Salon.com > Simon Hattenstone

Pacino’s way

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:11:00 +0000

I have been watching Al Pacino movies for days now. Pacino movie after Pacino movie. I'm getting to a stage where I can't tell one from the other. They all involve good guys turned bad or bad guys turned good, or guys constantly wavering on the moral compass so you just can't tell -- cops who kill, killers with fierce codes of conduct. In five movies on the trot he is shot -- "Dog Day Afternoon," "Scarface," "Serpico," "Carlito's Way," "Insomnia." In two of them, he manages to die at the beginning and end. I wake up in the middle of the night and watch another movie, "Heat." He doesn't get killed, but he sees off Robert De Niro. I wake up early and watch another movie, "The Insider." As in "Heat," he wins, but it's a pyrrhic victory. He's destroyed. The final shot shows him walking away -- walking away from life.

I'm beginning to feel like the cop he plays in "Insomnia" who loses his mind through lack of sleep and too much conscience. My pupils are getting bigger and bigger, and less and less discriminating. All I'm seeing is the guns; all I'm hearing is his screaming. His voice seems to get louder and louder in his later films. As Michael Corleone in "The Godfather Part II," the movie that really made him, you could barely hear his voice. Pacino, so young and grave, did the "Method" -- he didn't act so much as inhabit his characters. He expressed himself in the tiniest gestures. He showed ambiguity with consummate economy, saying one thing with his voice and something completely different with his eyes.

The same old argument

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:13:00 +0000

Desmond Tutu is taking his off-Broadway debut in stride. "I'm just waiting for my Tony nominations now," he says from his New York hotel. Tutu, 72, is relaxing for a few minutes after two well-received performances in "Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." Then he is on his way to Rochester, N.Y., Chicago, Philadelphia and back home.

"Guantánamo," written by Gillian Slovo and former Guardian journalist Victoria Brittain, is a documentary-drama based on the transcripts of interviews with those detained at the American military base in Cuba. Tutu was asked by Slovo if he would perform the role of Lord Justice Steyn, a law lord who delivers a damning judgment on the American abuse of human rights at Guantánamo. So Tutu brought forward his trip to America to accommodate his performances at the Culture Project in Greenwich Village, N.Y.

Tutu serves on the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission, which was set up with the aim of ending all forms of internment without trial. He describes the play as "stark" and "devastating" and says it reminded him of his time heading up South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Spike conspiracy

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 13:54:00 +0000

Never was a man so aptly nicknamed. (Spike Lee was christened Shelton). He's in typically spiky form, licking his lips as he makes each point. "I hope people in the audience connect David Kelly to the film because he was a whistleblower." Typically, Lee customizes the reference for the British. Lee's political education extends way beyond America, and he is something of an Anglophile. He supports Arsenal when he comes to London, and throws the word "bollocks" around with lavish abandon.

"I don't believe he committed suicide," he says. "I don't think he would tell his wife, 'Oh, I'm going for a walk in the park.' I mean if you want to commit suicide, he'd just go in the bathroom and slit his wrists or go in the garage and blow his brains out, you know. Somebody wanted him dead."

Has Lee always been a conspiracy theorist? He looks round the room, with a conspiratorial grin, and starts talking extremely loudly as if to double bluff any potential eavesdroppers. "Well I mean I was talking to friends ... Hahahaha! Just joking. But it's as plain as day he did not commit suicide." Which, of course, takes us on to weapons of mass destruction, and the Tony Blair-George Bush relationship, and another conspiracy. "A lot of people are scratching their heads -- like what does Bush have on Blair and what does Blair have on Bush. Well " Silence.