A few words about...™ Heat -- in Blu-ray

Once one gets past the marketing "sizzle" of two actors who once had roles in the same film, but never worked together, Heat can be accepted for what it is -- an extremely high quality police / crime drama about the definition of levels of good and evil.

A great many words are unnecessary here.  Warner Home Video has harvested an image and pressed it to Blu-ray for a high level of perfection.

Great film.

Beautiful  Blu-ray.

Highly Recommended.

RAH

Edited by Robert Harris - 10/28/09 at 9:01am

I am so eagerly anticipating this title. Thank you for the brief review RAH. I'll be picking this up on release date...

I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about the supposed "content changes" Michael Mann made, which makes for a different running time according to the cover art that's been posted online.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare8/heat.htm lists a runtime that's only 12 seconds longer than the dvd versions. The reviewer mentions the blurb on the cover, but he doesn't think the film itself was changed. That the same audio commentary is on the disc, would be further evidence towards that statement.

Edited by Brian Borst - 10/29/09 at 12:20pm

The WHV press release actually just states that he supervised a new transfer. I think it's just worded badly on the case art because I don't believe any actual content changed from the original. Here is the transcript from the press release:

Burbank, Calif., July 20, 2009 – Prior to the recent opening of his well-received motion picture Public Enemies, director Michael Mann went back into the telecine facility to personally supervise a new high-definition transfer of Heat, the crime classic that starred powerhouse duo Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

Thank you Robert!  This is my #1 favorite film.  I think it's perfect from top to bottom...can't wait for some BluRay goodness on this one.

On the back of the Blu-ray case (which is as far as I've gotten with the HTF review copy), it states as follows:


If he didn't change anything, that's more than "badly worded"!

But I just verified the Beaver's running times; so who knows? I'll just have to watch it and see whether anything leaps out at me.

It could be different framing of certain shots, changed lines of dialogue, alternate takes - those wouldn't make for a big difference in running time.

My one and only problem I've had with this film since the VHS days is that the dialogue is often difficult to hear, while the sound effects (gunfire) is thunderous. It makes for a very uneven listen and a lot of volume button pressing.

Quote:
Exactly, this is not an extended cut.  IIRC, the original, albeit unofficial, announcement actually pointed this out.

I wish someone from WHV would chime in here and straighten this out. 

 I'm glad this looks good in Blu-ray. Warner has had a few misses in the past, but it's good to hear this isn't one of them.

Is the winking smiley meant to suggest that there's already someone from WHV in this thread?

Just on an initial viewing focusing on a/v quality, I noticed a line that's been dropped in Hanna's conversation with Marciano (the Vegas scumbag played by Hank Azaria). There's probably more that went by me because I wasn't looking for it.

I certainly hope no lines were cut!  I don't think there's a wasted line in the whole film.

I can live with that....just was getting concerned that there would be more instances of it. I already pre-ordered this from amazon so I'm definitely on-board! 

You gotta say, Al's ad-libbing of that whole scene was awesome LOL. 

 I've read negative things about the picture on blu-ray.com but I hope they are misguided people.

Can you be more specific?

There's some buzz about a change in brightness in certain spots, including chapter 17 between 00:54:32 and 00:54:33.  I don't have the disc yet so I can't confirm.

And if one were so inclined to listen to some conspiracy buffs, they say the two didn't work together in this film either! 

I don't go that far but I was annoyed that you don't actually see them on screen, both of their faces at the same time.
All you get is a couple of over the shoulder pov shots of the other guy in the diner then a long shot near the end of one guy holding a gun at the other.

The movie is great, but there was some hype that this was their first on screen film together and you really didn't get it.

For sure it's a bit annoying to have had the promos touting "onscreen at the same time" when what you actually got was one of them onscreen with the back of the other's head simultaneously.

But there is a serious underground movement who believe that the backs of their heads are "stunt guys" because the two either couldn't (or in some conspiracy theories wouldn't) work together. That I don't buy into at all.

The best is when someone posted one of those photo-stills of the two of them sitting across from each other in the diner (the kind that are taken while on set and given out as promos) and then that photo was torn to shreds by the conspiracy buffs claiming photoshop manipulation, etc.

yes, was it a long shot straight at the table Al on the left and Deniro on the right, like a profile shot of them sitting at the table?

nevermind i found it.



well anyway can't wait to see it on blu.

That kind of died down after the 2005 special edition DVD, which had a featurette on the conversation scene (also on the Blu-ray) including interviews with Mann, Pacino, De Niro and even one of the employees at the restaurant where they filmed the scene, who says that the most frequent question she gets is whether both actors were there at the same time.

It also didn't help the conspiracy theorists that Righteous Kill (whatever one may think of the movie) exploded their root assumption: namely, that De Niro and Pacino are such egomaniacs that they wouldn't show up on the set together. (Yes, there's digital trickery, but now we're into aluminum hat territory.)



Suppose you had. How would the diner scene have played? You have this intense one-on-one conversation with these two adversaries staring each other down. If you shoot it with the faces of both guys visible in the frame, where do you put the camera? What will the audience see? Think about it for a minute.

In the featurette I mention above, Mann talks about his shooting methodology and why he adopted it. As you listen to him, you realize that he was doing what a good director is supposed to do: serve the story. Now, I know that a lot of people may react by saying, "Yeah, but that's not what I wanted to see." Well, that's the kind of thinking that studio executives worry about night and day, and it's what prompts them to interfere with directors and screw up a lot of movies.

If Mann had put the camera on the same place where the photo above was taken, you'd have an intense scene as well. It would've been better perhaps, because both actors could do the scene in a single take, so they could act off each other. Just a suggestion, but it could've been done easily.

From what I've heard, Al and Robert are friends.  I don't subscribe to any of the ideas that the diner scene was anything but what we see, and they did act off each other.  It's discussed on the special edition disc. 

What an amazing film.  I liked it much better than Righteous Kill (which was allright), but Heat is a tough act to follow. 

This kind of actor blocking would have been pretty intense...

"You a monk?"
"I got a woman."

"Brother, you are going down."
"There's a flip side to that coin..."

Very much looking forward to this film on BR.  It's most likely worth the price of admission alone for the shoot-out scene in high-res audio.