SUSO

THE CONVERSATION

"They are like two boxers. They know something, between them, that no one else knows.” Jon Voight.

It hit me during the summer. I hadn’t seen Heat for at least a couple of years, I definitely didn’t own it on DVD and with Amazon’s one-click buying mechanism, I realised I could be achieving a full-frontal Michael Mann onslaught, in my living room, within a matter of days. What a prospect. I even bought the limited edition version.

As it turned out, the mood wasn’t right. The warm, sunny evenings didn’t suit Mann’s dark city style. Heat was put on the back-burner for a while. But it was always there, chipping away at my subconscious, laying down its heisty gauntlet and taunting me with its 164 minute run time. Last night, the call was made. We would watch Heat. I’ve seen the film a million times, but picked away at the incomprehensibly fiddly cellophane like an ADHD kid at Christmas. Maybe because I'm a little older, maybe because I concentrated harder, I don’t know, but it was better than ever before. Heat still eclipses anything else that has been attempted in that genre since its 1995 release.

This scene, of course, has a place in cinematic history. The way Mann delayed and delayed it, the fact that it was one of only two times the screen legends were face to face when audiences expected them to be constantly clashing. It made for a classic conversation.

Categories Film Tags Film Mann

By on 12/11/08