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Twitter Users Ponder the Greatest Character Introductions In Film

By Petr Navovy | Social Media | January 4, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Social Media | January 4, 2023 |


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Blake Howard’s incredible podcast, One Heat Minute—in which he dedicates an episode each to analysing one minute of Michael Mann’s Heat—is, aside from the Always Sunny boys, the only podcast I’ve ever been able to listen to. An early episode of One Heat Minute covers Robert De Niro’s entrance at the start of the film. For twenty or so minutes Blake and his guest track the minute in which we meet Neil McCauley, the character melting out of the pre-dawn light of an otherwordly LA in the film’s opening credits, accompanied by Elliot Goldenthal’s emotive soundtrack, and transitioning into the sequence in which he floats through the hospital from which he is going to steal the ambulance that he and his crew will use to pull off the armored car/bearer bonds heist later in the movie. It’s one my favorite film openings of all time—fitting, I suppose, for what is my favourite film of all time (alongside the Before Trilogy, of course)—and the depth to which Blake and his guest go in analysing the perfect way McCauley’s opening moments are pitched in order to communicate so much about him and the cool and efficient professionalism which defines him above all else is a joy to listen to.

It was also the first answer that immediately popped to my head in response to this Twitter prompt:

There’s not many things in this world better than a good character intro, as Twitter’s other examples in response show: