Untamed Heart

At first glance, Untamed Heart (1993) seems like nothing more than your standard chick flick destined for regular rotation on the Lifetime Channel. And to be fair, there are definitely elements of that much-maligned subgenre but what redeems the film is Marisa Tomei who delivers a wonderful performance that transcends the sometimes cliché-ridden story. There is also actor-director Tony Bill’s excellent casting against type of Christian Slater who, for a rare moment in time, dropped his cool guy shtick to play a shy, socially awkward character. Bill gets solid performances out of his entire cast, which almost makes you forget the predictable beats of the story. The end result is a bittersweet holiday treat.

As a child, Adam lived in an orphanage run by nuns. He was the recipient of a heart transplant and was fed a fairy tale story that he was given a baboon’s heart thanks to the heroic efforts of his adventurer father. A sickly boy, he (Christian Slater) grew up to be reserved bus boy at a local Minneapolis diner. Untamed Heart takes us back to the early 1990s as soon as we hear the DNA remix of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” Caroline (Marisa Tomei) is a plucky waitress at the same diner. She is unlucky in love and right from her first scene, where she’s dumped by her boyfriend (that he would reject someone that looks like Tomei strains credibility but I digress) right before Christmas no less, we are rooting for her. This is because Tomei comes across as instantly sympathetic. Breaking her heart is like kicking a puppy fer Chrissakes!

Caroline commiserates with her best friend and fellow waitress Cindy (Rosie Perez), the sassy and cynical counterpoint to her co-worker. Tony Bill does an excellent job of establishing the diner and the colorful characters that populate it in only a few minutes. His camera moves around just enough so we get a sense of the layout of the place and then juxtaposes it with the people that work there to create a warm, inviting place. The cozy atmosphere of the diner is created with the help of Christmas lights and music, like the Cowboy Junkies’ dreamy cover of “Blue Moon.” The song is used to great effect in a shot where both Caroline and Adam are isolated in the same frame together. She is on one side, sitting by herself, and he’s on the other side, sweeping up the floor. This isn’t some sterile set located on a soundstage but a place that looks lived in and that has probably existed for many years. Set during the holiday season, Bill really conveys a sense of place – not just the diner but also the many establishing shots of a cold, snowy Minneapolis that sets the right atmospheric tone.

We see what a kind, nurturing person Caroline is when she tends to a nasty cut on Adam’s hand. She is oblivious to the intense, longing looks he gives her while she fixes him up. The way Christian Slater plays this scene is quite something. He doesn’t say anything to her (until the very end of the scene when she’s left and he says a quiet, “Thanks.”) but the actor conveys everything through his expressive eyes. Caroline and Adam develop a special bond when, one night, he rescues here from two guys (a pre-Sex and the City Willie Garson and Homicide: Life on the Street’s Kyle Secor) from attacking and trying to rape her.

Bill does a nice job of gradually developing the romance between Caroline and Adam. It is a slow burn that is accelerated by her attack. Afterwards, they have now shared something intensely personal and maybe for the first time she really notices him. Caroline is obviously moved by his selfless act and one gets the impression that he’s the first guy to look out for her, to be there for her when she needed it and not ask for anything in return. It is these scenes of their budding romance where the film is at its very best. We have become emotionally invested in Caroline and Adam and care about what happens to them.

Marisa Tomei is so good in this film. Fresh from her Academy Award-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny (1992) (?!), she plays a much more realistic character. Caroline is a bit of mess (as she says at one point, “My life is like watching the Three Stooges in Spanish.”). She has lousy taste in men and just wants to be loved by someone. Her chatty behavior is contrasted with Adam’s near-mute conduct but once they get involved she gradually gets him to open up. Tomei conveys a touching vulnerability that is quite endearing. The haunted look she adopts after her attack is heartbreaking. Most importantly, she has fantastic chemistry with Christian Slater, which is absolutely vital for a film like this. Their burgeoning romance is completely believable.

Untamed Heart is easily the best performance of Slater’s career. He showed that he could dial everything down and deliver a surprisingly minimalist performance. Freed from pages of dialogue, he has to rely more on his body language and his eyes to convey what Adam is feeling. Even when he does speak it is simply and directly. I’d love to know what Bill saw in Slater’s past performances that inspired him to cast the young actor as Adam. He even looks and acts differently with long, unkempt, unwashed hair and an introverted vibe in the way he acts. Adam avoids contact with people whenever possible. He hinted at this kind of character with the shy side of his protagonist in Pump Up the Volume (1990) but nothing to the extent that we see on display in Untamed Heart. Like Tomei, he also conveys an astonishing vulnerability.

Bill manages to tone down the usually manic, motor-mouthed Rosie Perez but without completely neutralizing her energy. She still gets some good zingers in there, like when she tells her nagging boss, who always complains that her breaks are too long, “You are like wet sand in my underwear.” (his reaction is priceless, by the way)

It’s too bad that once Caroline and Adam become a couple Untamed Heart loses its way a bit and veers dangerously close to disease-of-the-week made-for-T.V. territory – something that we’ve seen a million times. Sadly, the film shifts gears into a doomed romance storyline as Adam’s medical condition threatens his romance with Caroline. We get the standard relationship montage where we see the happy couple buy a car together, go for walks with his dog and so on. This culminates in a cheesy scene where they attend a hockey game and Adam even plucks a stray puck from the air for Caroline. It’s something I could have done without but it really is the odd misstep in an otherwise engaging film. Slater and Tomei do the best they can with what they’re given. However, as their romance deepens, the looks of unconditional love they convey to one another seems so genuine and real. Again, it’s all in the eyes.

Tony Bill was looking for unknown talent for a potential project and asked an agent at William Morris to send over some screenplays done by new writers. The script for Untamed Heart had originally been submitted as a writer’s sample. Bill showed it to producer Helen Bartlett who was moved by its theme of “having someone, somebody you never would have expected, come into your life and really transform you, change you.” Two weeks from Tom Sierchio handing the script for Untamed Heart to his agent, Bill optioned it and MGM agreed to make it.

Bill cast Marisa Tomei based on her audition for his earlier film, Five Corners (1987). She was too young for that film but he had kept track of her career over the years. Tomei found herself drawn to this “very warm story.” In order to perfect a regional accent, she chose a driver from the area who ended up acting as a dialogue coach. Once she had the accent down, she spoke with it on and off the set. When Christian Slater was first offered the part of Adam, he had his doubts and needed to be convinced to do it. He was scared of the role because it was so different from anything he had done before. As he said, “this one was a very internal performance, and at first I wasn’t really sure if I understood that.”

The film was originally set in New Jersey but for logistical reasons the producers could not shoot there and so they began to look for a city that could double for the Garden State. As luck would have it the filmmakers were scouting locations in Minneapolis and realized that it was “architecturally interesting.” They decided to actually set the film in the city as opposed to having it double for New Jersey. The production went on to cast 35 of the film’s 40 roles from the local acting community and utilize an almost completely local crew.

Untamed Heart received generally positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert wrote that the film was "kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson grudgingly admitted that it was “hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Tomei's performance: "With her flashing dark eyes and libidinous overbite, Tomei is adorable — she looks like a flirtatious bunny rabbit — but what's astonishing is the range of expression that passes over those delectable features.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, “The Rain Man-Dying Young elements in Tom Sierchio's script are pitfalls that Slater dodges with a wonderfully appealing performance. His love scenes with the dazzling Tomei have an uncommon delicacy.” In his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane praised Tomei for bringing "startling high spirits to a dullish role. She snatches moments of happiness out of the air and shares them out to anyone who’s around.” However, in his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby felt that the film was “to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it.”

It has been said about another Tony Bill film, My Bodyguard (1980), that, “it’s a nice, sweet movie, which I mean in the best possible way, with a surprising amount of depth found in its simple story." These words could so easily apply to Untamed Heart. By the film’s end one really feels like you’ve gone on a journey with these characters, especially Caroline who’s changed dramatically from where we saw her at the beginning. She’s gone from an emotional doormat when it comes to relationships to having experienced true love – to give of one’s self and to be there for someone else in return.


SOURCES

Salem, Rob. “Slater Digs Deep for Shy-Guy Role.” Toronto Star. February 12, 1993.

Untamed Heart Production Notes. MGM. 1993.

DVD of the Week: Cronos: Criterion Collection

Cronos (1993) marked the auspicious feature film debut of Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and introduced the world to his unique worldview that fused his love of dark fairy tales with the macabre. The film was the culmination of Del Toro cutting his teeth on short monster movies where he learned how to do special effects and makeup effects himself. The film dominated Mexico’s equivalent of the Academy Awards and won the critics’ award at the Cannes Film Festival. Unfortunately Del Toro’s film was a commercial failure at the box office despite positive notices from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times. However, it was a launching pad, career-wise, for Del Toro who went on to make Mimic (1997) for Miramax, which was plagued with studio meddling, and the popular Hellboy films among many others.


Created in 1536, the Cronos Device is said to be the key to immortality. It attaches itself to the bearer and drains blood from them in return for eternal life – they become a vampire of sorts. For hundreds of years the scarab-looking device was in the possession of its architect. When he died it came into the possession of a kind, old antiques store owner by the name of Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi). An American businessman named Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman) has been looking for the device as his benefactor desires to become immortal. Of course, Gris messes with the device and is unable to resist its lure. He soon finds himself craving raw meat and blood – even going so far as to lick a small pool of it off a public bathroom floor! He also looks younger and not only has to worry about being taken over by the device but also has to watch out for Angel.

There is a wicked streak of dark humour that runs through Cronos reminiscent of the early films of Stuart Gordon or Roman Polanski and is not as prevalent in Del Toro’s more serious films, like The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), but surfaces in his more commercial work, like the Hellboy films. Cronos would mark the first time that he would work with actor Ron Perlman and he is quite good as a ruthless but somewhat inept businessman. They have gone on to collaborate on several subsequent films together with the actor serving as the director’s cinematic alter ego.

Cronos is one of the more subtle vampire films as Del Toro doesn’t show blatant vampire iconography until well into the film. At this stage in his career, he was still working out his themes and still deciding what his trademark motifs were to be. The narrative beats are different from his later films but in a good way. Del Toro makes fairy tales for adults and Cronos is a parable for several things, chief among them be careful what you wish for because you might just get it and it won’t be everything you thought it’d be. Not to mention achieving comes at an awful price as if Del Toro is saying that we are architects of our destruction.

Special Features:

There is an audio commentary by writer/director Guillermo del Toro. He explains that one of the primary inspirations for the film was alchemy, which he talks about in some detail. The filmmaker touches upon the colour scheme and why he used the ones that he did. Del Toro says that he wanted to create layers of vampirism – political, religious, and economic, etc. He also speaks knowledgably about filmmaking, history, mythology, literature and how they inform Cronos.

Also included is a commentary by producers Arthur H. Gorson, Bertha Navarro and Alejandro Springall. They provide a much more nuts and bolts approach – i.e. how they raised the money for the budget so that it would be independent of the studios thereby giving Del Toro total creative freedom. They also point out the themes in Cronos that he would continue to explore in subsequent films.

“Geometria” is a short horror film Del Toro made in 1987. A teenager is supposed to be studying for a geometry test but is more interested in the occult. He summons a demon and all hell breaks loose. In his introduction, Del Toro calls the film a silly idea and talks about how he was influenced by Italian horror filmmakers like Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento.

“Welcome to Bleak House” features Del Toro taking us on a tour of his fascinating “man cave,” a house full of props and artifacts from his films as well as toys and books that he’s collected over the years. He has organized the house in a series of libraries. This is a film genre fan’s dream and one could easily spend hours exploring its rooms.

There is an interview with Guillermo del Toro. He sees Cronos as very important because it was where he first articulated his universe. He discusses some of the themes this film explores and how they resurface in later films. Del Toro talks about his intentions with this film as well.

Del Toro’s long-time cinematographer Guillermo Navarro is interviewed and recalls when he first started working with the director. He also touches upon when Del Toro approached him about making Cronos. Naturally, Navarro talks about his approach to the visuals.

There is an interview with actor Ron Perlman. He talks about how he got involved in the film. Del Toro sent him a fan letter and a copy of the screenplay, both of which impressed him. Perlman tells some funny stories about working on Cronos and with Del Toro.

Federico Luppi talks about working with Del Toro on Cronos. He speaks admiringly of the filmmaker while we see clips from the film and behind-the-scenes footage, including all sorts of makeup and gore effects being applied to the veteran actor.

There is an impressive stills galley featuring rare photographs and illustrations with captions written by Del Toro identifying them.

Finally, there is a trailer.

 

Waking the Dead

Keith Gordon began acting at a young age, appearing in films by legendary directors like Brian De Palma and John Carpenter but when he found acting in films, like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School (1986), unfulfilling, he decided to try his hand behind the camera, tackling a series of literary adaptations on modest budgets but managing to entice actors like Nick Nolte and Gary Sinise to appear in his films. In his Senses of Cinema interview with Gordon, Peter Tonguette best sums up the director’s body of work as having: “moral gravity and their aesthetic richness.” Arguably his most successful and sincere film to date is Waking the Dead (2000), a heart-wrenching story about love and loss spanning two decades.

In 1974, two Chilean nationalists and an American activist are killed in a car bomb. The two nationalists had been touring the United States and speaking out against Chile’s dictatorship government. Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly) was the American activist also killed in the explosion and the film begins with her boyfriend, Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup), finding out about her death via a television broadcast. We flash back to 1972 when Fielding and Sarah meet for the first time in New York City. She’s working for a publishing company that Fielding’s hippie brother, Danny (Paul Hipp), runs while Fielding is serving in the Coast Guard.

For Fielding it is love at first sight and over lunch he shares with her his idealistic beliefs – that politics can still make a difference and that you have to be part of the system to do it. He sees serving in the Coast Guard as part of his duty for his country and a stepping stone on the way to becoming President of the United States. He lectures for a bit but you can tell that Sarah sees right through him. Over dinner it is her turn to share her idealistic beliefs. She can tell that he’s ambitious, but doesn’t share his career path. Despite their ideological differences they fall in love.

We flash forward to Chicago, 1982 and Fielding is a lawyer in the District Attorney’s office and working his way up the social and political ladder. His girlfriend Juliet (Molly Parker) is a socialite and her uncle Isaac Green (Hal Holbrook) pulls strings so that the governor personally picks Fielding to run for a congressional seat. His life seems set until one snowy night he hears Sarah’s voice in the wind. Is it her ghost or his conscience? Or did she somehow manage to survive the car bombing back in ’74? Fielding still misses her and confesses to his sister (Janet McTeer), “it gets better and then it’s like it never got better at all.” Is he cracking up, sabotaging himself just when he’s poised to achieve a crucial step towards his ultimate goal?

Keith Gordon takes us back and forth in time to explore Fielding and Sarah’s relationship and how it continues to haunt him in the present. For example, he sees a little girl standing on a sidewalk who reminds him of Sarah. He walks through an airport terminal and everyone begins to look like her. These visions really get under Fielding’s skin (and ours too). With the nature of Sarah’s work it is possible that she faked her own death to continue her activism. Whenever Fielding sees her she is tantalizingly just out of reach like a ghost. He regrets not dwelling more on her death and trying to figure out what happened. There’s a nice scene between him and his father where he tries to articulate how much he still misses Sarah. Billy Crudup does a fantastic job of conveying how Fielding tries to make sense of his feelings and convey them to his father. He’s wracked with self-doubts at the worst possible moment in his life but he’s got to sort through them if he hopes to continue on his current career trajectory.

Gordon does a fantastic job charting the trajectory of Fielding and Sarah’s relationship. There’s a particularly telling exchange between them when they start living together in Chicago. She tells him about her fear of disappearing. He reassures her that he won’t let that happen to which she replies, “it’s not up to you,” and this eerily foreshadows what happens to her. Through editing, Gordon shows the sharp contrast between the ambitious, glad-handing Fielding getting the vote out in the 1980s with the idealistic version in the 1970s who is kept grounded by the earthy Sarah, his social conscience. A year into their relationship and we can see them already moving in different directions – she is getting into activism and he’s heading for the D.A.’s office.

There’s a scene where Fielding and Sarah go to a black tie event and while he schmoozes, she can barely hide her contempt and then tears into a guest, confronting him about his politics. If they continued on these paths would they have stayed together had she lived? She even calls him on his trajectory: “It’s all mapped out. It’s been mapped out long before we ever met. I’m not going to change it.” One of the things that strikes me about their relationship is the real and honest discussions they have about their beliefs. They are depicted in a way that is smart and fascinating to watch play out. At one point she says to him, “it’s so infuriating loving you sometimes,” and what couple that has been together for some period of time has felt this way and maybe even verbalized it? It’s a realistic portrayal of a relationship: they love each other passionately and have ugly arguments, too, just like anybody else. It is this commonality that we can all identify with. One can’t help but see some of themselves in their relationship.

Jennifer Connelly is a revelation in this film. Not only does she play Sarah as a vision that haunts Fielding’s conscience but also a real, tangible person who is smart, beautiful and with fierce political convictions and unafraid to voice them. Sadly, this is in short supply in American cinema and her character evokes Sigourney Weaver’s Jill Bryant in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Early on, Connelly delivers a passionate monologue where Sarah tells Fielding what she wants out of life. It is the moment where he falls in love with her and so do we. In this scene, the actress conveys the intelligence and passion of her character. It’s where we become emotionally invested in Sarah. She is beautiful and smart and like Fielding we want to know more about her.

Paul Hipp plays Fielding’s ne’er-do-well brother Danny, the black sheep of the family who goes from goofy publisher of a counterculture press in the ‘70s, to the drug-addicted mess who wants to marry an Asian prostitute (Sandra Oh) in the ‘80s. The actor had a scene-stealing turn in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and has worked with filmmaker Abel Ferrara on numerous occasions. He gives a memorable performance in Gordon’s film, making the most of his limited screen-time, refusing to play a stereotypical hippie or a clichéd junkie.

Producers Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson first approached Keith Gordon about directing Waking the Dead because they liked his adaptation of The Chocolate War (1988) and asked him to read Scott Spencer’s 1986 novel Waking the Dead in 1991. At the time, he was in the midst of falling in love with the woman that would eventually become his wife. While reading the book it made him think about “what would happen if I ever lost her, and how devastated I would be, and whether I could go on, and whether what I had gotten with her would be enough to go on or whether there would be no point.” He wrote the first draft in late 1991 to early 1992 when Warner Brothers was interested in backing it. The studio asked him to tell the story in chronological order, give it a happy ending, take the politics out and make Sarah more likable because “people don’t like a woman with strong politics.” Gordon refused and the project stalled so he went off and made A Midnight Clear (1992) and Mother Night (1996). After making the latter film, he read the script for Waking the Dead again and still wanted to make it into a film.

Gordon contacted Spencer who told him that the rights to the novel had reverted back to him. He gave the filmmaker permission to adapt it free of charge because he liked the script. The project finally picked up steam when Jodie Foster agreed to make it with her production company. Gordon had tried to get her interested in financing Mother Night but she passed on it. After attending one of its screenings, Foster told Gordon that she made a mistake not backing it. She asked him if he was working on anything new and he gave the script for Waking the Dead. She read it and wanted to do it. Foster had a deal with Polygram and took the project from Warner Bros. and set up Gordon’s film there.

Foster suggested Tom Cruise play Fielding and they sent him the script but he did not agree to do it despite liking the material. It was at this time that Gordon got a call from Billy Crudup’s agent telling him that the actor really wanted to do the film. He knew of the actor’s reputation but had not seen much of his work. Gordon thought that Crudup might be too young and that Polygram would not approve. At the time, the actor was making The Hi-Lo Country (1998) and executives at Polygram thought he was going to be a big movie star and were willing to take a chance on him.

For the role of Sarah, Gordon auditioned all kinds of actresses but found that they would “get the intelligence, but not have the sensuality. Or they would get the sensuality, but wouldn’t have the anger.” He did not even want Jennifer Connelly to read for the part because he was under the impression that she was beautiful but not a great actress. Her agent was persistent, however, and got Gordon to watch two independent films that had not been widely seen. In particular, he was impressed with her work in Far Harbor (1996) where she delivered a “long monologue about the death of her baby and she played this manic-depressive woman and she was fabulous.” Once he cast Connelly, he not only realized that she had the qualities necessary for the character but that she and Crudup had chemistry right away. Gordon rehearsed with the two actors for three weeks, discussing what happened between scenes and what their characters were like together so that they knew everything about them by the time principal photography began.

In a fantastic example of lousy timing, Polygram went out of business right around the time Waking the Dead was going to be distributed in theaters. They were being sold to Universal Studios and so Gordon did not know who to ask about things like putting a soundtrack album out (he later snuck many of the musical cues on the menus for the DVD).

Waking the Dead received mostly mixed to negative reviews from critics who didn’t seem to connect with what Gordon was trying to do with this film… or simply felt that he wasn’t successful. In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "In falling short of its goal, the movie raises the question of whether it's possible to film an intelligent tear-jerker that prompts us to think and cry at the same time … At its best, Waking the Dead suggests an intellectually upscale answer to Love Story. At its weakest, it comes off as a stiff, muted exercise in countercultural nostalgia.” Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars and said it "has a good heart and some fine performances, but is too muddled at the story level to involve us emotionally. It's a sweet film. The relationship between Sarah and Fielding is a little deeper and more affectionate than we expect in plot-driven melodrama.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "the arbitrariness of the lovers' passion and the somber hysteria with which the novelist and filmmaker treat every issue, whether its South American dictatorship or female armpit hair, is enough to anesthetize the living.”

The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "I can cite only one unequivocal reason for seeing Waking the Dead, and that's Jennifer Connelly ... What makes Connelly so remarkable isn't her character's radicalism but her capacity to keep the character fresh every time she appears and to leave a lingering impression that makes the hero's (and the movie's) sense of loss acute.” On a more positive note, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle called it "a film teeming with riches. One of the most powerful romances of recent years, it is as generous as they come ... an intelligent tale told with go-for-broke passion ... Crudup and Connelly are splendid together ... Waking the Dead gives us acting at its biggest and most beautiful." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, "The seeming presence of Sarah creates a special challenge for Gordon and his stars, and that Waking the Dead deals with it so imaginatively, makes the film all the richer and provocative an experience.”

I love that Waking the Dead opens with the beautiful Joni Mitchell song, “A Case of You” from her Blue album. It has been said that the song is told from the point of view of a sarcastic, cynical lover and one can’t help but see this as a commentary on Sarah. This film is many things – a love story and a supernatural thriller with politics woven throughout. At its heart it is a love story about two people with contrasting beliefs but who fall in love anyway. How does someone carry on after the love of their life is gone? How does it affect your life? Waking the Dead offers no easy answers (because there are none) and explores, in fascinating detail, how one man deals with the death of a love one. Gordon never really tells us definitively if Sarah is dead or not, leaving it up to us to make up our own mind. One could argue that a huge chunk of Fielding’s idealism died the day Sarah did and his visions of her are bits of it fighting to re-emerge. Ultimately, his struggle is an inner one with his soul as the prize.

SOURCES

Bernstein, Abbie. “Awake at the Wheel.”

Fuchs, Cynthia. “Interview with Keith Gordon: Director of Waking the Dead.” PopMatters.

Stark, Jeff. “Love and Death in Chicago.” Salon. March 28, 2000.

Tonguette, Peter. “Keith Gordon on Keith Gordon, Part Two: Less Afraid of Happy Endings.” Senses of Cinema.

DVD of the Week: The Expendables

For fans of action films from the 1980s and early 1990s, it has always been a pipe dream to see their favourite action stars team up or, better yet, battle each other. Think of it as the cinematic equivalent of fantasy football. With The Matrix (1999), the heyday of muscle-bound action stars like Sylvester Stallone was well and truly over as more normal-looking (physique-wise) actors, with the aid of cutting edge CGI, started doing their own stunts. Former marquee stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal were relegated to direct-to-home video limbo.


However, over time, people began to look back at that era of action films with nostalgia and Stallone wisely capitalized on it by resurrecting two of his most popular characters, Rambo and Rocky, to critical acclaim and respectable box office. The success of those films culminated in Stallone’s penultimate film, The Expendables (2010). Using his rejuvenated clout and reputation, he cast veteran action stars like Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li, bad boy character actors Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, and ultimate fighters and professional wrestlers like Randy Couture and Stone Cold Steve Austin. The real coup for Stallone was coaxing two of the other popular action stars from the ‘80s, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, to appear in the same scene with their fellow Planet Hollywood owner. The end result is an action film fan’s wet dream.

Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) is the leader of an elite group of mercenaries and, in a nice nod to current events, we are introduced to them wiping out a gang of Somalia pirates with plenty of cheeky one-liners, swagger and ultra-violence, including a cool bit where the good guys eliminate some baddies via night vision. Soon afterwards, the enigmatic Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) hires Ross and his crew to take out a ruthless dictator who controls a small, South American country. It turns out that the dictator is just a puppet for James Munroe (Eric Roberts), an ex-CIA operative now corrupt businessman. Ross and his crew of four men are forced take on a small army. The odds sound about right and much carnage ensues.

The cast of The Expendables is uniformly excellent. Mickey Rourke shows up as the guy who fixes Stallone and his gang up with jobs and we get a nice scene where the recent Academy Award nominee, in all of his Method acting glory, banters with Stallone and Jason Statham. Bruce Willis, complete with his trademark smirk and steely-eyed stare, plays the mysterious Mr. Church. Stallone shares a scene with him and Arnold Schwarzenegger that is the action film equivalent of the famous scene between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat (1995) – an understated meeting between legendary movie stars sharing the same frame. Eric Roberts gets to play a deliciously evil scumbag with just the right amount of suave menace complete with slicked-back hair and expensive suits.

All of the action stars get a chance to strut their stuff with Stallone and Statham getting the bulk of the film’s screen-time as if the former was symbolically passing the torch to the latter. One of the film’s most pleasant surprises is Dolph Lundgren as a psycho junkie ex-member of the Expendables who ends up working for the bad guys because Ross didn’t approve of his sadistic killing methods. Lundgren even gets a very cool fight scene with Jet Li.

There hasn’t been a decent men-on-a-mission film (a la Dirty Dozen) in some time. Inglourious Basterds (2009) could have been that film but Quentin Tarantino mutated it into something uniquely his own. Stallone goes for a meat and potatoes approach with The Expendables that has a refreshing old school feel to it. It has everything you could want from a film like this: bone-crunching violence, tough guys cracking wise, lots of earth-shattering explosions, and bad guys you love to hate. For fans of ‘80s action films, this is a dream come true and one hell of a fun ride.

Special Features:

There is an audio commentary by actor/director Sylvester Stallone. He talks about how he established his character and his crew visually with very little dialogue. He also defends the sparseness of dialogue against criticism that it wasn’t very well-written. Stallone praises Mickey Rourke’s performance and how he only had the actor for 48 hours because he was making Iron Man 2 (2010) at the time. Naturally, Stallone talks about the logistical nightmare of getting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis to have time to do their scene together. Stallone speaks eloquently about the nuts and bolts aspects of making the film and what his intentions were for a given scene.

“Before the Battle – The Making of The Expendables” is an excerpt from an upcoming feature-length documentary called Inferno: The Making of The Expendables that is on the Blu-Ray version. He narrates over behind-the-scenes footage about how The Expendables came together. He talks about his motivation behind casting all these famous action stars and athletes. We see Stallone take all kinds of physical punishment, including a nasty injury as the result of a fight scene with Steve Austin.

There is a deleted scene which is just a bit of extra footage early on where Dolph Lundgren tells a bad joke needlessly reinforcing the craziness of his character. Yeah, we get it.

“Gag Reel” is an amusing blooper reel of the cast flubbing their lines.

Finally, there is a theatrical trailer, T.V. spots and posters.

 

Home for the Holidays

Christmas holiday movies are a dime a dozen but how many Thanksgiving movies are there? Sure, many are set during this holiday but Home for the Holidays (1995) is the Thanksgiving movie. Director Jodie Foster captures the hassle and the horror of traveling during the holidays and presents an instantly relatable premise: going home for Thanksgiving dinner and having to put up with your relatives. Everyone has been stuck next to that annoying person on a long plane ride or have had to deal with a crowded airport or stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Everybody has a Thanksgiving history and stories that go with it. Home for the Holidays collects several of these stories into one entertaining movie.

Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) is having the worst Thanksgiving ever. She has just been fired from her job, made out with her 60-year-old boss and found out that her daughter Kit (Claire Danes) is going to have sex for the first time. To add insult to injury, Claudia is going to spend Thanksgiving with her parents. Her mother (Anne Bancroft) reads Dear Abby and constantly nags her daughter (“Claudia, I can see your roots.”) while her father (Charles Durning) has selective deafness and weaves in and out of lanes of traffic. The antagonists are represented by Claudia’s sister Jo Ann (Cynthia Stevenson), her boring husband (Steve Guttenberg) and their annoying kids. They provide the friction and conflict, exposing Jo Ann and Claudia’s deep-rooted sibling rivalry issues.

The film really comes to life when Robert Downey Jr. as Claudia’s gay brother Tommy arrives with his business partner, Leo “Go” Fish (Dylan McDermott) in tow. Downey’s introduction ranks right up there with Jack Black’s equally memorable first appearance in High Fidelity (2000). He’s the mischievous sibling who knows exactly which buttons to push to drive his sisters crazy and Downey plays the role with obvious glee as evident from the way he works the kitchen, improvising his ass off as he interacts with the cast, most memorably Anne Bancroft (“Spin mommy, spin.”), during his whirlwind introduction. Foster remembers that, “the cast pretty much stuck to the script once we had honed it down. The only person I let make up whatever he wanted was Robert Downey Jr. He just has this incredibly fertile mind.” The scene where Tommy tells the story about how Leo once injured his nose is a brilliant bit of comic acting on Downey’s part that is hilarious and slightly disgusting simultaneously. Only he has the fearless conviction to pull off this kind of throwaway anecdote that typifies the kind of gems that are peppered throughout Home for the Holidays.

Geraldine Chaplin, as the family’s eccentric Aunt Glady, all but steals every scene she’s in with her surreal non-sequiters (“Wanna see a really big boil?”) and matches Downey for memorable comedic moments in the movie. For example, there is a scene where Glady tells a story at dinner that stops things cold as she speaks wistfully about how, one Christmas Eve, Claudia’s father kissed her and for one moment she felt special like how she imagined her sister felt. It’s a scene that starts off funny and then becomes poignant thanks to Chaplin’s heartfelt performance. Foster remembers that she “came up with wonderful choices in Holidays. She was the most eccentric character of the bunch, so I allowed her to push a little bit more some of those strange behaviors. But I didn't want to push the other actors into wacky, campy idiosyncratic levels. These are real people; they're complicated, but they are very real.” David Strathairn even pops up for a memorable cameo as Russell “Sad Sack” Terziak, a guy with the worst hard luck story, ever. It’s a rare comedic turn as the veteran character actor is cast against type. He is able to put a slightly tragic and uncomfortable spin on his scene.

Castle Rock was originally going to finance the film but canceled and Foster’s own production company, Egg Productions, acquired W.D. Richter’s screenplay. She worked with him on it so that the film ultimately reflects her point-of-view and her own life experience. She spent two weeks rehearsing with her cast before principal photography began in February 1995. Foster used this time to get input from the actors about dialogue – if a scene or speech did not ring true, she wanted to be told. According to Richter, “We all drive each other nuts at holidays like Thanksgiving. I think there is great tragedy and great humor in that. I wanted some sense of a family pulling together in spite of all the problems.”

Holiday movies are like Madlibs: they present a structure and archetypes for you to impart your own experiences. Home for the Holidays contains every archetypal character so that you can identify with at least one if not many of the characters. Richter’s script perfectly captures the dysfunctional family that everyone experiences on some level, like how parents know just what to say to get under your skin. The dialogue is idiosyncratic yet very familiar and memorable, especially everything Downey says. It has a conversational tone that is delivered naturally by the excellent ensemble cast. The film also doesn’t follow the usual beats associated with this kind of movie. For example, early on Claudia’s mother reads to her a Dear Abby letter and the tone of the film shifts to a melancholic one for a few minutes before veering back into comedy.

Foster sets up an idealistic façade but balances it with a realistic depiction of the family dynamic. Richter’s script nails the interplay between retired parents and how they constantly nag each other but really do love one another. And there are the little details that ring true, like how Claudia’s mother makes lists of things to get or do. Sure enough, by dinner time there’s a big blow out argument as old grudges come to the surface. The friction between Tommy and Jo Ann echoes those old arguments that we’ve all had with siblings when one was eight years old and then comes bubbling to the surface whenever you get together with them, no matter how much time has passed. Regardless of all the bad mojo – Tommy having been secretly married to his boyfriend (Chad Lowe), Claudia guilty over being fired and Jo Ann’s bitter resentment with her two free-spirited siblings – coming together for dinner will, they hope, resolve some of these issues. It is a moment where the film gets serious as real issues and true feelings are addressed but it is consistent with what came before and doesn’t take you out of the film. Like real life, some issues are resolved and some aren’t. According to Foster, “At no point did I want the comedy so raucous and exaggerated that you could not believe in it. I wanted people to be able and look at it and say, ‘This is life.’”

The film received mixed reviews but most of the major newspaper critics liked it. In his three and half star review, Roger Ebert praised Foster's ability to direct "the film with a sure eye for the revealing little natural moment," and Downey's performance that "brings out all the complexities of a character who has used a quick wit to keep the world's hurts at arm's length." Janet Maslin, in her review for The New York Times, praised Holly Hunter's performance: "Displaying a dizziness more mannered than the cool, crisp intelligence she shows in Copycat, Ms. Hunter still holds together Home for the Holidays with a sympathetic performance.” However, in her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley criticized some of the performances: "Downey brings a lot of energy to the role, but his antics can be both tedious and distracting. Hunter has a lovely scene with her disgruntled sister, but there's no time for that relationship to develop, what with a romantic interest yet to explore.” USA Today gave Home for the Holidays three out of four stars and wrote, “Home has the usual hellish ritual. They come, they eat, they argue, they leave. It’s the stuffing in-between that makes it special.”

Home for the Holidays is not a straight-out comedy because it does have its moments of reflection and even a melancholic tinge of nostalgia. One of its underlying themes is the old chestnut that the more things change, the more we want them to stay the same. That is what makes this film so good. These characters will always be there for us to revisit and enjoy time and time again. Foster’s film has a timeless quality that allows it to endure and hold up to repeated viewings. No matter how much you’ve changed, you revert to your old self when you come home for Thanksgiving.

SOURCES

Allen, Tom. "Becoming Jodie Foster." Moviemaker. December 2, 1995.

Bibby, Patricia. "Jodie Foster Looks Home to Heal." Associated Press. November 12, 1995.

Hunter, Stephen. "Foster Feels at Home Adding Fun, Meaning to Holidays Clan." Baltimore Sun. November 19, 1995.

Kirkland, Bruce. "Downey to Earth." Toronto Sun. November 6, 1995.

Portman, Jamie. "Home for the Holidays No Ordinary Family Film." Montreal Gazette. October 31, 1995.

Young, Paul F. "Foster Moves Home to Par." Variety. November 19, 1995.

Here's an excerpt from the original short story that the film is based on.

Heat

It seems rather fitting that it took nearly 15 years for Michael Mann to get his ambitious crime epic Heat (1995) made and it has been 15 years since it was unleashed in theaters. After the commercial and critical success of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), he parlayed its commercial and critical success to get his pet project made. He was able to cast legendary actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as the leads in what would be their first the on-screen appearance together in a film (they were in The Godfather: Part II but never appeared in the same scene). Mann returned to a 1986 draft of a screenplay that had originated before he made The Jericho Mile (1979). He now had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured and decided to expand its scope.

At the core of Heat is the relationship between career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and dedicated cop, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Mann takes the career criminal from Thief (1981) and the intensely dedicated cop from Manhunter (1986) and places them in the same film together with the sprawling metropolis that is Los Angeles as its backdrop. It is a deadly cat and mouse game realized on an epic level. Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) but on the scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

The opening of Heat introduces the two main protagonists, McCauley and Hanna without any dialogue. Mann relies entirely on their actions to illustrate their defining characteristics. McCauley, disguised as a paramedic, steals an ambulance. It is how he does it that is so impressive. He walks through a busy hospital purposefully, taking in everything and touching nothing so that he leaves no clues behind for the police to find later. Within a matter of moments he is gone.

We first meet Hanna as he is making passionate love to his wife, Justine (Diane Venora). From the beginning, Mann shows a sharp contrast between Neil and Vincent’s professional and personal lives. McCauley is all business. His life is devoted to preparing for his next score. Mann remarked in an interview that the character “is not an archetypal ex-convict, who steals mindlessly until he gets busted back. This guy is methodical and good at what he does. He's going to accumulate a certain amount of capital, and then he's going to boogie. He has a doctrine of having no attachments, nothing in his life he can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat.” Hanna is married — albeit in a relationship rife with problems but at least he has some semblance of a personal life. During the course of the film, these two men will switch roles and this will determine their respective fates.

Hanna may have a personal life but it is a relationship in decline. He is on his third marriage and is gradually losing touch with Justine and her daughter, Lauren (Natalie Portman). After Hanna and Justine make love she tries to invite him to breakfast but he brushes her off to hook up with one of his partners. But not before he comes off as a bit of hypocrite. He criticizes Lauren’s real father for being late in picking her up and for standing her up repeatedly in the past, but he hardly pays attention to her or her mother either. This scene also establishes one of Mann’s prevalent themes: the fracture that exists between parents and their children.

Hanna is not in his element in a domestic setting and this becomes obvious when he appears at the crime scene of the armored car heist perpetrated by McCauley and his crew at the beginning of the film. As soon as Hanna walks on the scene he immediately takes control. It is a real treat to see Pacino act out this scene. He dominates it both physically — in the way he gestures and moves around — and verbally, in the authoritative tone that he speaks to the people around him. Pacino displays a confidence of an actor totally committed to his role, which is appropriate considering his character is someone who is completely committed to his profession. With little prompting, Hanna’s subordinates fill him in on the evidence they found and expertly piece together what they think happened. Hanna listens intently, absorbs everything and then quickly analyzes the situation. He assigns specific tasks to his men with all the efficiency of a professional. This is the complete opposite of what we saw him like at home. He barely hears what Justine has to say and briefly acknowledges Lauren’s presence before quickly leaving for work.

If Hanna is all about the verbal side of the professional Mann protagonist, McCauley is the flip side of the same coin. He is the quiet individual who lets his actions speak for him. Mann defines McCauley’s character visually. This is achieved not only in the exciting armored truck heist sequence — the essence of ruthless efficiency but, more significantly, when he returns to his home. Like most Mann protagonists, he lives in a Spartan, empty place. The establishing shot utilizes a blue filter that saturates the frame, with the ocean infinitely stretching out in the background. This is reminiscent of the scene in Manhunter where Graham and Molly make love in their bedroom. However, Mann uses this scene to illustrate that, unlike Hanna, McCauley is a loner, a prisoner trapped in his own empty surroundings. This is further reinforced by a close-up of his handgun; placed on a coffee table. As he walks over to the large windows overlooking the ocean, the gun looms large, upsetting the composition of the frame as it dwarfs McCauley. He is a man dominated by his profession — it defines who he is as a person. The camera pans up and we see him standing in the middle of this large, empty room, the frames of the window acting as bars, metaphorically trapping him.

Mann uses architecture to illustrate McCauley’s personality. His apartment is comprised of large, blank white walls, cabinets with the bare minimum of dishes and very little furniture. There is just enough to make it functional. This simple design is also reflected in his fashion sense: simple gray or black suits with a white dress shirt. According to Mann, this was an important clue to McCauley’s character: “His main job, as he sees it, in the way he’s elected to live his life, is to minimize risk. That’s why he wears gray suits and white shirts—he doesn’t want to have anything about his personal appearance that’s memorable. He’s a gray man, just some figure who moves through the umber of a poorly lit coffee shop. It’s all invisible, and it’s strictly pragmatic.” Like Frank in Thief, Graham in Manhunter, and later, Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider (1999), McCauley is yet another Mann protagonist who is constantly shown to be a solitary figure in an empty room. He claims, at one point, that “I’m alone. I’m not lonely,” but he is a forlorn figure or else he would not feel the need to get involved with Eady (Amy Brenneman).

Heat is different from other crime films in that it goes to great lengths to show how those around these criminals and the police that chase them are affected by what their loved ones do. Most of the relationships are very dysfunctional and none more so than between Chris Sherilis (Val Kilmer), one of McCauley’s crew, and his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd). He gambles away all of the money he makes on scores and this makes her very upset. She tells him, “It means we’re not making forward progress like real grown-up adults living our lives.” They argue and she makes it clear that, for her, it is not about the money but their son, Dominick. She is concerned for his safety and well being. For her role, Ashley Judd met several women who had been prostitutes and were now housewives. Mann located them through the convicts’ wives and ex-cons he had interviewed in his pre-production research. Some of them had turned tricks in their teens and were now middle-aged housewives selling real estate.

This scene of domestic disharmony is paralleled by Hanna’s own problems. When he comes home Justine informs him that she had dinner ready for them four hours ago. She tells him, “Every time I try to maintain a consistent mood between us you withdraw.” He replies, “I got three dead bodies on a sidewalk off Venice Boulevard.” Hanna tries to articulate something resembling an apology but he is unable. This is not good enough for her and she leaves the room leaving him alone and frustrated. The final shot is of him sitting alone watching T.V. Justine, like Charlene, is frustrated with her relationship. Both women are unhappy and not afraid to let their significant others know how they feel. Justine does not understand Vincent’s devotion to his job or his obsession with taking Neil and his crew down and this results in a rift between the two that is not repaired by the film’s conclusion. Both Hanna and Chris are unable to explain themselves to their wives. They may be the best at what they do but their personal lives are a mess.

Up until this point Neil has stayed faithful to his personal credo, “Don't keep anything in your life you're not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” This begins to change when he meets Eady at a coffee shop. Initially, he is guarded and stand-offish — an attitude that comes with his job. But once he realizes that she is genuinely interested in him, he softens somewhat but is still evasive, lying to her about what he does (a salesman) and asking her a lot of questions but offering little information about himself. He gives out only vague details: “My father, I don’t know where he is. I got a brother somewhere.” However, he does offer one interesting insight into his character. As they look out at the city lights of Los Angeles he tells her about his dream: “In Fiji, they have this iridescent algae. They come out once a year in the water … I’m going there someday.” Like Frank’s dream of a family in Thief and Wigand’s vision of seeing his children playing in The Insider, McCauley will be unable to realize his ambitions because of his failure to adhere to his own personal code. His fatal flaw is that he develops feelings for Eady and thereby betraying himself. Mann foreshadows McCauley’s inevitable downfall as a result of this relationship with tragic sounding electronic music that plays while McCauley and Eady kiss.

The film’s centerpiece is undeniably the classic meeting of Pacino and De Niro, on-screen together for the first time in the careers that takes place over coffee at Mantelli's restaurant in Beverly Hills. Although, ironically, Mann edits the scene so that each man is shown in over-the-shoulder shots and we don’t actually see them face-to-face at any time in the scene. This is the moment when both men size each other up and tell each other their personal philosophies. The dialogue between the two men reveals a lot about who they are:

Neil: If you’re one me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?

Vincent: So, then if you spot me coming around that corner, you just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?

Neil: That’s the discipline.

Vincent: That’s pretty vacant.

Neil: It is what it is. It’s that or we both better go do something else, pal.

For Mann, the coffee shop scene between De Niro and Pacino is when "every theme and every storyline in the picture winds up in that scene. It's very much the nexus of the film." Mann made sure that nothing distracted from the exchange between these two men. He wanted the place to be as invisible as possible with the “background is as monochromatic and as minimalist as I could get it, because, boy, I did not want anything to take away from what was happening on Al's face and Bob's face.”

It makes sense, then, that these two men understand each other better than they do their wives or girlfriends. They are more open with each other than with their loved ones because there is a mutual respect and bond between them. Over coffee they tell each other their dreams and Neil’s is particularly illuminating: “I have one where I’m drowning. And I gotta wake myself up and start breathing or I die in my sleep.” Vincent asks him, “You know what that’s about?” To which Neil replies, “Yeah, not enough time.” Like Frank in Thief, Neil’s dilemma is that he does not have enough time to do everything he needs to do. Neil is a fascinating variation on Frank’s character in the sense that he too is forced to decide between preserving a relationship and his work but unlike Frank, he wastes too much time deciding on which one to follow. When Neil finally does make up his mind it is too late and he is punished for his indecision.

Heat’s most exciting action sequence is the now famous bank heist scene. Right from the beginning, Mann establishes a quick pace as Neil enters the bank with pulsating electronic music that anticipates what is going to happen. With incredible precision and timing, McCauley and his crew have taken out the guards, have control of the bank and are taking out large quantities of money in under a minute. The music is underplayed but still effective in creating tension during the sequence. Once McCauley and his crew emerge from the bank and Chris fires the first shot, the music stops and the rest of this exciting sequence plays out with no music — only the deafening roar of the guns firing as McCauley and his men try to escape and turn the streets of Los Angeles into a war zone. Mann made sure that the gunshots sounded realistic and went to great pains to make sure he got the right sounds for the machine guns. He said, “There's a certain pattern to the reverberation. It makes you think you've never heard that in a film before so it feels very real and authentic. Then you really believe the jeopardy these people are in.”

Mann alternates between shaky, hand-held cameras and fluid tracking shots with kinetic editing that brilliantly conveys the exciting action that is taking place. One of the reasons why this sequence works so well and comes across as being so authentic is due in large part to one of the technical advisors for the film: Andy McNab, a Special Forces soldier who infiltrated enemy lines in the Persian Gulf War to sabotage SCUD missiles. De Niro gave Mann his copy of Bravo Two Zero, written by McNab. It so impressed the filmmaker that he hired him to train the cast how to shoot guns for two months. McNab worked from a tape of L.A. Takedown, Mann’s T.V. movie rough draft of Heat, to get an idea of what Mann wanted. The actors rehearsed carrying around the weight of the money they would be stealing in the bank heist. De Niro had to practice how he would carry Kilmer once he was shot and how to fire his weapon with one hand.

Before filming the bank heist sequence, Mann and McNab conducted a dry run with the actors on a real bank. De Niro, Tom Sizemore and Kilmer all wore disguises and body armor. Only the bank manager knew what was really going on. A couple of guys covertly videotaped everything from cameras in bags. The sequence was to be shot at the Far East Bank in Los Angeles. Location manager Janice Polley and the producers spent months beforehand meeting with officials of the bank explaining what was involved. Mann and his crew took over the entire financial district of the city every weekend for five weeks. They were allowed to shoot between 6 pm on Friday and 5 am Monday morning. The production shut down 5th street in L.A. and notified hotels and residents within earshot. The bank heist sequence was so authentic that in 1998, two men foolishly tried to copy what was done in the film. They robbed a bank in L.A. and as McNab remembered, they even "delayed the robbery for three days so they could get exactly the same bags as Kilmer had, and they used machine guns, body armor—everything."

The rest of Heat plays out the aftermath and fallout of the bank heist as McCauley ties up loose ends and attempts to escape with Eady before Hanna can catch him. Ultimately, Heat is about choices. Neil’s final choice in the film is also his most crucial. He has to decide whether to stay with Eady or run on his own from Hanna who is now in hot pursuit. However, Neil hesitates too long and this is what ultimately defeats him. He goes against his own personal code and is punished. Hanna does not and is willing to sacrifice his personal life so that he can take McCauley down. The film ends as it began — without dialogue as Hanna tracks Neil down.

The origins of Heat were based in large part from the experiences of an old friend of Mann's, Chuck Adamson. The police officer had been chasing down a high-line thief named Neil McCauley in Chicago in 1963. One day, "they simply bumped into one another. Chuck didn't know what to do: arrest him, shoot him or have a cup of coffee." Heat was also based on another person according to Mann: “Another is a guy I can't really talk about, who's bright, intuitive, and driven, and runs large operations against drug cartels in foreign countries. He's a singularly focused individual and much of the core of Hanna's character comes from him.” From these two sources, Mann created a story that explored the relationship between Neil McCauley, a career criminal and Vincent Hanna, a dedicated cop with very similar approaches to their professions but on opposite sides of the law.

Mann wrote an early draft of Heat in 1979 that was 180 pages and based on real people he knew personally and by reputation in Chicago. He wrote another draft after making Thief with no intention of directing it himself. During a promotional interview for The Keep (1983), Mann talked about making Heat into a film and was still looking for another director to make it. In the late 1980s, Mann tried to produce the film several times and offered it to his friend and fellow filmmaker, Walter Hill but he turned it down. Mann was still not satisfied with the script, which had developed the character of McCauley but Hanna still needed work.

After making The Last of the Mohicans, Mann returned to a 1986 draft of Heat and decided that he would make it himself. He felt that the L.A. Robbery-Homicide division would be an ideal basis for a television show and took his script and “abridged it severely. I abstracted probably something like 110 pages from 180 pages ... so it’s lacking in the sense that it’s not fully developed.” The result was a made-for-television movie entitled, L.A. Takedown. It was an incredibly fast shoot – uncharacteristic for the methodical Mann – with only ten days of pre-production and 19 days of shooting. In comparison, Heat would have a six-month pre-production period and a 107-day shooting schedule. Takedown starred Scott Plank as Hanna and Alex McArthur as Patrick McLaren, the character that became Neil McCauley in Heat, with Michael Rooker, Xander Berkley (who has a small role in Heat), and Daniel Baldwin. It aired on NBC on August 27, 1989 at 9 pm. In many respects, Takedown was another draft of Heat. The director said in an interview, "it had a similar kind of nucleus, which was the rapport between the thief and the cop." In the L.A. Takedown script, McCauley's gang is not fleshed out all that much. The Chris Shiherlis sub-plot does not exist, the bungled bank robbery sting is gone, and Hanna's step-daughter's sub-plot does not exist. NBC was willing to buy the show if Mann recast the lead actor. He refused and the network did not pick it up.

After L.A. Takedown, Mann had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured. "I charted the film out like a 2 hr 45 min piece of music, so I'd know where to be smooth, where not to be smooth, where to be staccato, where to use a pulse like a heartbeat." In 1994, Mann showed producer Art Linson another draft of Heat over lunch and told him that he was thinking of updating it. Linson read it, loved it and agreed to make the film with Mann. On April 5, 1994, Variety announced that Mann was abandoning his James Dean biopic and prepping Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro attached to the project with filming to take place in either Chicago or Los Angeles.

De Niro got the script first and then showed it to Pacino who read it and wanted to be a part of the film. De Niro thought it was a "very good story, had a particular feel to it, a reality and authenticity." To research their roles Mann took Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, and De Niro to Folsom prison and interviewed several inmates. Sizemore talked to one career criminal in particular who was a multi-millionaire and “had socked away several million dollars and continued to do it, you know one more score ... The guys we educated ourselves about only do big jobs, they won't do anything under $2 million. It's all true, that's what's amazing,” the actor remembered.

Scouting locations for Heat started in August of 1994 and continued through December with location manager Janice Polley, who had first worked with Mann on Last of the Mohicans. She had a staff of three to four people who went all over Los Angeles to find locations that had not been filmed before — no easy task. Mann let them know the kinds of houses each character would live in according to their income and financial status, the look of the house and the surrounding area. For example, Chris Shiherlis lived in Sherman Oaks, Vincent Hanna lived in Santa Monica, Neil McCauley's house was on the beach in Malibu, and Eady's house was in the Hollywood Hills. Polley did her job: less than 10% of the 85 locations used had previously appeared in a film. Not a single soundstage was used.

It was important for Mann to capture a certain vibe of L.A. It was almost another character in the film. The director remembers, “I wanted to capture basically the way the city felt to me being out in the middle of it at two in the morning or on top of the gas tower or on top of a roof or flying over it with the LAPD helicopters. You know, there’s a glow that it has, it’s unique western.” The most challenging location for Polley to get was Los Angeles Airport, one of the busiest in the country. After much negotiation, permission was given to shoot in a restricted area where the radar towers are located. At the last minute, Polley got a call. The Unabomber had threatened the post office at LAX and the FBI were called in to investigate. A delay in filming would have cost the production thousands of dollars. They met with LAX security and the FBI and it was determined that the area they were going to shoot in was far enough away from any potential danger.

Heat was released on December 15, 1995 in 1,325 theaters, grossing $8.4 million on its opening weekend. The film was a commercial success, grossing $67.4 million in North America and $120 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $187.4 million.

Heat received mostly positive reviews from critics at the time. In his review for Time magazine, Richard Schickel praised Mann’s direction: “An opening sequence that may be the best armored-car robbery ever placed on film. He proceeds to a crazily orchestrated bank heist that goes awry and finishes in a wild firefight on a crowded downtown street that is a masterpiece of sustained invention.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Mann’s not interested in good or evil, but in behavior: the choices people make, the internal pressures that can cause the best-laid plans to go awry.” Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with clichés.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The huge, well-chosen cast for Heat attests to Mr. Mann's eye for both esthetic interest and acting talent. Even small roles are so well emphasized that they show these performers off to fine advantage.”

However, in his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes. Its point of view about the innate violence of men is essentially that of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, but while the idea itself remains valid and even relevant, Mann cancels all that out with a ridiculous ending that suggests some sort of final spiritual, metaphysical mind-meld. To call it mythic absurdity is a kindness.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Mann's most perverse decision was to cast these two legends and then keep them apart from each other. Half-way through, they finally get an extended dialogue in a coffee shop (it's the first time the actors have ever been in a scene together), and you can feel their joy in performing. We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.”

One of the problems critics (and some viewers) had with Heat was Pacino's sudden, loud outbursts of outrageous dialogue. However, the actor justified his character's behavior in an interview: “I think that the character is prone to these kind of explosive irrational outbursts. A lot of those interrogations and that kind of thing, I got from watching detectives working, going into a kind of, flipping into a kind of–flipomatic, as they say–this state of just general chaos in order to get something. The hysteria shakes up the subject and gets to the truth.” Mann further elaborated in an interview where he explained that Pacino's character "will rock that person of his foundation, to the point where the man loses whatever defense mechanisms he may have set up against this detective coming in."

Heat has gone on to inspire numerous other films and filmmakers. Directors for both the Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs (2002) and the British gangster film Layer Cake (2004) have cited the look of Heat as an influence on their own work. Most impressively, before going into production on The Dark Knight (2008), director Christopher Nolan screened Heat for all his department heads. He said, “I always felt Heat to be a remarkable demonstration of how you can create a vast universe with one city and balance a very large number of characters and their emotional journeys in an effective manner.” Indeed, the bank heist that begins the film is reminiscent of the one staged in Heat right down to a cameo by William Fichtner as a defiant bank manager in a nice reference to the actor’s role in Mann’s film.