I'll be recommending home video releases once a week because you people clearly don't get enough advice on how to live and what to buy from the media already. My recommendation for the week of March 21 is the Blu-ray of Michael Mann's Heat (1995).
I know a lot of you saw Mann's Public Enemies in the summer of 2009, but what you may not believe is that he once made a crime epic that wasn't a blurry, digital, overrated mess. Heat is his best film, a Los Angeles crime saga that holds up under multiple viewings. The story focuses on cops and robbers, as Al Pacino's Detective Vincent Hanna hunts down Robert De Niro's Neil McCauley. A strong cast supported them, but the film didn't just showcase excellent procedural sequences of police work (before they got acronymed to death on network television) and shootouts; it brought the goods by focusing on the two driven lead characters and the effects their obsessions wrought on the people closest to them. The legendary cafe scene, pictured above, showcases a surprisingly moving exchange between Hanna and McCauley in which they realize that they are two sides of the same coin, one driven to hurt others through crime, the other to stop such victimization.
The Blu-ray features an excellent video transfer (for a film from 1995) and pounding Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio. Mann's commentary is also great. I recommend this one for home theater enthusiasts.
Mann up,
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