HELLO I AM AN AL PACINO POLL

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

I didn't know he roomed with Martin Sheen!

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.

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/

*You know, I was conflating two different JC productions -- Edward Herrmann played Cassius at the Public Theatre in '88.

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.

...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).

I’m puzzled at how this new Paterno thing was greenlit. Who’s looking for this

Important Issues always get the treatment, especially if they have a Tragic [sic] Hero

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.

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.

80 today! Have a sundae, Al.

read this as HELLO I AM ANAL PACINO POLL

if his name were dunk, wouldn't he be dunkpacino, not dunkacino?

ok wtf is dunkaccino

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeLuQQH1OHA

one of robert smigel's best

PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK is a good film and as clemenza says, intriguingly outside pacino’s usual MO

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.

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.

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").

83 years old today

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.

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...

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.

(The title is not Levinson's--Philip Roth! I have just personally been subjected to the humbling.)