Word: friedkin
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...trundles Serpico-style to Greenwich Village and sets up shop. He spends days with his nextdoor neighbor, Ted (Don Scardino), a gay playwright ("you know, boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets analyst") who is scared to death of cruising, preferring to frequent more traditional gay cafes that Friedkin never shows. Nights, Pacino cruises, donning his leather outfit like a pudgy boy pulling on his first Halloween costume. Later, of course, the leather will no longer be a costume and Pacino will stop fumbling with the cruising paraphernalia. He will fit into the crowd in that hole across...
...Friedkin does not pause to answer his question, driving on through increasingly dramatic sequences, fading out and fading in until he leads us back to the disco on Christopher St. This time, Pacino does not refuse the guy who grabs his hand and pulls him to the dance floor. He moves furtively at first, apprehensive. Male bodies fill the cave, twisting, punching, kissing, biting, stroking, tearing. On the wall, a giant neon American flag blinks omnisciently. A man in an executioner's leather mask watches from the side. Pacino's partner spins and flicks his blond curls. The drum pounds...
...Cruising develops into a leather-coated cat-and-mouse story, Friedkin's strange perceptions of New York cops become clearer. They are crass morons as he presents them, maligning the cruisers and transvestites, raiding apartments at the wrong time, busting the wrong guys, torturing criminals and failing miserably to prevent the killings. Throughout the film, however, Friedkin casts them as good guys. They are the New York cops of 1977, paralyzed and pressured by a maniac who hears voices that tell him to kill...
Like Son of Sam, Friedkin's killer is an impotent homosexual. He's a Columbia student who forays nightly to Christopher St. with the words of his long-dead father ringing in his ears: "You know what you have to do..." So he kills; to please his father, to expiate his self-hatred, his homosexuality, to obey the Catholic commandments he reads religiously, he hunts on Christopher St. for sacrificial victims. After each stabbing he mutters to the ghost of his father, "You made...
...Friedkin's unjustifiable massacre of sensibility reels on Ted, Pacino's neighbor, is murdered and while all clues point to Ted's jealous roommate as the culprit, Friedkin knows better. In an ambiguous series of elliptical shots, the director hints that Pacino has butchered Ted in a bizarre exorcism of his homosexual passion. Like the priests who die to save Regan in Friedkin's last sensationalist film, Ted dies to save Pacino's heterosexual soul...