“Phil Spector”: Is fame a Faustian bargain?

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:00:00 +0000

“Phil Spector,” starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren and directed and written by David Mamet, is a supremely odd film, and not because Pacino dresses up in a wide variety of wigs and rambles sort of in character, like a set of Pacino ticks coming through Quaaludes. The movie, which premieres on HBO on Sunday night, has been disavowed by both Spector’s wife and the survivors of Lana Clarkson, the woman Spector is currently in jail for murdering, and should you watch, you will understand their concerns. “Phil Spector,” reflecting Mamet’s own take on the case, argues, fairly forcefully, that while the one-time wunderkind of ‘60s pop arrangements may have killed Clarkson, there was enough reasonable doubt to have set him free. He was not acquitted, however, because people perceive him as a freak. Spector was too much of an epic weirdo to get a fair trial.

“Glengarry Glen Ross” revival shows us how low we’ve sunk

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Maybe it’s the carpet-bombing cursing or maybe it’s the blunt poetry of the Chicago streets, but David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer winner “Glengarry Glen Ross” is always reliable for striking the doctrinaire dramaturges and other gatekeepers of the Broadway stage as a noble beast of a play for how it swings the double-edged sword between a game of grotesque verbal handball and a finely hewn critique of human greed.

You know the drill: A storefront real-estate office in Chicago gets jacked of it prime leads, setting in motion a buzzard’s den of penny-ante salesmen who argue, whine and eventually knife each other in the back to survive, just like they do in the cubicle farms that grow the worst in human relations.

This harsh allegory of modern-day capitalism is not for the frail. New York Magazine critic John Simon famously freaked out on the play, calling it “reprehensible, immoral” because Mamet “enjoys his characters too much, that he revels in their brazen, agile crookedness.”

Salon.com > Al Pacino

“Phil Spector”: Is fame a Faustian bargain?

“Glengarry Glen Ross” revival shows us how low we’ve sunk