A new 4K DCP restoration of Michael Mann‘s Heat will screen at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wednesday, 9.7. I’ll be in Toronto that evening, rested and ready for the Thursday am start of the Toronto Film Festival. (TIFF had a 20th anniversary 35mm screening of Heat last year.) Christopher Nolan will moderate a post-screening discussion with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and other cast members.
This means, of course, that the 4K restoration will result in a better quality Bluray. (Sometime in the fall?) Why did the homies at Warner Home Video put out such an unexceptional Heat Bluray in the first place? It’s not “bad” looking but it’s far from a knockout. The 4K Heat was restored by Mann and Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3. The Bluray will be apparently be released by Fox Home Video.
Who invited Waingro (Kevin Gage) to join the Heat crew for that opening armored car job? Danny Trejo‘s character, right? A truly brilliant move. Waingro turned the armored car job into a murder rap when he shot one of the guards. Then the crew failed to kill him at that Burbank diner. Plus they didn’t find him and finish the job. Which led to Waingro giving damaging information to William Fichtner‘s Roger Van Zant and somehow tipping off Pacino’s crew about the big bank job downtown. Plus the determination of Robert De Niro‘s Neil Macauley to kill Waingro at that LAX-area hotel leads to his own death.
In short: No Waingro, no Heat.