"I meet up at least once a year with a group of university friends. We pick a city, descend on it and then leave 48 hours later, often a little worse for wear. I would say about 60% of all communication on these trips is quotes from Michael Mann's 1995 heist thriller, Heat. Screaming like Al Pacino's coked-up Los Angeles police detective Vincent Hanna or calmly saying I have a woman like Robert De Niro's robotic master thief Neil McCauley"
"My social media algorithms know me well enough to feed me Heat content: a bumper sticker that reads honk if you've seen Michael Mann's critically acclaimed masterpiece Heat, a comedian doing an impression of De Niro auditioning for Heat 2 by laughing maniacally, 30-year-old casting polaroids, action figures of the horrendous villain Waingro. It's never-ending and it's also never enough. I could watch this slop for hours."
"There's the obvious: it's arguably Mann's most accomplished project. The central performances are electric. Pacino and De Niro play driven obsessives drawn to and repulsed by each other in equal measure. It looks incredible, as Mann turns Los Angeles into a world of cold austere chrome and glass or, as Mark Fisher put it, endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises."
The narrator reunites yearly with university friends for 48-hour trips dominated by quotations from Heat. Social interaction on these trips relies heavily on lines and impressions from characters like Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley. Social media algorithms supply an endless stream of Heat memorabilia, from bumper stickers to casting polaroids and action figures. The narrator recognizes the film's technical strengths: electric central performances, a stylized Los Angeles rendered in chrome and glass, and a lineage of cinematic influences reaching from Bullitt to The Dark Knight. The narrator finds comfort and communal identity in repeated viewing and ritual quoting of the film.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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