Heat
This is a post-Fordist organized crime movie, in which the scores are undertaken by crews, not Families, in an LA of polished chrome and interchangable designer kitchens, of featureless freeways and late-night diners, a no-place that is very far from being a utopia. All the local colour, the cuisine aromas, the cultural idiolects which the obvious comparison pieces, the Coppola and Scorsese gangster flicks of the seventies*, depended upon, have been leeched out, painted over, re-fitted and re-modelled. You could be anywhere … It is a world without landmarks. Ours: a branded Sprawl, where markable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises. The ghosts of Old Europe that stalked Scorsese and Coppola’s streets have been exorcised, buried with the ancient beefs, bad blood and burning vendettas somewhere beneath the multinational coffee shops… @
Mr. Deniro, I read somewhere that you and Martin Scorsese grew up together on Kenmare street in New York City. Did you relationship as children on the streets of the Lower East Side bear any resemblance to the creative relationship you enjoy as adults?
“Funny you ask that. Yes, it did. Marty was a very intense little kid… a real brooder. He had schemes. Sometimes he would come to me with a scheme, or we would hatch schemes together. Just like now.”
