News Bites: Heroes and Heat

Good morning, folks. Another outage on my internet connection left me unable to post or read for a few days (I’d like to exchange 2013 for a better year, please), but it’s working again in time for this week’s News Bites. Now, given that I missed a few days of browsing the web, it’s certainly possible I missed some interesting news. But what I did find is certainly interesting in its own right. A few more roles being cast for films, yet another remake, a TV series name change, and a rumor debunked while another is seemingly (if unofficially) confirmed. So read on for this week’s news!

Heat

Somehow I suspect that when writer/director Michael Mann pitched Heat to the studio, all he had to say was “Let’s put Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on opposites sides of a heist movie.” The concept sort of sells itself from there. Throw in Val Kilmer and other assorted renowned actors and character actors, and you have a lot of characters for these personalities to reflect off of during the course of the 1995 film.

This is important, because despite having one of the most intense shoot-outs in cinema, Heat isn’t exactly a standard heist movie. It’s more of a character study, of a protagonist and antagonist (or two opposed protagonists, depending on how you look at it), with the heist as a framework. The heist is not the focus of the film, it’s the backdrop; the focus is how planning the heist and investigating it affect career criminal Neil McCauley (De Niro) and L.A.P.D. Lt. Vincent Hanna (Pacino).