Heat
After all, she is no loli anymore! I still like her though, and for some reason, I think she is a lot like Anna Paquin, only that Anna Paquin is horribly under-appreciated (she was really bad in 25th Hour though).
I’m glad that I finally finished watching “Heat”, but I admit that it was more a chore than truly enjoyable. Parts of it is my own fault (I wasn’t able to watch this long movie in one go), parts of it is that this movie probably really is not exactly my type. I surely love gangster and policemen films (like Infernal Affairs), and I admit that both Al Pacino and Robert de Niro are absolutely brilliant, and I also think that this film was fairly multi-faceted for a really mainstream-y Hollywood film (well, they had quite a lot of time too, after all), but I just couldn’t get really into the whole film. What I liked the most were the café scene in which the main character confronted each other and the one in which Chris and Charlene see each other the last time, those were pretty intense, besides that, bleh?
I kind of liked that there was such am emphasis on the portrait of the main characters’ relationships in this film. After all, it’s a rare thing for gangster flicks, I suppose, where women are mainly treated as sexy sidekicks. Unfortunately, most of these relationships and these women annoyed the hell out of me: They were mostly one-dimensional and hysteric, the relationships utterly boring and had no good scenes à la “Short Cuts” where hysteric women were great.
Finally, I understand why people would like this film, and I think to some degree I liked it too, but I guess it was just not breathtaking. It’s the kind of film I can’t recommend, but also wouldn’t un-recommend if somebody wanted to see it.
PS. All in all, there are too many films in my life that I want in my own DVD collection, and too few that I have already procured. What a sad world… And now that everything becomes HD, I can only hope that ‘my’ DVDs would become cheaper one day.
PPS. The only other actress I find smart-looking besides Nathalie Portman is actually Julia Stiles (who has written this nice, somewhat pretentious Guardian article).