OK, serial novella, LW-style. Finish this one up for me, cro-mags.
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I had a horrible toothache, so I made an appointment to see the dentist. The rest of my work day was a living hell, as I tried to keep my face from screwing up into a mask of agony during meetings and snapped inappropriately at people on the phone. I heard that the boss was mad about my behavior but managed to sneak out of the office before he could chew my face off. My drive home was pockmarked with near-misses and roiling road rage as the tooth beagle kept gnawing away at my nerve. When I got home, my wife gave me a kiss on the cheek which sent swords of pain through my jaw and into my cranium. I took a bunch of Ibuprofen, cursed the fact that I hadn't saved any Vicodin that I had left over from my foot operation, and headed to to bed. Of course, sleep was impossible until sheer exhaustion overtook the machete sensation and I passed out.
When I woke up I was starving, but I forewent my customary bowl of "Kashi" brand cereal due to the blinding pain in my head. At this point, I was totally unfit to drive and couldn't even really speak, so my wife took the morning off from her job and drove me to the dentist. I signed my pathetic name on the sign-in sheet and sat twitching in the waiting room until the nurse called me.
I walked into the white room and sat down on a dentist chair so high-tech that I'm surprised it was declassified. Even through the pain I could tell it was really cool and was barely able to suppress an urge to bark Picard-style space commands. The nurse came back in and took my blood pressure, which I thought was odd for a tooth extraction, but whatever. The nurse looked pretty hot; her "Spongebob" scrubs were about a size too small and her short hair was tinted a kinky purple. This didn't really help ease my blinding discomfort, however.
The doctor came in, looking very much like a thinner Gene Hackman. He had a big bluish birthmark on the side of his cheek and I remember that he smelled like Tabasco.
"Hi, I'm Doctor Cartwright. Looks like you're in some pain, huh?"
I nodded gingerly.
"OK, Hank, you just hang in there. We're going to get you all fixed up. Edie, let's get Hank set up -- administer the anesthetic and get him secured."
The nurse, Edie, said "You'll feel a pinch" and inserted an IV of clear fluid into my arm and began to manipulate some apparatus behind my chair. Within a few seconds, the murderous pain had dulled to a throb and I was feeling more relaxed. Edie swivelled some metal pieces out from behind the chair and snapped them in place at the side of my head, locking it in place.
"Hey!" I drawled.
"Don't worry, Hank," Edie said with a wink. "This is just to immobilize your head so it doesn't move while we're working." In my peripheral vision, I could see that she was doing something with the IV.
Shortly thereafter, I felt a metallic chill and started to hear things in a weird, crunchy, amplified way, like as if I was listening to the world through a paper cup.
The doctor popped back into my frame of vision. He looked different. He said, "How we doing, Hank?" and his mouth curled in a sickening, inhuman smile. Behind his eyes I could see a bonfire of hate, and I would have screamed. But in fact, I couldn't speak at all.
"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. (37,793)
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