"Heat" is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Brimful not of Asha but of pointless shots, horrific acting, and flaccid stabs at emotional depth, this three-hour unintentional parody of the crime thriller drama is almost as criminal as "Magnolia."
It never achieves the "so bad it's brilliant" effect of "Point Break," but instead just wallows along in its own smelly muck of "serious adult themes" all the long way until its groanworthy ending.
How did this forced, clunking script attract actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, and Jon Voight? Simple : those actors need money to feed their coke / stripper habits. Each turns in a wrenchingly bad performance, choking out some of the most leaden, unnatural dialogue ever heard in a major flick. Pacino especially -- he was good in "Godfather" and great in "Scarface," but his pseudo-hard-boiled persona is so stupid and fake that he makes gangsta rap look like a "NOVA" documentary. Kilmer looks like a complete idiot reject elf nazi or something. He should have called it quits at "Tombstone."
Here's something : De Niro's mopey love interest is played by some woman with a bobo look and immense shag of curly hair, and as soon as I saw here, I was like "Hey look, it's Edie Brickell!" Well wouldn't you know it? De Niro's next line was "What's your name?" to which flopmop replies "Eady." !!!!! I'm not kidding, and there is no way this was a coincidence. She's not aware of too many things, including the fact that the movie in which she's supporting actress is a rank stack of fetid herring bowels.
There are some scenes in here that are particularly worthy of mention for their very risibility. Chief among these is the big shootout scene -- you know, the one that directly inspired the real-life 1997 "North Hollywood Shootout" wherein a couple of guys with assault rifles went ape after a bank robbery and injured ten cops. Those guys got shot a whole heck of a lot. In the world of "Heat," however, a few guys with AR-15s can take on about two dozen cars full of well-armed cops, and not only live to tell the tale, but win! As we saw in 1997, there is no @#$%ing way that a few guys could hold off, much less defeat, dozens of cops, but I guess it helps that De Niro and Co. only have to reload their rifles every 500 rounds or so. There's this ludicrous shot toward the scene's end of all these bullet-riddled cop cars (some with what look like shell holes in them) and incapacitated cops lying about as De Niro saunters out the side of the frame through a parking lot with Kilmer in tow. Unbelievable. Equally noisome during that scene is where Pacino takes a shot that no cop would ever take : from an unsupported shoulder position and with his assault rifle, he shoots junkie swine Tom Sizemore in the cabeza while Sizemore is holding up a toddler in his arms. I don't @#$%ing think so. You'd think that it would be impossible to make a huge machine gun battle boring, but these clowns somehow manage it -- I kept getting distracted and had to rewind a bunch of times to see how they "escaped." Heinous.
Another scene that's dumber than a bag of dead snakes is where the cops lay a trap for Kilmer at his wife's place. Kilmer pulls up in his car, wifey goes out on the balcony to lure him into the trap at the behest of coppers. She warns Kilmer away with a facial expression and he gets back in his product-placement Camaro and starts to leave. Wifey says to copper "It wasn't him." Copper radios his buddy downstairs to stop Kilmer and check him out; Kilmer produces a fake ID. Cop buddy radios back saying "Oh, this isn't Kilmer, it's G. Phil Wizzleteats! Says here on his license. And the car's plates are clear and registered to a totally different person! Everything looks kosher." Copeer radios back "OK, let him go." WHAT THE @#$% I'm so sure that cops on a manhunt haven't, say, looked at a photo of th' guy for whom they're lying in wait! Complete and utter unmitigated BAD WRITING.
In summation, "Heat" is hot garbage. I suffered through it so that you don't have to.
New rule of wrist : if any movie shows up as being longer than 2 hours when you pull it up in Netflix instant, TURN IT OFF RIGHT AWAY. You can save yourself a lot of heartbreak. (10,607)
For those of you who don't know, Glenn Beck is a "conservative" commentator who has apparently recently discovered libertarianism. He gets on the air 5 days a week on Fox News and rants about the 'classical liberals' who we call the founding fathers. Whenever I see his show (not often), I think that it's too bad he wasn't ham-fistedly proselytizing about these things when Bush was in office, he might have actually earned himself some credibility. Beck is well-known for finding and airing buried footage of people in the administration and upper echelon of the democratic party making communist / socialist / fascist / racist / statist / scary-as-hell statements. He then spins these soundbytes into vast conspiracy theories and cries about it. With real tears. On the air.
Devil's advocate: According to Beck, he criticizes republicans too... But only if their names rhyme with Teddy Roosevelt (Seriously??) or John McCain
I've seen a few of these soundbytes made by Obama's various "czars" as well as some of the more central voices of the administration. What strikes me is not that these people exist or that their statements are so unapologetic, it's that the rest of the media aren't airing some of these clips. I'm left thinking "Are these people too insignificant to report or are these ideas just so innocuous to the press that they're not worth noting?"
The press historically gives a free ride to its favored politicians. The American public were denied critical information about FDR and Kennedy--particularly the juicy personal tidbits that would've ruined them. Even Bush was allowed to get away with a heck of a lot until the 9/11 fever broke and the press went rabid once again.
It would seem, however, that even the new liberal messiah can't walk on water forever. Left wingers around the country are waking up to the fact that their former lover and nobel laureate is actually a fraud and a danger to freedom--even as they (the left) narrowly define it. Obama has broken key campaign promises that have driven all but the most vapid party hacks from strong approval to apathy or disillusionment if not outright rage ($5 says they'll vote for him in 2012 regardless; but we're talking politics here, not reality).
With all this, Glenn Beck's muckraking over Obama's appointees is starting to bubble up from the depths of the journalistic septic tank that is "Fixed News" into the liberal press.
One of my favorite examples is a Salon article about Cass Sunstein ("one of Barack Obama's closest confidants"). It talks about 'his' idea to use government funds to pay agents to infiltrate internet chat-rooms and forums to spread the word of the state and to bolster confidence in the government. This isn't a new idea, of course, but it certainly should hit a nerve with the same groups that were upset about Bush's "propaganda" (which the article also goes into at length almost out of nowhere, proving once again that "leftwing" reporters can't say bad things about democrats without scrambling to assert "... But Bush was worse!!").
Interesting historical note: The first official propaganda ministry in the western world wasn't in Fascist Germany or Italy, it was in the United States under the progressive President Woodrow Wilson.
The Salon article goes on to point out the hypocrisy of certain liberal pundits in not jumping on this and other scaryisms drizzling out of the mouths of the Obama administration along side the drool and edamame particulates. They pass over these omens of statism while at the same time dubbing those who don't "Purveyors of Becksh*t-nuts Conspiracy Garbage."
To keep an even keel about politics (if that's even possible), I think it's necessary to look to people who actually endorse the person/group in question to see if your concerns are valid. Obviously most people just assume they're on the "right" side until the evidence piles up to the point of suffocation. However, when you see these 'sheeple' start to defy their shepherds and say the same incendiary stuff you've been saying, that's when you know you're not crazy--at least if you go by George Orwell's definition of insanity as being "a minority of one" ... although in politics it's usually the majority that's crazy, so who knows. (46,757)
Share
For those of you who don't know, Glenn Beck is a "conservative" commentator who has apparently recently discovered libertarianism. He gets on the air 5 days a week on Fox News and rants about the 'classical liberals' who we call the founding fathers. Whenever I see his show (not often), I think that it's too bad he 
Interesting historical note: The first official propaganda ministry in the western world wasn't in Fascist Germany or Italy, it was in the United States under the progressive President Woodrow Wilson.
