Watched David Mamet's caper flick Heist, which he wrote and directed, on videocasette and it was awful--phoney-sounding, stagy, heavy-handed and a terrible waste of the great Gene Hackman, the main problem lying in the directing, which compelled everyone in the film to talk like a Saturday Night Live caricature of a Mamet character, everything drenched in unreality; one felt as if the characters had invisible scripts in hand and were reading their lines, everything seemed fake, and there was a horrible sameness to all of them, each in effect saying, "Hey, fuck you, I'm tough as nails and sly as a fox," and the next, "No, no, no, fuck you, I'm tough as nails and sly as a fox," and on and on, the mood of the film unalterably monotonous from beginning to end, the heist itself, of gold bullion from an jet that is on take off and cut off by a car, implausible to an extreme, all this inferiority genuinely surprising because I found Glengarry Glen Ross magnificent. [Later: The Research Department reports that Glengarry wasn't directed by D.M. but one James Foley.]
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