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Victim of The Night
I did not care for Heat. So many people think it is great, but all I could see was actors ACTING!!!! DO YOU SEE THAT I AM ACTING????!!!!

A lot of technical brilliance, but the performances were hard for me to watch.
Dude, I am so with you.



Victim of The Night
I thought it was pretty clear that he was on drugs. Still didn't care for it.

After all the hype I was expecting a 9/10 or 10/10 and I feel like I got a 7.5/10.

I fully accept my minority status in this opinion. But for example, I would watch The Keep like three more times before ever wanting to revisit Heat.
Yup, totally with you, though I wouldn't even go to 7.5. I thought the whole movie was written to hang around the stunt of Pacino and DeNiro as adversaries in a movie and really I thought the whole movie was written just so they could have the scene in the restaurant. Like somebody wrote that scene and was like, OK, now we have to make a kewl movie so we can have this scene. I was bored.
I also didn't LOVE The Keep but it was entertaining enough and certainly less tiresome than Heat. I've told people in the past on other forums that I would watch it again just to make triple-sure I didn't like it, but honestly, the idea sounds like an exhausting waste of my time.



Victim of The Night
Run Hide Fight - 2021

I hope Daily Wire succeeds in bring entertainment back to the middle.



"Back to the middle"? Where is it now?



The Keep is an atmospheric 90 minutes of a demon killing Nazis. I didn't even love it, but at least it was interesting.

Heat was so disappointing that I can't remember any specifics of it except a crushing sense of annoyance that only mounted as it approached the 3 hour mark. It is my least favorite of any of the film's I've seen from Mann.
I was shocked when you said that the Keep was only 90 mins. It had been butchered to incomprehensibility and a degree of disjointedness that it felt at least twice as long.

Is it possible that it's merely expectations that affected your view of Heat? Usually when I'm fairly sour on an acclaimed and beloved movie, I mentally bookmark it as something to come back to with fresh eyes. When I first saw it, I thought it was severely bloated but now have come to love that element about it, as it takes it beyond a straightforward procedural into something epic in scale.

How did you feel about Thief or Collateral?



THE LAST LAUGH



It's interesting watching this after Dr. Mabuse as, aside from the title and a 4th wall breaking title card for the epilogue, Murnau didn't use any title cards or text throughout the film. Instead, he told the story purely through visuals and his aesthetic evolution represented a massive jump in sophistication from Nosferatu, which was no slouch. That trend would continue with Faust and Sunrise so I'm interested to see what he was able to accomplish in his later career.

That said, I preferred the simple poignance of this film and it's hauntingly "happy" epilogue to Faust. That said, of these few Murnau I've seen, every single one has been excellent.
I seriously love this. Probably my favorite film of the 1920s.
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Mindhorn (2016)

Hilarious outing from Julian Barratt about a washed up actor called out of retirement to assist in a murder enquiry on....The Isle of Man!




I seriously love this. Probably my favorite film of the 1920s.
It's a serious contender. Though there are a few Chaplin and Keaton films that will always have my heart from that era.



It's a serious contender. Though there are a few Chaplin and Keaton films that will always have my heart from that era.
Yeah, I would certainly have The Kid up there.



Well, to be clear, I wasn't referring to the actual ending scenes where Pacino and De Niro shoot it out. That of course was the result of De Niro getting separated from the gal at the hotel. I think I was rooting for De Niro and Amy Brennerman to get away and live happily ever after.

It's like the conversation with Whit. One gets invested in a bad guy, and wants him to succeed, even though he's a cold blooded killer...
I put it down to DeNiro's being the more charismatic character as well as him coming off as the better actor. Pacino just chewed the scenery and his Vincent Hanna wasn't very sympathetic. As a matter of fact, I can totally understand where Takoma is coming from. I did love the kinetic action sequences but the rest was a clumsily staged pissing contest between two groups of overly stylized manly men. With the tightly organized and professional robbery crew of course being the clear cut winners over the boring, knuckle dragging cops. Which is why the ending stuck in my craw.



Well, to be clear, I wasn't referring to the actual ending scenes where Pacino and De Niro shoot it out. That of course was the result of De Niro getting separated from the gal at the hotel. I think I was rooting for De Niro and Amy Brennerman to get away and live happily ever after.

It's like the conversation with Whit. One gets invested in a bad guy, and wants him to succeed, even though he's a cold blooded killer...
I think that at this point, everybody wanted him to get out. I mean, way back when he decided to drive away to kill the guy instead of going to the airport. At least I know I was like "NOOO! WHYY!?". But it does go to the nature of De Niro's character and how him working against his own "rules" ends up being his undoing. I love that.



Victim of The Night
I put it down to DeNiro's being the more charismatic character as well as him coming off as the better actor. Pacino just chewed the scenery and his Vincent Hanna wasn't very sympathetic. As a matter of fact, I can totally understand where Takoma is coming from. I did love the kinetic action sequences but the rest was a clumsily staged pissing contest between two groups of overly stylized manly men. With the tightly organized and professional robbery crew of course being the clear cut winners over the boring, knuckle dragging cops. Which is why the ending stuck in my craw.
Yeah, I think that was all I really took away from this film. Nearly 3 hours of stylized bloat and cliche around very Movie characters acting very Movie in a small pissing contest I just couldn't care less about.



And I don't always root for the bad guys. They basically ripped off Heat a couple of years ago but called it Den of Thieves. And boy oh boy, did that ever suck. Again, it also staged some good to great heist sequences but the character's personal lives ranged from tedious and irrelevant to embarrassingly preposterous with Gerard Butler a walking, talking cliche of a macho cop leading his own "outlaw" squad of robbery dicks.

I hated both groups because it was a sh*tty movie. Heat at least had a little bit of Mann's mojo working in it's favor.



'The Hidden Fortress' (1958)


One of Kurosawa's more accessible films, laced with comedy and adventure. His ability to keep characters in focus (deep or shallow) is brilliant. Framing and blocking also noticeable and the way he uses fog to light the scene is sublime. Mifune again dominates the screen.




ONE CHILD NATION
(2019, Wang & Zhiang)
A film with the word "One" in its title



"I'm struck by the irony that I left a country where the government forced women to abort and I moved to another country where the governments restrict abortions."

From 1979 to 2015, China enforced the famous "one-child policy" to deal with the rapidly growing population. To achieve this, they used propaganda, law enforcement, fines, and ultimately forced sterilizations and abortions. This documentary follows the implementation of that policy and the impact it had in the general population and in the country overall.

Wang, who was born in China during that period, uses her family as a starting point to highlight the lengths to which the government would go to enforce this policy. To do so, she interviews a former village leader, authors of propaganda, as well as a midwife that claims to have performed tens of thousands of abortions. She also establishes the connection between the one-child policy and the growing Chinese adoption market, which was established in the 1990s, and is fed by child trafficking as a direct result of the one-child policy.

Most of what the documentary presents is both compelling and shocking, but there are times when it feels a bit scattered. I would've appreciated a bit more focus. Finally, Wang's general approach is also somewhat amateurish, both in how she addresses some of her interviewees and in how she directs it. There are parts where you can see the "seams" of her narrative, and the conclusions don't feel organic, but rather forced. Given the source material, I don't think that was necessary.

Grade:



Wait, so you didn't even like the big diner scene? It's Pacino AND De Niro acting face-to-face for the first time ever... and at length, too!:
By the time I got there, I was too worn out from the film to be all that excited. I was like Oh, this is the scene everyone talks about. And it was fine, but it wasn't worth 3 hours.

I don't know whether that was a contribution to, or a reflection of, the diminution of morality in society. I'm wondering if we were better off when the bad guys always got caught...
There have always been charismatic criminals, far, far predating the film industry. I think it's more about what actions we are expected to be okay with in rooting for criminals. For example, I really took issue with the sequence in The Italian Job remake where they drove a car down some subway stairs. They didn't kill anyone--hard to root for a protagonist who squishes a woman and her baby--but in the reality of the film they easily could have. It really made it hard for me to like any of them after that.

I also didn't LOVE The Keep but it was entertaining enough and certainly less tiresome than Heat. I've told people in the past on other forums that I would watch it again just to make triple-sure I didn't like it, but honestly, the idea sounds like an exhausting waste of my time.
This is how I feel. I get tired even thinking about rewatching it.

Is it possible that it's merely expectations that affected your view of Heat? Usually when I'm fairly sour on an acclaimed and beloved movie, I mentally bookmark it as something to come back to with fresh eyes. When I first saw it, I thought it was severely bloated but now have come to love that element about it, as it takes it beyond a straightforward procedural into something epic in scale.

How did you feel about Thief or Collateral?
I won't rule it out, but I have had very little interest in revisiting it. When people describe what they like about it, it just doesn't light any fire in me.

I enjoyed [b]Thief[b] and Collateral and thought they both had a lot more authentic personality than anything in [b]Heat[b], which felt both bloated and cutesy (the gangster movie form of cutesy) and contrived.



Wait, so you didn't even like the big diner scene? It's Pacino AND De Niro acting face-to-face for the first time ever... and at length, too!:
IIRC, wasn’t there some talk that they actually weren’t in the same scene? That each did his scene then they were patched together? (Like they do for a single actor playing 2 parts at the same time?)
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Paranormal Activity, 2007, 2nd watch (C)

I didn't absolutely hate this movie this time, but it doesn't work terribly well. It's very long and very thin, The heavier material nearer the end doesn't balance really well with the earlier, mundane, everyman paranormal stuff. It's escalates like a ladder with 6 feet gaps between the steps.