A few years ago I blogged about the great 1995 movie Heat, a Los Angeles crime epic starring two of the greatest actors NYC ever produced -- Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Although taking place entirely in LA, the New York sensibility of its two stars makes it ever greater.
It's one of my favorite movies, a true classic, about men and their work, men and their loves, about how work and love become one and the same, and overwhelms and subsumes them. I can watch this movie again and again and again and find something new each time to appreciate about it.
The movie was written and directed by Michael Mann (himself a son of Chicago) who has made many excellent films over the last forty years including Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, and Collateral. His movies, and the men and women who lives and work he portrays, are steely, unsentimental, brutal, and totally honest. In each movie he brings his exacting eye, his almost surgical camera-work, his extremely honest storytelling, not so much to tell a story but to reveal one through the motivations and actions of his characters. His movies manage to be both trilling and suspenseful while also soulful and meditative. Mann's movies, as I wrote before, are action movies for smart people.
And now Michael Mann is having a moment in NYC. His movies are enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image in early June and then, on June 17th, the Tribeca Film Festival is honoring Heat with a special screening where Mann, Pacino, and De Niro will be in attendance and speak afterwards.
Truly a Mann and his moment.
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