Word: vito
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...when the director's only feeling is for carnage (a man's head getting shorn by a girder, or a pimp choking a whore with Draino). And The Seven-Ups' story of mixed roots in Little Italy--strong Buddy grows up to be a cop, while his weak friend Vito turns crook--is naturalism used to lubricate the gore machine. The Laughing Policeman is most barbarous of all: it primes viewers for two hours of pointless mayhem in the very first scene, when a nameless killer mows down eight strangers on a bus. (If the action slows at other points...
...fact remains that the "boss of bosses" Vito Genovese died in prison while serving a sentence for narcotics trafficking. Right now, Carmine Tramunti, the head of one of New York City's crime families, is on trial for his alleged involvement in financing heroin smuggling. Father Gigante has said that both cases are government frame-ups and are examples of persecution of Italian-Americans...
That is the lesson of The Godfather. Brando wanted the coveted role of Don Vito Corleone; he fought for it, he even took a screen test to get it, something to which he had not been subjected for 20 years. When he got it, his presence fused and lifted the whole enterprise (TIME, March 13). His mastery flared anew. The record-breaking box office success of the movie, says Hollywood Producer Ray Stark, "made Marlon fashionable again. People are willing to put money in his pictures once more...
...hard to believe that this is a man who plans to retire, no matter what he may say. It is a performance that displays what Bertolucci calls Brando's capacity to "destroy himself and re-create himself continuously, in a kind of savage dialectic." After his Don Vito in The Godfather, Brando could have continued indefinitely in the security of similar roles. Instead, he has made new departures, taken new risks, and thus answered the imperative of his talent by regenerating it. In his willingness to confront publicly the fearful ambiguities of sex and death, in his ability...
There is something indubitably menacing about the work of people like Vito Acconci, one of whose recent pieces was to build a ramp and crawl around below it, masturbating invisibly; or the young Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who had himself manacled to the floor of an open garage, between live wires and buckets of water, so that (in possibility) anyone who cared to might kick over the pails and electrocute the artist. The sight of such gratuitous risk is a vulgar frisson for the spectators, and unlikely to appeal to those who believe that art and life interact best...