Three Brief Movie Mentions

I've been sitting on many posts for this site for a while, and here I plan on quickly glossing over two movies and the impressions they left on me, while setting a third up for a deeper discussion later.

These are brief because I have forgotten planty about what I wanted to say, or too much has happened in the meantime and I lost interest to fully savage one of them.

1) Heat, 1995

I had heard so much about this movie in the 23 years since it came out that had turned it into a sacred cow of sorts. I hadn't ever watched it...until a few weeks ago.

I remember the bank heist and shootout in LA that was all over the news back in late '95 or early '96 and the repeated references to Heat. Damn, I gotta see that movie, I remember thinking. Years passed. Years turned to decades.

I own copies of Melville's classic Le Samourai and Kurosawa's Rashomon and Yojimbo, but it wasn't until Fall of 2018 that I got around to watching Heat.

I should change that to "...that I got around to trying to stay awake through Heat."

Holy shit this movie is slow. And every scene is melodrama turned up to eleven. When I read that Michael Mann made the movie off of a scrapped television series treatment, it started to make sense. I am an unabashed homer of HBO's The Wire, and I imagine that if David Simon tried to turn his complex and realistic series into a movie (or five?) that the chances that it could turn into a boring, melodramatic slog would be greater than zero, but my faith in Simon's ability to not up the stakes by resorting to melodrama maybe could fix that.

The only on-screen scene between Pacino and De Niro? All out action set pieces? That Pacino/De Niro scene was good, but unrealistic relative to the entirety of the preceding movie. And the action set pieces were all pretty badass. But do I give a shit about Val Kilmer-the-degenerate-gambler-and -awful-father? Or the creepy relationship De Niro cultivates with Amy Brenneman? Yay, Al Pacino saves his ex-step-daughter Queen Amidala Natalie Portman...

I felt exhausted by the time it was over. Also, THIS MOVIE DOESN'T NEED TO BE 10 MINUTES SHORT OF THREE HOURS LONG.

2) The Third Man, 1949

I JUST SAW THIS!!!! IT'S THE BEST MOVIE EVER!!!

If not the "Best Movie Ever," it has certainly busted into my pantheon list of Favorite Pieces of Cinema ever. My ziggurat/pantheon movie discussion is being worked on in my head all the time, and will be discussed later.

As will this incredible thing that I never heard of until a few months ago while reading some film essay.

3) The Neverending Story, 1984

Besides The Princess Bride, Cassius doesn't much care for live-action movies. We sat down and recently watched The Neverending Story to preview it for him should the time come for us to try him out on it.

The special effects were pretty good for 1984 (with the exception of Falcor's face close-ups) or anytime, really, and the idea of people not caring about something leading to its ruin is neat and something I can get behind.

It was okay. I can't say that I liked it two-thirds as much as The Princess Bride, but easily half as much. During the research phase I learned that the movie was based on the German fantasy book of the same (in German) name, about a kid who escapes bullies and ends up with a book that he reads and becomes sucked into, which was something I didn't know.

Not much to say...it was pretty vanilla, but that may be due to me not having the same emotional kid-attachment to it like other movies from the same era (Temple of Doom, Back to the Future, Return of the Jedi, et al). Even this "mention" is boring...