― gershy, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:52 (seventeen years ago) link
― Laurel, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:52 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:52 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:52 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:53 (seventeen years ago) link
― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Friday, 6 April 2007 18:54 (seventeen years ago) link
― gershy, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:56 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:57 (seventeen years ago) link
― gershy, Friday, 6 April 2007 18:59 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:01 (seventeen years ago) link
― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Friday, 6 April 2007 19:02 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:02 (seventeen years ago) link
― Oilyrags, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:06 (seventeen years ago) link
― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Friday, 6 April 2007 19:10 (seventeen years ago) link
― milo z, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:12 (seventeen years ago) link
― milo z, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:13 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:14 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:17 (seventeen years ago) link
― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Friday, 6 April 2007 19:18 (seventeen years ago) link
― milo z, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:19 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:19 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:21 (seventeen years ago) link
― ghost rider, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:21 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:22 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alex in Baltimore, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:25 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:27 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alex in Baltimore, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:29 (seventeen years ago) link
― brownie, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:33 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:34 (seventeen years ago) link
― horseshoe, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:34 (seventeen years ago) link
― rps, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:35 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:39 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:42 (seventeen years ago) link
― elmo argonaut, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:44 (seventeen years ago) link
― and what, Friday, 6 April 2007 19:44 (seventeen years ago) link
― Shakey Mo Collier, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:07 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alex in Baltimore, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:11 (seventeen years ago) link
― A B C, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:43 (seventeen years ago) link
― deeznuts, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:49 (seventeen years ago) link
― Eisbaer, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:49 (seventeen years ago) link
― deeznuts, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:55 (seventeen years ago) link
― deeznuts, Friday, 6 April 2007 20:56 (seventeen years ago) link
― Pleasant Plains, Friday, 6 April 2007 21:00 (seventeen years ago) link
― gabbneb, Friday, 6 April 2007 21:02 (seventeen years ago) link
― gabbneb, Friday, 6 April 2007 21:59 (seventeen years ago) link
Problems with the mostly-monologue two-character Mamet play China Doll in previews on Broadway:
http://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1087651&page=7
http://nypost.com/2015/10/29/al-pacino-totally-lost-over-his-terrible-new-broadway-play/
― I know some Civil War re-enactors you might want to talk to (Eazy), Monday, 2 November 2015 05:43 (eight years ago) link
He would take long walks (he could do that then) through Manhattan plotting out Michael’s transformation from an open-faced war hero to someone darker, more inward, more intense. “I remember not being able to articulate [that arc], even to Francis,” he says. “For the first couple weeks of filming, they were going to let me go.” Coppola saved him, Pacino insists, by moving up the shooting of a key scene — Michael’s killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey at an Italian restaurant: “When they saw that scene, they kept me.”
The weird thing is that the inward Michael Corleone — the role that turned Pacino into a star in one of the greatest films ever made — is the one that’s least emblematic of his work. It’s not how he ever was again! He says it gives him pleasure when I say that, though it touches on the charge that he has often strayed into ham territory, distending and syncopating syllables like a demented bebop artist. Michael consumed him, put him in a kind of straitjacket, forced him to take some of the music out of his voice. And he thinks of his acting as musical. “I’m a tenor,” he says, “and tenors sometimes like to hit the high note.”
He was happy, he says, to make the leaps to Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon: “I didn’t have to see Michael Corleone. I was flying.”
...Here’s what Pacino wants you to take away from the retrospective, especially if you think he’s often the same in every role onscreen — if you always say, “Oh, that’s Al”: “It’s an overview of an acting artist from the Village, really,” he says, and suggests looking at his four gangsters, Michael Corleone, Tony Montana in Scarface, Carlito from Carlito’s Way, and Lefty Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco. They couldn’t be more different. Pacino’s Montana is huge and burns like a filament, a purposely two-dimensional character in a film that the director, Brian De Palma, called a “Brechtian opera” — and Pacino loves how Tony became a cultural icon, however cataclysmic the trajectory. Carlito, on the other hand, is a man who gets out of prison and wants to put his life in order — the opposite of Montana, who manufactures chaos. Lefty is a Mafia middleman, a second-rater striving to rise in the ranks but brought down by a surrogate son who turns out to be an undercover FBI agent.
Sometimes, Pacino says, he goes overboard, sometimes underboard.
“But as Lee Strasberg used to say, ‘Don’t do what you can do. Do what you can’t do. That’s how you learn.’ ”
http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/al-pacino-pacinos-way-retrospective.html
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 7 March 2018 18:45 (six years ago) link
I didn't know he roomed with Martin Sheen!
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 8 March 2018 01:10 (six years ago) link
what a great piece. I love that eternal student quality he has, at least when he talks about acting, the 'I don't know anything about acting' heart of Pacino is what really appeals to me.
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 8 March 2018 01:19 (six years ago) link
I saw Pacino play Marc Antony to Sheen's Brutus in Julius Caesar at the Public Theatre, 1988. It was... not a great production. (Richard Dreyfuss played Cassius.) I did see Pacino in two different stagings of Mamet's American Buffalo, '81 and '83 I think.
He'll be doing a few appearances at the NYC retro, which is unprecedented I think.
https://quadcinema.com/program/pacinos-way/
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 8 March 2018 17:53 (six years ago) link
*You know, I was conflating two different JC productions -- Edward Herrmann played Cassius at the Public Theatre in '88.
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 8 March 2018 17:56 (six years ago) link
For a while, he worked as a messenger at Commentary magazine for the likes of Norman Podhoretz and Susan Sontag. “They just thought I was an energetic, crazy kid, which was great.” he says. “I loved being there, I must say. One of the few places I wasn’t fired from.”
listen, he survived contact with these two – he's a legend.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 8 March 2018 17:59 (six years ago) link
...And Justice for All is quite entertaining for a film that doesn't work at all, and has several flat-out bad sequences. Jeffrey Tambor with hair! Christine Lahti's film debut (she has no chemistry with Al).
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 21 March 2018 14:47 (six years ago) link
I’m puzzled at how this new Paterno thing was greenlit. Who’s looking for this
― big C (calstars), Wednesday, 21 March 2018 14:48 (six years ago) link
Important Issues always get the treatment, especially if they have a Tragic [sic] Hero
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 21 March 2018 14:59 (six years ago) link
Took me a couple of nights to get through Paterno one-and-a-half times, and I still probably drifted through a couple of parts twice. Pacino gives one of his better performances of the past decade-plus. He basically plays Paterno as being in a fog the whole time, mumbling about staying focused on Nebraska next week, and only gradually realizing his complicity in what everyone's trying to get him to pay attention to. Or not--he may realize it from the start, and the fog is just a convenient way to mask that, from others and from himself. Elvis's granddaughter from American Honey is very good too.
― clemenza, Wednesday, 2 May 2018 01:11 (six years ago) link
Watching Dick Tracy for the first time since the 90s.
Kinda fun but it should have been called Prosthesis: The Movie.
Pacino puts in an inspired performance as The Elephant Man.
― When I am afraid, I put my toast in you (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 29 October 2019 05:36 (four years ago) link
80 today! Have a sundae, Al.
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 25 April 2020 15:05 (four years ago) link
read this as HELLO I AM ANAL PACINO POLL
― genital giant (Neanderthal), Saturday, 25 April 2020 15:09 (four years ago) link
if his name were dunk, wouldn't he be dunkpacino, not dunkacino?
― wasdnous (abanana), Saturday, 25 April 2020 15:18 (four years ago) link
ok wtf is dunkaccino
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 25 April 2020 21:38 (four years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeLuQQH1OHA
― He is married to Brogmus, Linda. (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, 25 April 2020 22:00 (four years ago) link
one of robert smigel's best
― wasdnous (abanana), Sunday, 26 April 2020 00:24 (four years ago) link
PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK is a good film and as clemenza says, intriguingly outside pacino’s usual MO
― mens rea activist (k3vin k.), Sunday, 17 October 2021 22:42 (two years ago) link
Yes, it's an interesting low-key performance; I don't remember anything else about the film except that a dog comes to a bad fate on a ferry.Last night I made a comment on the William Friedkin thread about another Pacino film omitted from this list, Cruising, quoting a review in a book called Movies on TV from 1981:
The basic narrative idea is that our growing discomfort with Pacino's convincing integration into his new environment and our growing fear that he may be developing some homicidal impulses of his own -- both are inextricably linked to our growing exhilaration of our release from fear as Pacino's savvy and power increase. Lurid, brutal, dehumanizing, but it does succeed in searing the audience.
I found Pacino a complete alien presence through the whole film, I certainly wasn't exhilarated at any point (and I don't really think he became savvy at any point either - desensitized, perhaps.
― Halfway there but for you, Sunday, 17 October 2021 22:53 (two years ago) link
Looking at my Gucci, it's about that time: off to see whether Lady Gaga can chew scenery as voraciously as the master this afternoon.
― clemenza, Saturday, 27 November 2021 15:43 (two years ago) link
Not nearly as campy as I was hoping: Jared Leto's performance (felt like I was watching Jeffrey Tambor the whole time) and Gaga/Driver's first sex scene are about it. Just very long and not all that interesting. Pacino's actually pretty good. Except for a vintage Italian cover of "I'm a Believer" by Caterina Caselli, the soundtrack is thoroughly unimaginative (and, when Driver and Gaga get married in 1972, laughingly arbitrary as to placement: "Faith").
― clemenza, Saturday, 27 November 2021 21:59 (two years ago) link
83 years old today
― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.), Tuesday, 25 April 2023 12:58 (one year ago) link
LOL at this thread for including S1m0ne and Insomnia but not Cruising, Panic in Needle Park, and Looking for Richard.
Carlito's Way obv should've won.
― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.), Tuesday, 25 April 2023 13:03 (one year ago) link
Getting the shakes now, last call for drinks, bars closing down... Sun's out, where are we going for breakfast? Don't wanna go far. Rough night, tired baby... Tired...
― Cthulhu Diamond Phillips (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 25 April 2023 13:31 (one year ago) link
I was flipping through a sale rack of DVDs and came across this from 2014:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568343/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_14_act
Never heard of it. Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Barry Levinson, Buck Henry...no doubt terrible. It was $5, and I did consider buying it for the sheer weirdness of its existence (and for the brilliantly awkward title, too); didn't, then had second thoughts, then spent the next five minutes trying to find it again and couldn't. Which was pretty weird in itself--there were only about 100 DVDs on the rack.
― clemenza, Friday, 3 May 2024 21:47 (four months ago) link
(The title is not Levinson's--Philip Roth! I have just personally been subjected to the humbling.)
― clemenza, Friday, 3 May 2024 21:58 (four months ago) link