Body Heat- Critque the critic

Though it was hard to find a " bad" review on the movie Body heat. I thought I would find a critic that was different from Roger Ebert to see what they had to say about the film. The critic I chose was Dave Kehr. While looking through rotton tomatoes I knew it would be hard to find a review other than amazing, torrid, wonderful, and brilliant, but I decided to look anyway..and got no luck. What really amazed me and caught my attention was the way Kehr described the director ( Lawrence Kasdan) directing "his images have a dark, overripe poetry that his pastiche dialogue definitely does not". When reading this I never thought that films could be at all related to poetry in any way but now when he talks about it being poetic it kinda starts to make sense. I think that this movie really helped make some things clearer that we were talking about in class. For example the lighting, in the movie the lighting was always dark and really focusing on one object like Matty's ( Kathleen Turners) white dress in the first scene that she is shown in. Also the different camera angles, a lot of steadicam, crane and long takes and shorts. But what really stuck out to me was the lighting, it was very low key lighting to create a stronger contrast and sharper, darker shadows where you see extremely dark and light regions with tehe same frame. An example of this is what I said earlier with Matty's white dress.
In my personal opinion I really didn't like this movie at first. I found it really confusing to understand whats going on because the director gave no backround information about the characters in the begining. The first scene is Ned (William Turner) in a hotel room looking out the window smoking some cigarette with some woman. I had no idea what this movie was about or what was going on. Also you really had to pay attention to all the deatil that was said. For example when we find out that Matty changes her cigarettes to the kid that Ned smokes really doesn't make any sense when it actually happens but later on in the film everything clicks together, so that made it kind of frusterating for me. But after watching the movie and especially the ending I really liked it. I almost wanted to re-watch it so I could pin point everything I missed that all came together at the end. I don't think I would agree with Dave Kehr and Roger Ebert that it is one of the best movies of all time but it was very interesting to wach a movie that was made so long ago and go out of my so called " comfort zone" of watching movies that just come out in theatres.