores" starts to play, I really start to get shivers. Somehow with this game they captured some of the vibe of California, and related movies (HEAT, Point Break).
Fans of "Heat" may also be interested in Mann's 1981 film "Thief". I saw it after hearing it had a lot of thematic overlap with "Heat". It stars James Caan and Willie Nelson, which I took as a selling point.
It's been awhile since I saw it but I remember not hating it.
Same. Some movies, like Heat, should just be left alone. No sequels, prequels, nothing
The best thing about Heat is the sound design. One of the very very few films that makes guns sound as loud as they actually are.
(No HN pedantry about SPL please.)
One of my favorite movies. Mann recently wrote a novelized sequel, "Heat 2", and has said it's his next film project. I read the book and am, let's say, not optimistic about the prospects for the film version.
I hope he proves me wrong.
If anyone hasn't seen Michael Mann's Heat, put it on your to-watch list. It's an excellent movie and of course features a bank robbery in LA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(1995_film)
Yeah, this post opened my eyes to important context about 80s and 90s action movies. Watching those movies 10-20 years later, I often thought, how are there so many darn banks getting robbed? Turns out, ‘Heat’ is more realistic than I understood (at least in this one respect).
Spike Lee’s ‘Inside Man’ is kind of a throw back to that era’s preoccupations.
The 1995 film "Heat" refers to them as "gladiator academies". And there's a great Willem Dafoe film called about the US prison system called "Animal Factory".
It's not just silencers - movies and video games are generally bad at gunshots. For good reasons - if you make them as loud as they ought to be, even to the limits of the recording equipment (since you'd need to go well into the hearing-unsafe territory), they'll drown out everything else.
There are exceptions. The famous shootout scene from "Heat" does a surprisingly good job at conveying just how deafening gunfire really is close up, for a movie. Although even that is much milder than it would be IRL, due to use of blanks and the aforementioned equipment limitations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL9fnVtz_lc (shooting starts around 4:20)
as someone who used to work at a digital intermediary (DI) company (think photoshop filters but for film) most of this is bollocks.
> But every time I watch something made before 2000, it looks so beautiful to me
No, the author is confusing nostalgia with aesthetics.
Heat for example is a great movie, fun story, good suspense. It looks ok, but its colours are all over the place. you don't notice it, because its an old film and old films should feel like that.
The quote:
> Tungsten allows for more accurate color in camera but LEDs are cheaper, cooler, and more convenient. So the solution is to film on a nice digital camera and fix the color in post.
very much nope. None of the stuff you've seen in films since about 2005 looks like it was shot. No film ever gets to screen without colour correcting. In fact every setup will have a macbeth chart film so that they can conform the colours so they are consistent.
More over, film is colour corrected in 16bit log, which is way more colours than most of us can observe, and a fuckton more dynamic range than can be displayed.
yes shite LED lights have worse spectral response than tungsten, but its fairly easy to correct for (hell if you are good enough you can film under sodium lamps and make it look good. )
but ARRL lights have full RGB, with loads of effects that were not possible before. I as a mere mortal can light a room like the Holywood golden age for <$1000(but not with ARRL lights, because they are $5k each). For the big players, you can do something ridiculous like this: https://ymcinema.com/2022/09/26/lighting-a-desert-magnificent-bts-footage-of-nope/
> Another user mentioned that shooting on film required a level of forethought, planning, and patience that digital simply doesn’t
Yes, it also means that you can't take risks, because every foot of film cost a fuckton to process, you have to rush it to get developed, then view the rushes, print the stuff you like or re-shoot. reshoots are very expensive. If you miss a shot, then you are fucked, because it'll blow a hole in your budget.
digital allows instant playback, much less reset, and longer shooting in much more challenging lighting situations. For example Barry lyndon could be shot without custom lenses.
Digital allows multi camera shooting, meaning that you can get much better acting from everyone, because a "two shot" takes half the time.
So to the meat: "all of netflixs looks the same"
No, you are looking at fashion. Colour and feel of a TV show is completely under the control of the producers/directors/DoP. They colours you are seeing are a conscious choice. When the next Coen brothers movie pops up, you'll see a rush to have warm, low contrast rich colour movies again.
Marvel movies look like that, because they chose to.
Marvel Tv series look like that, because it was a choice.
They respond to fashion, which means that at the moment shit is dark and grundgy, because thats what's in.
Black and white will come around shortly.
TL;DR: the author is talking shit about stuff they are making assumptions about. none of the data there is accurate. Its just a reworked classic: "everything was better in the old days, the youth don't put any effort into the craft" which given that this is literally the tail end of the golden era of TV is utter risible bollocks.
Here's at least one book on him: The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. by Evan Ratliff.
Another is: Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire by Elaine Shannon.
Michael Mann has the rights to turn Hunting LeRoux into a film. He did Heat, Ali and Collateral (probably one of my favorite movies). Unfortunately, he also did Blackhat.
That's pretty horrible list if it's missing Heat, Fight Club and Falling Down from 90s, also no Jagten from newer movies.
I just live the quote from the movie Heat:
”Assume they got our phones, assume they got our houses, assume they got us, right here, right now as we sit, everything. Assume it all.”
I was not very impressed, entered Fight Club, Heat and Still Walking (Japanese family drama/comedy) and all movies I got recommend were Japanese, completely unrelated to first two movies, most of them I knew, the free I didn't were not interesting or straight up anime.
Upgrade is pretty mediocre forgettable movie, bit difficult to regimens l recommended good scifi movie, those are rare. From less known Mr Nobody, Her are decent.
My LG TV plays movies from USB stick and never tried a trick like this. Not gonna lie, those were mostly relatively old movies, like LOTR or Heat, but also latest Predator installment.
The year is 2043, and I’m in the mood for a “Heat bank robbery movie with an Alien twist”.
Soon enough, convergent-rendered Val Kilmer is stumble-crawling through an extensive duct system containing numerous big city bank branches, relentlessly harried by a xenomorph Al Pacino.
Heat (1995) is actually a remake. The original movie is called L.A Takedown and was also written/directed by Michael Mann
When I saw that scene in the theater the first time, it left me shaking in my seat. It's still powerful today.
Watching Val Kilmer's facial expression change at that start. "At the drop of a hat, these guys will rock 'n roll."
I'm one in, I imagine, a very small group. But I find Mann's "Miami Vice" to be one of my favorite films of his. It's the most dangerous movie I've ever seen, it (almost) never lets up. Even the sex was dangerous. Heck, the ROSES were dangerous.
The minor nemesis Neptune is one of the scariest characters I've seen, and we only see a glimpse of him. And John Ortiz' Jose Yero. Sheesh. "I'm a disco guy."
The Heat gunfight scene is intense, the audio is amazing. A late friend of mine was in downtown LA during one of the shooting days, and relayed what it was like.
But MV is intense throughout the whole movie. Just never lets up.
I think the street shootout in Heat (1995) is one of cinema's greatest scenes. It's the audio that makes it incredible - the guns echoing off the buildings. And Val Kilmer, Sizemore and De Niro trying to run carrying large bags of cash - greed vs survival.
For non gun users - I recommend watching the heist/ambush scene in Heat at a painful volume. This is a reasonable simulation of the loudness.
I like the quote from the movie Heat: “He knew the risks, he didn’t have to be there. It rains you get wet.”
SPACs are a high risk way of going public and nothing is guaranteed.
You could certainly sue, it might takes years and money from your pocket to get a judgement you’ll never collect a dime on, but yeah, you can sue.
Yes, cliché implies an overused trope; in Heat, all the female characters are clichés; most of the male characters are too (the main two, the exhausted but determined cop, and the super-pro bank robber, certainly are); and so are the situations and plot developments. The "one-last-big-score-that-goes-wrong" is so cliché it should be legislated against. Everything in that movie is utterly predictable.
As for movie critics, I'd rather form my own opinion than follow those of people who's profession is to sit in cinemas without even paying for their own tickets. But, while you're right that most reviews of Heat are very positive, there are plenty of critics who thought that movie was boring and cliché. Here's one for instance: https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/heat
"all the character-building information is cliched and uninteresting"
"About forty minutes of Heat is involving. The rest varies from humdrum to tedious. That's not a very good success rate."
"the long stretches of banal dialogue and formula plotting mute the impact of the staccato, bullet-laden bursts of energy"
None of this matters much, of course. I would feel the same if there were zero negative reviews.
I think we should agree to disagree.
You're misinformed as the meaning of the word cliché, if that's your definition. Cliché != normal. Heat has a variety of different people with different families and different situations, it's realistic, it's not clichéd. Cliché implies an overused trope, especially one which is heavily featured or relied upon as a major element of the story. This "soccer mom" element (which I don't agree with to start with) is a very minor side aspect barely featuring for 1 or 2 minutes in the movie. The fact that you obsess over it so much is frankly weird to me.
Also, movie critics highly disagree with you and consider Heat to be one of the best crime/thrillers ever made, original, fresh, not clichéd, and the movie which every crime thriller which came after aspired to be.
I have to say, I don't agree that any of the items you point out as clichés are really clichés. A cop's wife cheating on her husband with a "loser" is a cliché? Are you sure you know what a cliché even is? Loose morals are a cliché? One wife of one of the gangsters in the movie is obsessed with family, aren't some people out of most people you meet obsessed with family? That's kind of a normal thing.
I would say, when compared to most action/suspense/thriller movies, Heat is one of the all-time greatest mostly because it defies most of the genre conventions. When I saw Heat, it amazed me because even 20 years later, it still seems incredibly fresh and original and unlike 99% of other movies of the same genre.
Heat is incredibly realistic, there are no out and out "pure" good guys or "pure" bad guys, very much like reality, everything is shades of grey. There is no winner in the story nor solely happy or bad ending, and the mechanics of the story both on the cops and robbers side is strongly grounded in reality and indeed based on real life stories from the police. The cast was extremely well trained by people experienced on both the "bad guy" side and the "good guy" side. The gunplay and heists are also extremely realistic, to the point that many elite armed forces use the gunplay and tactics in heat as training tools!
I have no problem to defend Drive against Fugitive, Fugitive aged really bad and it feels like cheap TV movie, Drive is obviously much newer, has great cinematography, great score, atmosphere, nice action and aged really good despite being 11 years already (but I am not really some big fan of Drive, just saying it's better than Fugitive). Btw. just because something is "stupid action flick" it doesn't mean it can't be good at it, you can have good stupid action flicks and you can have bad stupid action flicks. I don't usually watch stupid action flicks (I'm more (social) drama guy), but when I do I want to watch the good ones.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
"One way to entirely ruin the movie would have been to insert scenes with the Marshal's wife where she would ask why he's never home, and scold him for missing his son's football game, etc."
Heat was specifically about their personal relationships, so in that context it made sense.
Honestly, I love Heat and Michael Mann not because they are great movies all around, but because I love Michael Mann's aesthetics. I'm totally ok with the cliches and basic stories and just appreciate the glossy atmosphere.
Heat wasn't a very good movie. It was full of clichés, esp. the female characters. The cop's wife cheats on him with a loser, to make her husband notice. The wife of a gangster is obsessed with kids and family. And of course the love interest of the protagonist doesn't have a clue about what he does or whohe is, she's an innocent white dove completely, well, clueless. Morals are also very loose, which makes the protagonists hard to relate to.
The Fugitive has very bad guys, which may be a little cliché too, but there is this ambiguous central character of the Marshal who has a great arc. At the beginning he's just doing his job and isn't interested in the least in the details of the case. He only digs into them because he thinks they may help with the chase. And as the movie progresses he warms up to the protagonist, until he saves him at the end. That's great.
One way to entirely ruin the movie would have been to insert scenes with the Marshal's wife where she would ask why he's never home, and scold him for missing his son's football game, etc.
Unpopular opinion: The Fugitive is not a particularly good movie and Harrison Ford is not a particularly good actor.
I mean if one wants to write an article about the good action movies of the time maybe write about Heat?
And while I agree with the observation that we are seeing way too many entirely predictable movies made by the same patterns, I would argue The Fugitive was one of them at the time.
Still from time to time something very different comes along. I just watched "Everything, everywhere, all at Once". That is definitely not your typical Holywood fare, and was extremely surprising and enjoyable.
I work in the industry. Look at Heat and the opening of Dark Knight Rises and you'll see a partial direct remake of many shots.
People take shots from other films all the time. The only weird thing about this is how close the two films were chronologically. Usually people steal from older films. But this is far from a big deal. Tarantino has talked about how Reservoir Dogs is basically a segment of one of his favourite Honk Kong films made into a whole feature. This is literally the way a lot of films get made, people are inspired, sometimes they see a scene that's quite tough or they can't quite crack it so they take from some other film. Doesn't mean they're hacks.
> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
They're an overrated collectible. There's no great quality-of-media benefit to VHS tapes, versus say the audio record market (where there is an argument in terms of the audio experience).
People are in fact quite nostalgic for movies, not VHS tapes. The author is confused on the difference.
Nobody is buying Ikari Warriors 1/2/3 (old NES games) for $50 on the PS5 today; but people have been buying Top Gun on DVD, then Blu-ray, then 4K, and paying retail prices to do it. They do it because there has generally been a quality increase. The rare exception is a few hyper popular games from the past that eg end up on Steam (Final Fantasy 1/2/3/etc games, or Age of Empires) or on a Nintendo repackaging hardware device.
Most NES video games for example were not endlessly repackaged with each generation of video game machines. The companies make new games, the old games largely stay in the past (in part due to the vast improvement in the quality of the games, the graphics, the size of the games, etc). The same is not true of movies. I can buy a superior copy of the movies The Color of Money or Heat on disc today vs the same movies on VHS, and that's why nobody cares about collecting VHS tapes, the same exact movies are reproduced at often dramatically better quality vs the past. They're not merely reproduced, it's typically a superior offering (certainly moving from shoddy VHS tapes to modern discs, when they're done well by the studio, is a vastly superior consumer experience).
I distinctly remember feeling like 1995 was absolutely amazing year for cinema.
Toy story, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Usual Suspects, Heat, Casino, Seven, Clueless, 12 Monkeys, Babe, Get Shorty, Leaving Las Vegas, etc.
A great time to be going to the Cinema.
I was half expecting this to be about Val Kilmer's self titled movie Val (about his life) that's coming out soon. I love Val Kilmer, especially in Heat, but this article was really interesting as well.
Theatres in my city do this, it is fantastic. I paid normal prices to go watch Heat on the big screen in 2021 and it was worth every penny.
As someone who really didn't watch movies until recently, I have missed a lot of them. So being able to watch some of the iconic movies of yesterday in the theatre has been great.
In every Michael Mann movie I can think of, the gunfire is really loud compared to everything else; I can understand wanting to show off after recording all of the gunfire in the Heat shootout for real.
I disagree with you to some extent, in that the world is shades of gray, and indeed, it is naive to think that either "someone is so dangerous we should deprive them of all liberty" or "despite past activities, we are so confident in their rehabilitation that no caution should be taken in their release to society".
You do make an interesting suggestion that, if we do put a scarlet letter on someone for a past crime for which they are deemed "safe" enough to be in the public, that they should be compensated for that in some way. Shit, look at the movie "Heat" for one of many examples. If someone is trying to get their life together but can't find decent work on parole, or is abused and looked at as a criminal despite paying their debt, what motive might someone have to stay out of a past life?
So to clarify that...the federal Assault Weapons Ban applied to semi-auto rifles with certain ergonomic features, including pistol grips, flash hiders, and folding stocks. (Semi-auto is one bullet per trigger pull, full-auto means you can hold the trigger down and spray bullets.)
The North Hollywood robbers had illegally modified their weapons to enable full-auto fire. Since well before 1997, modifying guns like this has been a federal felony that gets you a ten-year prison sentence. That's a prohibition that predates the Assault Weapon Ban, which had nothing to do with full-auto weapons.
The AWB has since expired, and doing your own full-auto conversion will still get you ten years in the slammer. You can buy a full-auto weapon, but only after an extensive background check and approval of your local sheriff, if your state allows it, and only if the weapon was manufactured before 1986.
The movie Heat, of course, also had its robbers using full-auto. Incidentally, the movie came out before the North Hollywood robbery; many people have actually blamed the movie for inspiring the real robbers, one of whom owned a copy of the movie!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(1995_film)#Impact
I agree with this philosophy. I see the writer has used popular memes to convey the problem with humour. I would also add this quote from the movie "Heat":
"Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
Yeah, in fact, it was me in the original youtube. Even I forgot I ever saw this on youtube...
But you're right -- 1989 summer job.... 3 network channels + some UHF channels. I doubt I was the only burger flipper sitting there thinking, "huh?" at midnight.
Millennials will never appreciate how edgy Far Side, Letterman, Howard Stern, etc. were to that era. Of course, I'll never appreciate most of the nonsense my teen son watches on youtube now either. (he even thought 'Heat' was a lame movie...)
Speaking of Saab 900 Turbo. I saw one the other day when re-watching the movie Heat (1995), visible during the infamous street battle. Well worth a watch, if not just for the Saab.
A quick Google shows a few sites that keep history of IMDB ratings. Unfortunately they seem to concentrate on movies actually in the IMDB 250
Some interesting ones:
Avatar - http://top250.info/movie/?0499549
Se7en - http://top250.info/movie/?0114369
Heat - http://top250.info/movie/?0113277
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens http://top250.info/movie/?2488496
Terminator 2 - http://top250.info/movie/?0103064
Note: There seems to be a big shifts in movie ranks in May 2005 and July 2012, probably due to a change in the ranking formula.
See also the street shootout scene in the Michael Mann bank robber film Heat, in which the bank robbers employ this tactic while trying to escape the police.
(Arguably the tactical prowess displayed by the bank robbers was unrealistic, since it suggested the characters had a military background that wasn't otherwise hinted at. It's generally a great movie though, Michael Mann at his best.)
I was just thinking that they recently got some good content added.
These were all added this month: Batman Begins, Clerks, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, No Reservations, Stripes, The Aviator, and The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire Comedians in Cars series is a lot of fun. Heat, The Godfather, Gangs of New York, Casino, and Seven.
Maybe you're bored of all that, but it's not like the films on Netflix are universally terrible.
Your work sounds fascinating. I was previously into my photography, specifically film (both slide and col neg) - I'm still a big fan of the medium, except for the expenses and faff of getting a good scan and then getting the colour right.
Can you help me answer two things, as both have bugged me for years..?!
How do they achieve a look of tinted monochrome in films, which are still actually in colour? If that doesn't make sense - I'm thinking of films like Heat where there is often a strong blue tint which gives the feel of monochrome but it is all in colour. I've found was able to replicate it somewhat by combining the image with a quadtoned version, but it was still fairly far off tbh.
The other question is - how does colour gamut relate to the brightness of the display? Is it all to do with the dynamic range of each channel - i.e. the difference between black and, say, red, rather than overall brightness? I was at a photography show recently, and was blown away by some of the prints made by some of fuji's printers. Is it ever possible to match the gamut our eyes can see? And what colour space/gamut do you usually work in? Sorry two extra Q's there...
Thanks, and thanks for the fascinating info already.
Pftt! This scene is nothing. The best scene of all times is the bank robbery scene in the movie Heat and what happens after. Al Pacino and Robert Deniro were lethal. It makes me cry every time when Deniro leaves her behind:
“Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
Slick write-up, and I especially appreciate your personal story and context to mull over. I studied Curriculum Design as my advanced degree program, have worked 5+ retail/sales/customer service jobs, and also done formal classroom instruction. I like that distinction you put forward, because it captures what I, well, disliked about sales as a profession.
I love imparting knowledge, telling stories, and holding a person's interest - that is a transaction in and of itself. It's the end goal. What I had to do in sales was get to the very end of the discussion and then "ask for the sale" which always felt like a disservice to the relationship / exchange. As in, if I did well educating somebody that they needed to buy the movie Heat to test out their audio system, I shouldn't have to say, "So, are you going to purchase this today?" because they'll have already made the decision themselves. Sales is hard like that, and I can appreciate good sales techniques in both the soft and hard approaches.
...as to your story, it really reminded me of a write-up over at the AV Club on the second installment of the Atlas Shrugged independent movies. The film beats the audience over the head with dialog that only serves to advance the philosophy (or what have you) of the story, meaning it's really preachy and not very entertaining. I think there's a difference in audience expectations depending on subject matter, e.g. it's more acceptable to learn STEM material from a heavy handed teacher, but with personal belief systems/notions, lecturing creates push-back in many cases.
There's a quote from the film Heat where Al Pacino says"You can get killed walking your doggie!"
Death is everywhere, it seems that he has fully accepted the fact that all people are mortal and like him, you will die too.
Also, I'm pretty sure that for him it isn't about proving things for other people, it's about how climbing makes him feel about himself.
Yeah, I've messed around with Method of Loci off and on over the years, but it hasn't done much for me. Probably I'd just need to put the effort in to it, and I haven't. My natural tendency has been a grab bag of sorts; if I want to recall something, I think about a category -- "people", "projects", "trivia", etc. -- to kind of prime my brain in some way I don't really understand, and then it just pukes out a bunch of stuff until the thing I'm looking for pops up. Like, if I'm trying to remember an actor's name, it goes, "face -> action movie -> movie box was dark blue at night -> heat -> Val Kilmer". It's usually pretty quick.
You're right though, brains are pretty fallible. If something's really really really important, I do have backups. Usually email, or text, or paper.
...but, honestly? I'm scared to death of old age. It scares the piss out of me. One of the things about it that really gets to me is the idea that I might be 90 one day and not recognize people I care about, or remember anything about myself, or have any idea what's going on around me. The smartest elderly people I know are all very mentally active, and always have been, so even though there isn't good scientific evidence for the prevention of alzheimer's through puzzles and brain teasers and the like, I do it anyway.
Maybe I will play the bastard in this role, but I respected Ebert far more for triumphing over what he went through than his actual reviews.
I watched (and loved) Siskel & Ebert when I was a kid living in NY. When I saw it, it came on late at nite on a Sunday after The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Darkside which always scared me.
I'll still never forgive Ebert for giving a lukewarm (possibly thumbs down) for Heat after all these years. Don't get me wrong. I love the guy because he loves arts but I just won't ever forget.
Every time I loved a movie Ebert would piss all over it while Siskel loved it. Needless to say, you can tell which fan I am of the two. With that said, the greatest thing about him is that he overcame any obstacle presented before him. Maybe it's the love of a good woman that allows this.
I'm always the student but I can't figure out how to be as great as he was.
>The predicted loss of a bank robbery is high four figures.
Having worked as a bank teller, that figure is much, much lower. Often they'll only get away with a couple of hundred dollars.
Otherwise you're right. I think a lot of people still have the romantic picture of Bonnie & Clyde or Hollywood style movies like Heat. The reality is that bank robbers nowadays are idiots. They're high on crack or otherwise don't know what they're doing. They are dumb. All bank robberies are investigated by the FBI, and these guys get caught.
This isn't just fear for the customers or perception, it's a dangerous situation where the loss is really not that great. Meanwhile a teller that tries to act like a hero could get himself or others shot, over a couple of hundred dollars.
Apropos of nothing, but a few times in my life I've actually gone to the theater to see a movie I knew nothing about. Nothing about the plot, the cast, etc. No trailer. It's a distinct experience, and sometimes highly pleasant. (I say "Heat" this way. Which was cool because the whole beginning of the movie is that long sequence with DeNiro stealing the ambulance, but I had no idea what the movie was, not even genre, and it was fun to try to figure out what was going on :)
Heat is an insanely great movie.
"Heat" and "WALL-E" have a shorter edit distance between them than any Indiana Jones movies.