While scrolling through his enormous DVD collection, Matthew Kiernan of Headquarters 10 re-watched a film that many of you have probably never heard of. I had never heard of it. What movie? "Heaven" directed by Scott Reynolds.

 

Kiernan wrote:

 

"Scott Reynolds' HEAVEN, a victim of the Miramax dump bin that played one contractually obliging week in L.A. before it was shunted off to video. The film probably would have stayed under my radar if it wasn't for my friend Mitch Davis, programmer for Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival and a longtime supporter of Reynolds' work. Despite the dumping, he was able to schedule the film at the 1999 edition of Fantasia and my friends who attended agreed that it was a film worth seeing. Once I did, later in '99, I found that I couldn't agree more and now, 8 years later, I'm glad to say it holds up very well.

 

"In a sense, I can understand why HEAVEN got the treatment it did, because if you put it in front of a test audience full of normal folk in Clifton, NJ (one of Mirimax's old testing grounds), they're probably not going to take too kind to it. The story is sometimes told out of sequence and the characters are not always likable. There's a certain amount of violence and unpleasantness to the material, and on top of that, it requires the viewer pay attention and take several leaps of faith. To use one of my favorite expressions, this is not a movie for dumb people. But for everyone else, HEAVEN should prove to be an intriguing entertainment and the kind of movie that movie lovers like to love.

 

"To give you a basic rundown (while not giving away too much), it's the story of a nasty divorce between architect/gambling addict Joanna Going, perpetuated by her psychiatrist/lover (Patrick Malahide). Thrown into the mix are a strip club owner (Richard Schiff), a bouncer (Karl Urban) and a transvestite stripper named Heaven (Danny Edwards) with the power of second sight. While it's a small movie, it's a big story and Reynolds deftly juggles a lot of plot lines in the air all at once. Personally speaking, I never once lost track of what's going on, but at the same time when I was conditioning myself to expect the odd jump cuts in the narrative I often found the film surprising me by what was and wasn't going to happen. Actually, HEAVEN is full of surprises, which is what's so good about it."

 

Read his entire celebration of "Heaven" here.