Word: pacino
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movie builds from its bloody beginning, cutting between Pacino's encounters with the S-M crowd, his growing relationship with Ted ("I wish I could do something for you," Al mysteriously tells his cute, freckled neighbor) and his visits to his girlfriend (Karen Allen). The driving disco and violent gyrations of the cruising scene contrast strikingly with Allen's soft-toned flesh and delicate moaning orgasm. When Allen goes down on him, Pacino's passion rises as the throbbing Village theme invades his senses. The sequence arouses, perhaps in a trite or superficial way, a heterosexual's most basic fear...
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...
SUDDENLY, PACINO WHIRLS in a frenzied freak-out, pumping his body and punching his hands into the air, a wild, abandoned look frozen in his tumescent eyes. "I don't think I can handle it," he whines later to Sorvino. "Things happen to me.. I'm not afraid...I can't deal with it." But Sorvino coaxes him back to the job, ironically affectionate to his protege, paternally hugging him and gesturing warmly...
...Pacino and the killer meet inevitably, a showdown in a green Garden of Evil under the bridges and tunnels and viaducts--the labyrin-the--of Morningside Heights, along the glistening, lamplit paths where Pacino cruises for the last time. They stare at each other, Pacino now affecting an effeminate walk. They throw down their burning fags in a mutual invitation to duel. Pacino steps out of his pants, urging on the killer ("get 'em down, I want to see the world") who whips out his blade. Pacino wounds him with his own knife and collapses against a wall, naked...
...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...