Papa's Basement » Heat

The Ten Greatest Guy Movies, Part 2: Five Through One

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:51:24 +0000

Last Thursday, I punched out the first half of my list of the ten greatest guy movies, promising the top five the next day. Since I operate on CPT, that was code for a week later. Here, at last, are numbers five through one.

Lorraine Bracco, moments before gnawing off Ray Liotta's face in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy. It was in the director's cut.

5. Goodfellas

Some people might say it’s hard to make a case for Goodfellas as a guy movie because you could call it a love story…if you wanted to miss the point entirely and sound like a jackass. I mean The Shining featured Jack Nicholson going on a vacation with his wife and kid; I still wouldn’t call it a family-friendly romp.

Goodfellas was the first film I watched with my mom where it became abundantly clear that her limitations as a female prevented her from enjoying certain awesome movies. Before the barrel cooled on Joe Pesci’s gun, the video was being shoved back in the rental box as my mother bemoaned the movie as a overrated and far too violent, which shocked me because, up until then, my mom and I always agreed on films and I thought Goodfellas kinda rocked. It wasn’t until years later I figured out that the ovaries taking up 50% of her cranial capacity were interfering with her brain’s ability to process the film’s awesomeness. While I may have failed Anatomy that year, I aced Guy Movies 101.

Moment girls leave-When Morrie gets that icepick through his brain stem. Women see that scene and wretch. Guys laugh because Joe Pesci insulting Frankie Carbone is hilarious, even more so with a corpse evacuating itself right next to them.

James Caan's hairy back and shoulder and Abe Vigoda's face. Sorry this photo didn't come with a warning that you'd have to fan your crotches off after gazing upon it, ladies.

4. The Godfather

The Godfather is a slightly questionable choice as a guy movie because almost everyone, male or female, has watched it. It isn’t until you ask around and learn that four out of five women (especially your mother) watched the film to get out of going down on their significant other that its selection starts to make sense. The joke’s on the guy who forsook head, though: Watching The Godfather with a girl is three hours of hearing about how Kay’s a great wife, Michael’s an uncommunicative prick and that Apollonia (that’s a NSFW link to her non-nippled Barbie boobs) deserved to get blown up for being his slutty side-piece.

Moment girls leave-When Moe Greene gets popped through the glasses.

Does everyone else find it easier to picture Sigourney Weaver with a penis, or is that just my weird thing?

3. Aliens

Aliens is a love letter to everything I was obsessed with as a kid. A plucky team of space marines? Check. Futuristic weaponry? Check. Monsters that combine “cool-looking” and “frightening” so well that they induce pants-shitting awe? Check. Sometimes I think that James Cameron’s focus group for the film was a class of fourth grade boys. “Yeah, I guess the plot is okay, but can you make Hudson say more cool things? Sweet. Oh, and I want a robot. And I want the robot to die. And, when he dies, I want him to puke milk like I did in the lunchroom. No boobs, though. Those are gross.”

Moment girls leave-The initial space marine massacre that kills half the characters they’d just spent an hour growing to love.

2. Full Metal Jacket*

Conservative estimates place the number of times I've recited this scene's dialog at 4,236.

*The real number two guy movie of all time is Predator. But I’m sick of writing about it. I’ve written about it here. And here. And here. (Okay, that last one was a link to hilarious moments from To Catch a Predator, but items always sound best listed in threes.) So, instead, you’re getting Full Metal Jacket. And that’s fine, because FMJ deserves to be on the damn list. The movie made such an impression on a teenaged John Papageorgiou that I held a cassette recorder to my TV to capture R. Lee Ermy’s opening monologue so I could then listen to it on my Walkman as I paced the halls of my high school. Two weeks later, every guy in every one of my classes was reciting the film scene by scene with me whenever we got a chance. Were we viewed as hot commodities as prom dates that year? You betcha!

Moment girls leave-The blanket party.

One look at this photo and I know I made the right choice.

1. Heat

Here it is. Heat. The greatest guy movie ever made. I’ve never met a man that didn’t speak of the film in reverent, hushed tones. Asking a guy what he thinks about Heat is akin to asking him “Do you like breasts?”: He’s going to look at you cockeyed for a moment, then bury a pickaxe through your forehead, because you were either an alien or a Russian spy and, in order to be safe, you had to go.

Conversely, it’s easier to grow bacterial colonies in a Petri dish full of rubbing alcohol than it is to get a girl through a viewing of Heat. If The Godfather is a movie that portrays women as dopey and superfluous, then Heat presents them as actively ruinous, existing only to complicate a man’s life as he seeks to give it real meaning by battling his arch-nemesis, a person who understands him more than any lady could. Heat is the ultimate guy movie, and it taught me more about being a man than school, the Cub Scouts and all of my years of youth sports combined. Thank you, Heat. Thank you.

Moment girls leave-THE OPENING CREDITS.

Now that I’m done, what would your top ten list be? Leave a comment, Tweet it to me or leave a message on Facebook. Just make sure to do it somewhere I can publicly scold you for being incorrect.

Heat-The Best Movie Ever

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 03:58:32 +0000

Cause she got a great ass! And you got your head all the way up it!

There are a few movies that I will watch every single time I catch them on tv: The first two Godfather films. Goodfellas. Scarface. (Though I always turn it off right after Tony shoots Sosa’s hitman Alberto in the car and things start to go downhill. I just can’t bear to see my Montana-bear face down in that bloody “The World is Yours” pool.) Heat is on that list as well, and, as far as I’m concerned, is the king of the bunch. For, you might not know it yet, but…Heat is the best movie ever made.

How, you ask? How can it not be! It pits the two Italian alphas of acting, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, in a life-or-death struggle of silverback dominance as they spout off shit like “Have no attachments. Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat” and “I’m alone. I am not lonely.” (Coincidentally, I’ve been known to mutter both statements over and over under my breath as I jerk off to my old yearbooks. But that’s an article unto itself.) The rest of the cast is similarly superb, and, on top of all that, it contains the single-most amazing (non-pornographic) scene ever put on film: A 10-minute bank robbery that is so manly I still refuse to let any girlfriends watch it out of a fear it might impregnate them. Let the celebration of Heat‘s greatness begin.

The Cast

Before he was asking men named Gaylord to milk him.

Let’s not bullshit ourselves: Heat‘s selling point is that it gets two of the greatest actors ever and veterans of countless guy films, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, on screen together. (You may notice I keep putting Al’s name ahead of Bobby D’s despite in the fact that “De Niro” is ahead of “Pacino” alphabetically. This is due to the fact that Al Pacino is of pure Sicilian ancestry while De Niro is a mongrel of partially-French, Irish and Dutch descent, a fact that disturbs me greatly to this day. I mean it’s goddamn Robert De Niro. The guy should be so Italian that he cums olive oil and shits fist-sized meatballs in a light Bolognese sauce.) Thankfully, both of their performances are top-notch: De Niro plays Neil McCauley, a zen thief, a dangerous man of few words who lives by an impossibly strict code of conduct. In other words, he’s everything I’d aspire to be if 80% of my life weren’t dedicated to eating fast food at every meal and staring at the countless Bang Bros. Network websites for hours on end.

Pacino channeling Linda Lovelace.

Pacino, conversely, plays Vincent Hanna, the skilled detective out to bring De Niro and his crew down. In contrast to the samurai-like calm De Niro brings to his character, Pacino’s detective behaves like an autistic child who is one viewing of a tv commercial for Chuck E. Cheese away from repeatedly punching himself in his genitals. Here are some of his more-restrained exchanges in the film:

TONE LOC: (Yes, the Tone Loc. I told you the cast was great.) I can get killed for telling you this shit!

PACINO: You can get killed WALKING YOUR DOGGIE!

Such a dipshit line, yet he delivers it so well you can’t help but love it. Here’s another snippet of godlike dialogue between Pacino and the gentleman of color playing Tone Loc’s brother (I’m too lazy to look up his name, but, to narrow it down, he was a black guy with a shaven head):

BLACK GUY WITH SHAVEN HEAD: Vincent…

PACINO: (slamming table with his fists so hard that the dishes on it go flying) GIMMIE ALL YA GOT!

BLACK GUY WITH SHAVEN HEAD: Vincent…

PACINO: (more fist slamming) GIMMIE ALL YA GOT!

Oscar-worthy.

The rest of the cast is similarly top notch: Val Kilmer. Ashley Judd. Henry Rollins. Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Bubba from Forrest Gump. Natalie Portman before she grew breasts. (Or the approximation thereof. I still don’t get the fuss about that broad. She’s got a body like a 12-year-old Vietnamese boy. And yet somehow isn’t sexy. Hiyo!) Every actor in the film was of the utmost pedigree. I’d believe it if you told me Meryl Streep and Marlon Brando were used as uncredited extras.

The Robbery

The film’s centerpiece is a bank robbery that is without a doubt the most amazing action sequence you will ever witness. Before I continue, I’d just like to say I’m aware of the Dane Cook bit about how the heist scene in Heat makes him want to go out and commit armed robbery. I’d like to add that Dane Cook even speaking the name of my beloved Heat makes me want to bury him up to his neck in the sand and get the rest of the village to help me stone him to death. You know, the same way I’d handle things if I had to restore honor to my family after I caught my Afghani daughter not wearing her veil around a Westerner. Whore.

There is nothing the written word can do to convey the greatness of the scene, so I’ll just spit out some facts: The cast received months of weapons training prior to shooting the scene so they wouldn’t look like a bunch of short bus passengers when handling their guns. It is still shown to Marine Corps recruits as an example of both how to properly load a weapon mid-combat and how to retreat while under fire. The gunfire in the scene is so loud that, to this day, playing it will immediately cause my cat to defecate in fear wherever she’s standing. Finally, due to the detailed nature of the scene and the fact that 95% of the general population is mentally retarded and will ape anything they see on television, the Heat robbery is credited with countless copycat crimes, chief among them the famous North Hollywood Shootout, in which two guys in heavy body armor took on hundreds of cops before finally being put down. (Not to sound too Columbine-y, but I always did think that was a badass story.)

So do yourself a favor and watch (or re-watch) Heat. It’s currently streaming on Netflix. (Oh, Netflix…had you existed 15 years ago, I’d have never graduated high school.) You’ll thank me. Just remember: Don’t watch that robbery scene if you’re ovulating. Lest your family be forced to stone you to death. Whore.

I still choke up like a bitch during the ending...which I may have just given away with this picture. He, uh, fell asleep because he ate too much strawberry jam, some of which is smeared on his shirt. There we go.