Word: pacino
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...record, Jeremy Irons is the melancholy, homoerotic Antonio, and the American Lynn Collins an efficient Portia, in what we may call the Al Pacino Merchant of Venice. Director Michael Radford, going heavily for brooding atmosphere, has shrouded the canal town in dank mists until the Adriatic could be the river Styx. He has also wrapped the play in historical perspective, noting the sorry plight of Jews in 1596 Venice. This makes Shylock's demand for a pound of Christian flesh his righteous revenge for all the spittle and slander he has absorbed. Pacino emphasizes Shylock's gnomish outsider status...
...show it and cut all that descriptive dialogue and verse. What [director] Michael Radford did with the script was cut about a third without sacrificing the story line. As a result, the story plays much more dramatically. In the film, your character, Antonio, has to spit on Al Pacino's character, Shylock. What was that like? Actually, with the way movies are filmed now, I was spitting on an X-mark in one location and Al was being spit upon by someone else at a different location. The Merchant of Venice is often criticized for its portrayal of Jews...
...marriage. For reasons that are never very clear, Michael tries and fails to assassinate an ambitious Corleone street soldier named Nick Geraci, who then becomes his rival and nemesis. As plots go, it's a little thin, and Winegardner doesn't have much of a feel for Michael. Al Pacino played him as a tragic Mafia genius, a dormant volcano of repressed emotion, but here he's just an icy, hypercompetent sociopath...
...Alamo is instead arriving in theaters with a whiff of stale cheese about it. Doleful stories of the project--directors and writers hired and dropped, the budget cut and restored, the story rearranged during editing--could land the film on the junk heap of historical movies. (Remember Al Pacino in his 1776 saga, Revolution? Neither does anyone else.) But, in fact, The Alamo deserves a fate better than oblivion...
...their honor, demanded star quality in its bad guys. Gotti and Gigante provided it. The suspicion is that both men bought dangerously into the Mafia movie myth. They wanted to be the wiseguys with lethal charm, the types who get immortalized onscreen by the "O Team"--Brando, De Niro, Pacino. And maybe become their own O team: Soprano. The FBI loves this, because a mobster's ego is the most fragile weapon in his arsenal. Set it off in public, and it can explode. Indeed, the mythologizing of the Mob by Hollywood and HBO could almost be a giant sting...