You, specifically, will pass away.” They were right! -Petrana Radulovicįullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is available to stream on Netflix. It only took a few episodes before I became totally hooked.Īlso, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my coworkers Ana Diaz and Julia Lee personally egging me to watch FMAB because of - and I quote - “the characters … you will die. But after making it through 148 episodes of Hunter x Hunter - and absolutely loving it - I realized that, hey, maybe I actually do like fantastical action?Īs it turns out, I am really vibing with Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which has so many things I specifically love: vague steampunk-era aesthetic, seven deadly sins motifs, a magic system with specific rules and caveats, a very cute robot (okay, it’s technically a soul bound to armor, but… c’mon), a deep sibling bond, and really uniforms. I put it off, because even when I started my anime journey, I was drawn to shows that contained less fantastical action and more everyday events (with the occasional turning into animals thrown in the mix). įullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Photo: BONESĮven before I started watching anime, one of my childhood friends kept telling me I needed to watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Heat is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video. I felt like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption who, in an experience not unlike living through a global pandemic and an election cycle from hell, crawled through 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness to be met on the other side by a cleansing rain. I felt a wave of pure exultation wash over me as Moby’s God Moving Over the Face of the Waters played over the final moments of Lieutenant Hanna’s clasping Neil’s dying hand in a expression of mutual admiration between worthy adversaries. Heat is the apotheosis of the genre of crime thriller such that it surpasses said categorization, becoming what Mann himself describes as, “a highly structured, realistic, symphonic drama.” It exists in a rarefied echelon in the canon of popular culture, the platonic ideal by which all other contemporaries aspire to surpass, yet inevitably fall short. Dante Spinotti’s cinematography transforms the vast cityscape of Los Angeles into a shimmering expanse of lights strobing across the surface a sea of pitch darkness, a den of moral inequity from which no soul emerges wholly clean or unscathed. Pacino and De Niro deliver two of their greatest performances as a pair of obsessive workaholics whose razor sharp proficiency at their trades comes at the cost of all they otherwise love or hold dear. Here, they exist in a triumphant assemblage of carefully interlocking components working in concert with the precision of a Swiss timepiece. It’s a film made of moments and set-pieces that could comprise an entire third-act finale in a lesser movie. Mann’s 1995 crime-thriller stars Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna, an eccentric and hyper-competent police detective caught in a tense cat-and-mouse struggle, and Robert de Niro as Neil McCauley, a career criminal. And that’s exactly what I got when I went out with some friends this weekend for a screening of Michael Mann’s Heat at the Music Box Theatre. I didn’t want to watch some mid-tier direct-to-video piece of crap passing itself off as a tent-pole feature I wanted something moving and transcendent its sheer unencumbered power when rendered on a big screen.
So after I got vaccinated, I knew that I wanted- no, needed my first time back in a movie theater to mean something.
My last experience watching a movie in theaters before the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside-down was an especially annoying screening of Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, wherein some annoying kid and his friends in the aisle across from me played Fortnite on their phones for nearly the entire film at full brightness (yes, I’m still mad about it). Here are a few of the shows and movies we’re enjoying watching right now, and what you might enjoy watching as well. Our weekend media diet was pretty wild too, with the fine folks here at Polygon HQ watching everything from Michael Mann’s 1995 “symphonic crime drama” Heat and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood to Shiva Baby, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and David Robert Mitchell’s Under The Silver Lake. Also, apparently Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are now back together? (Wild!)
This past weekend was a weird and exciting one, with Tesla/SpaceX CEO and self-styled “meme lord” Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live ( weird!) and the announcement of a brand-new Dragon Ball Super movie slated to release next year (exciting !).