Heat

[Photo Credit]

Vincent Hanna: You know, we are sitting here, you and I, like a couple of regular fellas. You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do. And now that we've been face to face, if I'm there and I gotta put you away, I won't like it. But I tell you, if it's between you and some poor bastard whose wife you're gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down.
Neil McCauley: There is a flip side to that coin. What if you do got me boxed in and I gotta put you down? Cause no matter what, you will not get in my way. We've been face to face, yeah. But I will not hesitate. Not for a second.
[Heat at IMDB.com]

I didn't watch one minute of the NBA Finals, but for the past week or so, I have been catching all of the highlights. I like the NBA about as much as I like Shaq, which is not a lot. Basketball, as a sport, reaches it's pinnacle every March during the NCAA Tournament. Since Michael Jordan left the league has continued to lose me more and more each year. The only people that keep me somewhat interested are Dwyane Wade and LeBron James. But, it is minimal interest at best. Guys like Mark Cuban, a fellow blogger and fellow gazillionaire, push me further and further away. This guy is a young Jerry Jones, an owner who thinks he is part of the show, that people come to see him blow up at refs and commissioner David Stern, when, in reality, he is just a really wealthy guy that owns a sports team (one that just came in second).

I read a couple of his posts and they are humorous, but I wonder how the players feel about the owner being in the locker room. I remember playing college basketball and hating it when the Athletic Director rolled his fat ass into our team space. Enough about basketball. The fact that the Heat won got me thinking about songs named purely "Heat" and then I decided to grab a few songs with the word "heat" somewhere in the title, you can find them at the bottom, we cross a few genres and in the process, post our first hip-hop songs, I believe.

Now that we established that the NBA, Mark Cuban, and Shaq aren't friends of Metro D, lets discuss film. HEAT. The first thing that comes to mind when I think about HEAT is watching FINDING NEVERLAND. For real. My buddy Callo and I are Johnny Depp fans. One night after work he had to crash at my house and there was no Sox game on. We decided to hustle over to Hollywood Video and find something to kill the time. Neither one of us had caught FINDING NEVERLAND, so we picked it up. That movie is depressing as fuck. Very good, but very, very sad. At the end of the movie both of us were just staring straight at the screen, both wanting very much not to allow the other to see how "affected" we were. As soon as it wrapped up, I jumped up and yelled, "Fuck! I need the bank robbery scene from HEAT, right now!" We still laugh about that.

Michael Mann is one of my favorite directors of all time. LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE INSIDER, MANHUNTER (far superior to Ratner's futile RED DRAGON), COLLATERAL, and ALI to name a few. They don't always hit the mark exactly, but you can count on a killer script and magnificent filmmaking everytime. HEAT is great for many reasons, here are a few: it is loosely based on a true story from Chicago and Michael Mann spent a significant amount of time with the real-life cops involved in that story (learn more on the 2-Disc Special Edition, which came out last year and has excellent extra features to compliment the film), it features the first on-screen meeting of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and has a fantastic soundtrack (Eno, Moby, Moby covering Joy Division, Willie Dixon, Eric Clapton, etc.).

Vincent Hanna: My life's a disaster zone. I got a stepdaughter so fucked up because her real father's this large-type asshole. I got a wife, we're passing each other on the down-slope of a marriage - my third - because I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block. That's my life.
Neil McCauley: A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." Now, if you're on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a... a marriage?

MP3: The Velvet Underground - "White Light/White Heat"
MP3: Common - "Heat"
MP3: 50 Cent - "Heat"
MP3: AC/DC - "Heatseeker"
MP3: The Roots - "Rolling With Heat"