Fran Magazine: Issue #30

The Heat issue

You’re reading Fran Magazine, one of the few good Substacks on a platform full of unedited weirdos and narcissists, of which I am both but in the most normal way. This an issue for paid subscribers. Annual subscriptions cost $40, which is a steal when you think about all the other things that cost way more than $40 out there in the world. If you can’t justify a paid subscription, consider sharing this or a past post to convince Substack that this is a legitimate editorial enterprise.

Heat 2

I didn’t get asked to do a Sight & Sound poll, “obviously.” I put obviously in quotations because if you are me, you never think for a second that you would be asked if you did a Sight & Sound poll. But then people ask (polite) and you demur (also polite), leaving aside the uncomfortable frustration of doing a particular work for a decade now and sitting out of the club. Whatever! I was an unpopular child and a more unpopular teenager, and part of being both of those is getting used to a non-invitation. You live, you learn, you move on.

Except I am bad, to some degree, at moving on, so of course I have my dummy list, an ever-shifting work in progress, of the ten films I would contribute to the list of “the canon.” The canon has shifted over the past several years in a direction I would happily say is towards the better, but as an editor and a reader and a consumer of arts across all mediums, I can’t say that I have been concerned with “the canon” much at all. Part of teaching in grad school (there it is) required boiling down a medium into about four, maybe five, weeks of study, max. You can’t teach every poem, every short story, whatever. So the focus shifted to the diversity of craft, authorship, and era. I wasn’t going to teach Hemingway. “Hills Like White Elephants”—a great, and arguably timely, story can be found anywhere. If someone wants to read it, they’ll figure it out. I am inclined to feel the same way about movies.

Two different friends generous enough to share their lists with me included Michael Mann’s 1995 crime epic Heat. Cool choice!

Madison Brek @madisonbrek

Can’t believe no one warned me about the way Al Pacino says “baby” in Heat

I myself was in search of a Michael Mann movie to include on my list, waffling between Thief (not all that special in the grand scheme of things, but special to me personally) and The Insider, the latter of which I wound up putting my little list. A few months ago, Phil and I watched Mann’s Miami Vice, beloved by some but mostly disliked by me. An ugly movie that is mostly just vibing. In a fit of compartmentalization, I put together a list of Mann’s filmography (what I’d seen of it—I am still missing two films) on a spectrum of “vibes” to “operatic.” I think enough people who know me and know this blog know that I prefer the latter to the former, not that one is better than the other. The Insider, in turn, is Mann’s most operatic movie, in my opinion—literal opera plays in it, for one—though Heat is a close second.