Word: keitel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ironist. This quality, if nothing else, is a sign of intelligence. Before taking up fire fighting, Nick was a cop falsely tainted by corruption. Now the very people who secretly profited by victimizing him -- the crooked, volcanic mayor (Rod Steiger) and the bland, bureaucratic police commissioner (Harvey Keitel) -- need him to lead the hunt for a maniacal killer...
...Paul Schrader's script, Scorsese has found a story vibrant with melodrama and metaphor. This Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is not God born as man. He is a man who discovers -- or invents -- his own divinity. And he is both tormented and excited by the revelation. This Judas (Harvey Keitel) is a strong, loving activist. He wants to overthrow the Roman occupiers, while Jesus wants freedom for the soul. To fulfill his covenant, Judas must betray not Jesus but his own ideal of revolution. He must hand the man he most loves over to the Romans...
Fundamentalists are upset by scenes in which Christ (Willem Dafoe) is shown as tormented and self-accusatory ("I lied, I am afraid. Lucifer is inside me") and in which he persuades Judas (Harvey Keitel) to betray him because it is God's plan. But what has them fuming is a portion of a final dream sequence -- meant to be Christ's hallucination while on the cross -- in which Jesus is shown briefly engaged in sexual relations with Mary Magdalene, played by Barbara Hershey...
...Mind, the newest, longest (3 hours 45 minutes) and best of his 40-odd plays. Staged off-Broadway by the playwright, Lie superficially resembles yet another Shepardian slice of life among borderline psychotics of the underclass. It opens with the confession of an uncontrollably jealous man (Harvey Keitel) who has beaten his innocent wife (Amanda Plummer) and left her for dead. Before it is over, characters have been shot, pummeled, enslaved and murdered. Yet the play's real action is a coming to terms with the past by the families of both the wife beater and the wife...
...political news in the paper or tries to make sense of the post-Freudian gabble of his friends. Distracted, he abuses emotional ties that are so close at hand he could touch them were he only to reach out. His best friends have simplified these problems: tough Phil (Harvey Keitel) makes most of his conjunctions with his fists; Artie (Jerry Stiller) is hooked into the only thing that matters to him, his career, via his answering machine; Mickey (Christopher Walken) simply accepts the ad hoc life. For him all liaisons are intrinsically temporary, and cynicism, laced with drugs...