Heat

          Heat.  Heat, Heat, Heat, Heat…  Believe it or not, folks, this movie is the reason the Man Movie Guide exists.  This movie is the quintessential example of what we mean by a Man Movie.  If you survey everyone you know that has seen Heat, a vast majority of people will tell you it was a good movie.  However, if you speak to the men that have seen it, they are likely to get a certain twinkle in their eye.  This movie touches a male nerve that most people won’t be able to explain away.  Interpreting the movie through our primer on what constitutes a Man Movie, it becomes somewhat clearer what separates this movie from countless other good heist movies.  This movie features heavy amounts of violence, manly archetypes of various stripes (on both sides of the law), loyalty, betrayal, brotherhood, honor, epic shootouts, and bank heists.

CORRECTION: Heists with cool fucking hockey masks!

          Al Pacino plays a cop who buries his emotions in his work.  His personal life collapses around him as he focuses on doing what he does, and shielding his family from the details.  His single-mindedness is pointed out in dialogue with other people and how he responds to his wife’s accusations.  Perhaps a better gauge, however, is his dialogue throughout the movie.  One of the most bizarre things about this film is that it seems as though Pacino’s Lieutenant Hanna never has a conversation with anyone but himself.  His answers to questions are nearly complete non-sequiturs, his anger is often unprovoked, his eye contact is all over the place.  At times this is unnerving and almost helps the character who seems to border on the autism spectrum, but at others it leaves us with really funny lines like, “You can get killed walking your doggie!”  Just imagine the trademark Pacino yell-y voice saying that.  The only conversation he seems to be engaged in takes place at a coffee shop across the table from his nemesis, Robert De Niro.  Whether this is intentional or not is undetermined, but it does add a gravitas to the scene beyond the mob movie fanboy ejaculation, “They’re finally in the same room together in the same movie!” that was likely a big selling point to the whole shebang.

Sometimes it feels like the only thing separating Pacino from Gary Busey is The Godfather.

          Robert De Niro plays the head of a heist crew.  His character has at least a partial resemblance to James Coburn’s character in The Magnificent Seven.  The money almost seems secondary to both the challenge and the craft to De Niro’s Neal McCauley.  As with many, many heist movies, this one focuses on the concept of ‘one last big score’.  But don’t let that deter you from the film.  If anything, it just helps to amplify the underlying philosophical premise of the movie.  You see, this film is about as fatalistic and deterministic as it gets.  Characters are constantly and repeatedly going against their own decisions, not to mention against good advice or the smart move.  Each character seems as though they’re traveling on rails towards the endgame, and what makes this movie both wonderful and tragic, is that those rails all inevitably collide in a pleasantly unpleasant way.  Thieves have to steal, cops must fight crime, psychopaths are compelled to kill, criminals are unable to leave their life behind, witnesses can’t not testify despite the implications, and relationships live on in the brutal light of infidelity and incompatibility.  Case in point, during the pivotal shared coffee between Hanna and McCauley, the following exchange happens:

                     HANNA

          I don't know how to do anything

          else.

                      NEIL

         (the shared confession)  ...neither do I.

                      HANNA

          And I don't much want to.

                      NEIL

          Neither do I.

          If you have seen this movie, and it’s been a while, you’re likely forgetting what an unbelievably ridiculous cast was involved.  Granted, not everyone was well known at the time, but De Niro’s gang also includes Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, and Danny Trejo.  Jon Voight is their awesomely disgusting mulleted fence and advisor.  Pacino investigates flanked by Ted “It rubs the lotion on its skin” Levine.   Natalie Portman is Pacino’s stepdaughter Ashley Judd plays Val Kilmer’s wife.  The movie also features Dennis Haysbert, Hank Azaria, Jeremy Piven, Tone Loc, and Henry Rollins.  It can be distracting, but only momentarily.

          The movie, though it belongs on the Man Movie Mount Rushmore, is far from perfect.  The non-orchestral music is particularly bad.  Much of the time the music has a seedy mid-90s aspect not unlike an episode of Red Shoe Diaries, and a scene in a hip, urban underground club features House of Pain (unlikely even in 1995).  The dialog between Waingro and his prostitute sounds like it was written by Michael Mann while he was trying to watch something on TV at the same time.  If you think we’re making a big deal about nothing, she at one point says this to Waingro, “You fly. You cool.”  Nobody says that ever.  Not ever.  She goes on to say, and we quote, “You a hot dog.  You a cowboy.  You hung like a horse and this was the monster fuck of my young life.  Now I gotta get my ass streetside.”  Really, Michael Mann?!  Really?  It also warrants mentioning that the lighting in certain scenes is completely fake to the point that it looks like actors are in front of a green screen for something as mundane as being on a balcony overlooking the city.  We’re not sure who was in charge of this, but lighting is a craft that was honed to a point so as to be innocuous in ordinary scenes in non-expressionist/surrealist films decades before Heat came out.  There are no less than three scenes that throw all conventional lighting knowledge out the window.

Unless Mac Tonight is standing right behind you, this is not how night looks.

          Flaws and all, this movie is an essential.  The first heist holds up just as intense and indispensable as when it first came out nearly 20 years ago.  The acting and the script (with the one noted exception) is phenomenal.  The movie is thrilling and suspenseful and gut-wrenching.  It also manages to accomplish what so few movies do; it humanizes both sides.  Some people grew up wanting to be the good guys, others grew up thinking being a bank robber would be awesome… but it’s safe to say that the movie makes you understand the allure and the grief of both.

Heat Trailer

Animated GIF: Black Caesar

You jive, turkey!

Predator

      When we were polling folks for Man Movies that absolutely had to be reviewed, one of the movies that kept coming up again and again was Predator. It seems to occupy a similar hallowed ground for nearly everyone we spoke to. So when it came time to review it (yes, we'd all seen it before), it came as quite a shock to this reviewer. You see, dear reader, you probably haven't seen it in quite a while (beginning to end). It is not as good as you remember it. Don't mistake that inflammatory statement for dislike. The movie is good, and very deserving of a review on the Man Movie Guide. It is just a very flawed film that is airbrushed into classic status by nostalgia and a distance from actually having seen it.
      Predator is a roll call movie that is partially derailed by the sheer star power of a mid-80s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold plays "Dutch" (likely a way of haphazardly writing off the fact that a US Military officer sports an accent more Colonel Klink than Sanders). His team of special ops falls flat due to a lack of screen time for each of them, but most of them get at least one chance to shine and show off their machismo before being offed as fodder. Sonny Landham plays stoic Native American tracker "Billy", who is so hardcore that he mutilates himself before standing up to the titular alien hunter. Jesse Ventura (yes, that makes two future governors in the movie) isn't a very good character, but he does have one of cinema's all-time coolest guns in the movie: a mini-gun with an overhand joystick-esque trigger fed by a metal backpack full of bullets. And Apollo Creed himself, Carl Weathers, plays a one-time operative turned pencil pusher who gets it in the coolest/funniest scene in the movie [Note: This movie is about an alien hunter that picks off people one by one. Not many people survive. That doesn't count as a spoiler so get over it.]
     So the pacing of the movie is off due to bad editing. So the music by Alan Silvestri sounds as if it was written for an entirely different movie. So the continuity of much of the action is uneven and subject to interpretation. Predator will not soon be mistaken for high art. But let's talk about what it does have going for it. This is vintage Arnold, where he is kick ass and spitting one-liners like only he can. It is a 7 foot alien with dreadlocks blowing the shit out of people with lasers in a jungle and taking pieces of them as trophies. It is explosions and machine guns and a dense and verdant jungle belonging to some anonymous South American country. It is a popcorn movie at heart, and will never allow you to treat it as anything else. The movie is damn fun; and that's probably why you remember it more for what it is than what it isn't.

Predator Trailer

The Magnificent Seven

     Suppose you were in charge of the world, and you wanted the next crop of youngsters to be the spiritual successors to “The Greatest Generation”, here is what you would do: When kids are in health class, and they separate the boys and girls so that girls can learn about their periods and boys learn about boners...show the boys The Magnificent Seven instead and afterward, just say, “Pick one.”

     It seems as though the Western is rife with nothing, if not archetypes that embody the Teddy Roosevelt, “Speak softly and carry a big stick...” quote. The king of all these is The Magnificent Seven, and that is no accident... as it was smartly remade from the feudal Japan masterpiece, Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. The personalities, quirks, and Achilles' heels of the titular Seven transcend language, era, and preferred method of fucking shit up (guns, swords, etc.).

     There is so much manliness crammed into this movie that lesser folk have been known to curl up into a fetal ball, cowering from the overpowering radiance of masculinity coming from these cowboys. Actually, that's not true. But if it were true of any movie, it would be this one.

     Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are introduced to us first, and, just describing their initial scene will put hair on your chest. It seems as though a transient Native American met with an untimely demise and, due to the racism of the locals, they are threatening death upon anybody looking to bury him in Boot Hill. Yul Brynner says, essentially, “fuck that noise”. He borrows a shovel and the hearse and heads towards the cemetery, despite having no attachment to the injun. McQueen sees this and his reaction is to take someone's shotgun and jump onto the hearse to shoot anyone who gets in the way of the coolest damn funeral of all-time.

     Brynner and McQueen are contracted by a Mexican village to defend against a despotic bandit and his bandit army. Against dozens of men, the plan is to raise an army of six. The thinking is that the testicular fortitude of these six will substitute for the other fifty-plus men realistically needed to even the odds.

So, joining this crew is a knife-toting James Coburn. And get this, he signs on, not because the money is even close to decent (because it's not), but because all he cares about is proving that he's the best... at killing people. Charles Bronson is conscripted because he essentially has nothing better to do with his time. And then you have Harry, played by Brad Dexter (yeah, I haven't heard of him, either)... who is convinced that there is some sort of con to be had on the other side of killing nearly a hundred ruthless Mexicans. Robert Vaughn's character is a little on the precious side, but that almost makes him more cool. For instance, he doesn't take off his dandy gloves, even when smoking fools. And then there's the impetuous seventh, played by one Horst Buchholz, who is out to impress the rest of the cowboys. While the eager puppy routine is a bit grating, it does lead to some of the most heroic/awesome antics in the movie.

     When you take the time to tally up all the key ingredients of the movie, there's no mistaking it for anything other than Man Movie Royalty...the kind of movie that 50 years of celluloid testosterone is built on the hairy and ripped back of. Watch this movie and try not to smile or clench your fist in an appreciation of its awesomeness, I dare you.

The Magnificent Seven Trailer