Diane Keaton was more than just a great actress, she was a cultural icon and a cinematic legend, an actress who could deeply impact you with her dramatic work, and make you laugh out loud with her comedica performances.
Diane Keaton's acting showed that she could do anything -- and it didn't look like she was acting at all.
Her filmography is oustanding: all three Godfather movies; many Woody Allen classics like Sleeper, Love & Death, Annie Hall (her Oscar), Manhattan; other movies like Looking for Mr Goodbar, Shoot the Moon, Marvin's Room, Father of the Bride, Something's Gotta Give, and, more recently, bizarre and brilliant The Young Pope series.
Keaton was from and mostly lived in California but her 1970s classics -- The Godfather, Annie Hall and Manhattan -- remain something of the greatest movies and New York City movies ever made. One is the most classic NYC crime story ever told and the others are the two most classic NYC romantic comedies ever made. Her leading men were Al Pacino and Woody Allen -- how cool is that?
RIP Diane. We'll never see your like again. La di da.
In 1973 a movie called Serpico starring Al Pacino about the corruption whistler-blower NYPD cop Frank Serpico came out. To this day it remains a classic flick with one of Pacino's best early career performance (it came out between the first two Godfathers).
Then in 1976 a TV series called Serpico starring a guy named David Birney about an NYPD cop named Frank Serpico who busts other corrupt cops came out, ran for 15 episodes, got cancelled, and was promptly forgotten.
This being Mr NYC, I'm naturally interested in little forgotten cultural nuggets like this. And even though it wasn't a great show, it's certainly an interesting late 1970s slice-of-life. The show's pilot aired in April 1976 and then for half-a-season from September 1976 to January 1977.
Interestingly enough (for me) the show aired at the same time the recently deceased Jimmy Carter was elected and when yours truly was born. It also went off the air at the start of one of the most consequential years in NYC history.
If you have any interesting in watching this show, you can actually see the whole series here. And believe it or not, as of this writing, Frank Serpico is still alive at the age of 88!
A few years ago I blogged about the great 1995 movie Heat, a Los Angeles crime epic starring two of the greatest actors NYC ever produced -- Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Although taking place entirely in LA, the New York sensibility of its two stars makes it ever greater.
It's one of my favorite movies, a true classic, about men and their work, men and their loves, about how work and love become one and the same, and overwhelms and subsumes them. I can watch this movie again and again and again and find something new each time to appreciate about it.
The movie was written and directed by Michael Mann (himself a son of Chicago) who has made many excellent films over the last forty years including Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, and Collateral. His movies, and the men and women who lives and work he portrays, are steely, unsentimental, brutal, and totally honest. In each movie he brings his exacting eye, his almost surgical camera-work, his extremely honest storytelling, not so much to tell a story but to reveal one through the motivations and actions of his characters. His movies manage to be both trilling and suspenseful while also soulful and meditative. Mann's movies, as I wrote before, are action movies for smart people.
And now Michael Mann is having a moment in NYC. His movies are enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image in early June and then, on June 17th, the Tribeca Film Festival is honoring Heat with a special screening where Mann, Pacino, and De Niro will be in attendance and speak afterwards.
Read this blog long enough and you'll know that I'm a massive fan of Al Pacino, perhaps America cinema's greatest actor ever. He has given more brilliant performances on stage and screen than anyone can remember. In many ways, all actors live under his shadow, he has defined acting for his and all subsequent generations. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the movie that made Pacino a star, The Godfather, and the great thespian is still working, most recently in House of Gucci.
Godfather is the hallmark of early-era Pacino, Gucci being late-era Pacino. So that's why it's interesting to revisit two NYC-centric movies that Al Pacino made in 1997 -- Donnie Brasco and The Devil's Advocate -- that mark mid-era Pacino.
Both movies are good -- not great -- but both show the huge range of the Bronx born actor.
In Donnie Brasco, Pacino plays Lefty, an aging, low-level NYC mafiso. He is befriended by a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco who, we learn very quickly, is actually an undercover FBI agent named Joe (played by Johnny Depp). Lefty takes Donnie under his wing, teaching him the ways of the mob and giving him lots of advice ("One broad, that's enough"). They try to get a club going in Florida -- yeah, that doesn't work out -- and they become part of a larger power struggle within the mob. These are guys who actually watched The Godfather but it couldn't be farther from their lives. How this ends, you can imagine -- but the bond between Lefty and Donnie is beautiful and tragic to watch.
Unlike many of his performances from this era, Pacino is very understated in this movie. He's mostly quiet except for when he feels offended. Lefty is a sad figure -- after 30 years in the mob, he has little in ways of power or money to show for it. He's scrapping by, still trying to prove himself. What makes Donnie Brasco so unlike most mob movies or TV shows (like Goodfellas, The Sopranos, even The Godfather movies), is that it makes life in the mob seem truly dreary and pressure-filled. Lefty and many of his cohorts aren't rich, they aren't dripping in bling or living in big houses or driving fancy cars, and, as indicated, not a lot of broads. They also spend all their time following orders and doing grunt work. It's a hand-to-mouth existence, and Pacino's deeply sensitive performance makes your heart ache for a man who has wasted his life for nothing -- although, as we realize, he probably didn't have anything else going for him either. This movie, and Pacino's performance, gets under your skin with its sad comment on humanity -- and it's also a master at the top his craft.
Then there's The Devil's Advocate. Long story short, it's a movie about how New York City is Hell and Al Pacino (playing a lawyer) is the Devil. A young hot-shot criminal lawyer from Florida named Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves playing smart for once) is tempted to NYC by Pacino's superlawyer John Milton (Get it? Paradise Lost!) to represent Milton's megafirm clients who get into criminal trouble. Milton assigns Kevin to a murder case involving a billionaire real-estate magnet (there's even a scene that was shot in Donald Trump's apartment before we fully realized that he was actually the Devil), and it sends Kevin down into a personal and moral tailspin that involves his shallow but vulnerable wife (played by a wonderful Charlize Theron in one of her first big movies). It climaxes with fire and brimstone Devil Al Pacino yelling -- A LOT -- especially about why God's prick ("He's a tight ass! ... Worship that? NEVAH'!"), and has a very suprising ending.
No critic will ever call this Pacino's best performance but, along with Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, it's one of his most fun. Pacino is all id, all wildness, all attitude in this movie precisely because his character (El Diablo himself) is nothing but that. Pacino's greatest skill as an actor comes from the great depth of human feeling that he imbues his characters with -- here, because his character is the very anti-thesis of humanity, he make you sympathize, make you like, makes you want to keep hanging with the greatest evil ever. If the Devil existed, and he really was Al Pacino, doubtless we'd all become Satinists.
So I highly recommend these two mid-era Pacinos movie that show the immense range of his talent -- and you'll also be highly entertained.
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the classic movie The Godfather which made its cast (Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and others) into huge stars (and cemented Marlon Brando's cinematic comeback). It also made its director, Francis Ford Coppola, into a household name.
Prior to The Godfather -- which became the highest grossest movie of all time when it was released in 1972 -- Coppola had only directed a few movies (Finian's Rainbow, The Rain People), none of which were successful. But prior to his Mafia classic, Coppola made his first movie in 1966, and it's actually one of his best: You're a Big Boy Now.
Set in NYC during the psychedelic '60s, the movie is about a young man named Bernard (Peter Kastner) who lives under the thumb of his controlling parents (Rip Torn and Geraldine Page) and works at the New York Public Library. Bernard and other library flunkies move around the stacks looking for books and documents on roller skates and daydream about leading more exciting lives. Bernard decides to move out of his parents home on Long Island and into an apartment in Manhattan. Naive, virginal, innocent and sincere, Peter roams around Times Square and the city, finding temptation around every corner. He falls for a go-go dancer and actress named Barbara Darling (Elizabeth Hartman) who teases him constantly, all the while being pursued by a sweet girl named Amy (Karen Black), a former classmate of his. Many hijinks ensue including with a rooster that attacks attractive women (!) and that take young Bernard from the streets of the city into walk-up apartments, off-off-Broadway theaters, Central Park, and adult stores.
But, fear not, true love prevails.
You're a Big Boy Now is what I'd call a "romp": there are many wacky surreal scenes that would be annoying if it wasn't for the fact that we really like Bernard and are rooting for him. The characters are all very unique and well-drawn, and all of the acting is first-rate. Most of all, this is a very stylishly-directed film -- unlike Coppola's later slowing-moving, epic films, You're a Big Boy Now is fast-moving with lots of quick cuts, clearly influenced by the French New Wave and rock'n'roll spirit of the times (music by The Lovin' Spoonful plays throughout the movie).
The movie came out a year before The Graduate and shares, in plot and tone, much in common with You're a Big Boy Now. But whereas the 1967 California-based movie is a very mainstream, straight-forward telling of a young man's coming of age, this 1966 NYC-based flick is an odd, eccentric, art movie about the same subject.
So, to sum up: You're a Big Boy Now is a very good, very 1960's, very NYC movie about moving into adulthood, and, since it's the debut film of one cinema's greatest directors, it's a must-see.
P.S. This was the first movie made under the Mayor's Office of Film and Television. I remember, years ago, seeing an old clip of Mayor John Lindsay giving a press conference, announcing the creation of this office and this movie being shortly going into production. Standing right behind him was a young, fully-bearded Francis Ford Coppola which Lindsay pronounced "Cap-polla."
Yours truly has not yet seen the popular new show Only Murders in the Building that involves Steve Martin and Martin Short solving murders in an Upper West Side building with, of all people, Selena Gomez. But the show is a big hit and it's apparently created some interest in the popular neighborhood not seen since the days of You've Got Mail twenty-odd years ago.
What's happened to the Upper West Sideis indicative of what's happened to NYC in general over the last fifty-something years: from hellscape to playground, from wild to, well, kinda boring.
This years marks the 50th anniversary of Panic in Needle Park, the movie Al Pacino made just before The Godfather. The brutal story about heroin addicts hanging out in Verdi Square on West 72nd street made the Upper West Side look like a village of the damned. This was on the heels of 1968's Rosemary's Baby where the Devil literally took over the body of a young housewife living in the Dakota, just down the block. A few years later came Taxi Driver, with Robert De Niro's crazed Travis Bickle turning into a horrific vigilanty -- and living and hanging out mostly on the Upper West Side. Then, in 1989, Pacino returned to the neighborhood in Sea of Love where he pursued a serial killer, Even the city's "hoity toity" lived in the squalor -- in 1990's Metropolitan the young Tom Townsend lived in the 'hood in genteel poverty -- in great contrast to his Upper East Side debutante friends.
But forget the movies -- reality was just as scary and sexy. John Lennon was killed in front of the Dakota in 1980. The swinger's club Plato's Retreat was going full blast. I grew up in the area and remember the Upper West Side as a decaying but nonetheless fun neighborhood -- and it felt like a neighborhood, a community, a place unto its own.
This article from Town & Country nails the evolution of the Upper West Side, how it's gone from a place of wildness, a sexy and scary place, into a not terribly interesting suburb. Lots of chain stores, lots of high-end boutiques, lots of expensive restaurants, lots of new glass buildings. Now it's safe. It's "family friendy." It's dull. Don't get me wrong -- it's lovely, and a great place to live. But the Upper West Side of yore is, well, yored. All we have are the memories.
On the face of it, the 1970s movies Serpico and The Turning Point couldn't be more different: the former is a real-life story about dirty cops, the latter is a fictional story about ballet.
But watching them makes you realize they share a lot in common: besides both movies being made in the 1970s in NYC, they are gritty, brutal, totally realistic deep-dives into high-pressure, competitive, all-consuming worlds that their denizens both love and revile, that reach into the very cores of their being, enthralling and warping them, and completing devouring their lives.
Back in the 1970s Hollywood used to make movies like these, movies where not everyone and everything was beautiful, where the world was reflected back to us in all of its deformed glory, where we saw and heard people who were in pain, and where things didn't always end happily. These movies were overshadowed by many othe great classics from that time (The French Connection, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, you name 'em), but these two slice-of-life movies of believable realism cut just as deep emotionally as any of those other great '70s flicks.
Serpico stars Al Pacino as real-life cop Frank Serpico who "blew the whistle" on massive, entranched corruption within the NYPD, leading to the Knapp Commission and major reforms. Serpico (who's still alive!) was an odd fit with the NYPD, more of a hippy than a tough guy, someone who didn't believe violence and brute force necessarily meant good policing, and someone who didn't think corruption should ever be "business as usual". He took his life into his hands to expose the corruption and, afterwards, quit the NYPD and left the country. Directed by Sidney Lumet at the height of his career, the movie was made just a year after the main events in the film so it was an almost real-time retelling of how and why Serpico changed the NYPD -- and the whole city -- forever. Pacino was just then becoming a star -- the first Godfather movie had just come out and he was just about to start work on the second one -- but this film showed his incredible range, his ability to transform into complicated people, the depth of a soul that is both revealing and mysterious. The film is also a very realistic look at what NYC was like back in the early 1970s and, watching it now, you see how much the city has changed while also realizing that problems with policing are, well, perennial.
The Turning Point is much different but no less intense: as someone who had experience in the world of professional ballet, I can tell you that it's a tough, insular, and unforgiving world. People in ballet LOVE balletto an irrational level, it completely dominates their minds and bodies, they speak and think and do nothing else. They sacrifice their lives and physical, mental, and emotional well-being in pursuit of career in it. There is no divide between their personal and professional lives. This film asks but doesn't attempt to answer this question: at what price glory? Shirley McClaine stars as DeeDee, a woman who relinquished a ballet career to move with her former dancer husband Wayne (Tom Skerritt) to Oklahoma City and raise a family and live a quiet life. Events ensue bringing DeeDee and her daughter Emilia to NYC where Emilia shines with the company, and where DeeDee enounters her frenemy Emma (the always glorious Anne Bancroft) who started with the company at the same time as DeeDee, stayed, and become a big ballet star. There are affairs, fights, and great performances throughout the film that show, in raw and gorgeous ways, the constant fight between ambition and personal happiness, between career and family, about understanding your real values, and the sacrfifices and sadness that go with both. The film offers no easy answers and does what all great movies do -- it shows and doesn't tell (including showing lots of great ballet dancing). It's a film that moves you and makes you think about own life and values.
So if you want to see two old NYC movies that feel just as relevant today as they were more than 40 years ago, I can't suggest Serpico and The Turning Point enough.
Being a New York City resident, being a denizen of this town, is such an identity unto itself that the debate over what makes someone a "real New Yorker" has and will continue to rage ad infinitum.
For me, however, you never feel more like a New Yorker then when you leave it. And you REALLY don't feel more like a New Yorker until you start living somewhere else.
I lived elsewhere for four years in college and I never identified more as a New Yorker than in those years where I was in exile from the city. And apparently this is a common phenomenon: many born-and-bred citizens of NYC who have moved elsewhere, who are "in exile" for reasons good and bad, have made it clear that they feel the same way.
Some famous exiles are people like Larry David, the brilliant comic-mind and co-creator of Seinfeld. If you watch him on Curb Your Enthusiam, you see the rich Brooklyn-native bumbling his way around Los Angeles, a New Yorker to his core. This reminds me, in a very different way, of what I wrote about the movie Heat, a great crime movie set in LA but starring two great New Yorkers (Pacino & De Niro) -- they never seemed more like New Yorkers to me than watching them in this movie where they are both in exile in a strange wild place, far from home.
It reminds me that no "real New Yorker" ever leaves NYC -- you take the city with you, its ghosts and memories exist within you, its roots to your identity gets stronger, and it makes you New Yorker wherever you go.
The fall of 1989 was an eventful time -- not unlike now. Communism in Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall were collapsing. Apartheid was drawing to a close in South Africa. Here in NYC there was a legendary election raging between three men who had and would be Mayor -- Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani. And our movie theaters saw the debut of two classic NYC crime thrillers: Sea of Love and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Watching them again after 30 years, they more than hold up -- they are examples of great storytelling, brilliant acting, peaks in the arcs of historic careers, and wonderful NYC movies. Despite being thrillers, and being very different movies, they have one big thing in common: they are studies in the trials and tribulations of becoming middle-aged.
Sea of Love: Al Pacino stars as a Manhattan cop named Frank Keller. He's a classic movie detective: getting older, divorced, drinking problem, wondering if he should "put in his papers" to retire at "his 20" (years on the force that is), and generally depressed about his life. Meanwhile he's investigating a series of murders -- men who had answered personal ads turning up dead, shot in the head. The latest victim had a 45 record playing when he was found -- "Sea of Love." Frank and his new partner Sherman (investigating a similar murder in Queens) start an undercover operation where they will place a personal ad in the paper, meet up with women at a restaurant, and then take the glasses from the dates to swab them for prints. They hope that this will link them with the killer. But then Frank meets a woman named Helen on one of these dates -- and they fall for each other, hard. Suddenly Frank finds a new unexpected love, a new joie de vivre, but there continue to be more murders and Helen starts to look more and more guilty -- until he finds out the truth and solves the case. (I remember the tagline for this movie: "He's found somone who's either the love of his life ... or the end of it!").
This movie was a big deal for Al Pacino -- his career had been in decline for most of the 1980s, after his triumphs of the 1970s and early '80s (think The Godfather to Scarface period). Sea of Love was his comeback, a big hit that started the next act of his career. Meanwhile John Goodman was breaking out from Roseanne and his performance as Sherman made him a big movie actor too. Ellen Barkin was a star then too, and few performances are as sexy and frightening as her's in this movie. What's fascinating about this movie is that, while it's certainly a sexy thriller, it's also a working class NYC movie, set largely on a still-then middle-class Upper West Side. It's both extremely familiar and also exotic -- it's about becoming middle age, trying to find a new happiness, figuring out life, working hard for a living while also trying to find excitement and thrills.
Crimes and Misdeameanors: Woody Allen has made nearly 50 movies, many of them great. This may very well be his masterpiece. Woody has directed numerous comedies and a few dramas but this was his first movie to combine both comedy and drama. In fact, the movie contains two stories -- one comic, one tragic -- and the endings of each make them come together in a way you wouldn't expect. The drama centers around a man named Judah (played by Martin Landeau who got an Oscar nomination for it), an extremely successful eye doctor who has recently overseen the opening of a new opthalmology wing at a hospital. But Judah has a dark secret: he has been conducting an affair for a few years with a former airline stewardess (a scary Angelica Huston) who is making increasingly desperate demands that Judah leave his wife or else she'll confront his entire family about his adultery and also reveal his financial chicaneries. Judah calls up his brother Jack -- a dissolute character with underworld connections -- who sets up a hit to kill the mistress. Will Judah get caught and the scheme unravel? You need to see the movie to find out! Meanwhile, the comic story concerns a man named Cliff (played by Woody), a struggling documentary filmmaker who also has a failing marriage (although no mistress) who is making a TV special on his very successful brother-in-law, a pompous Harvey Weinstein-like producer named Lester. One of the producers on the TV special is a woman named Hailey who both Cliff and Lester fall for -- will she choose either man or reject both of them? Again, you need to see the movie to find out! And how do the stories relate, one makes them link-up? Again, only Woody Allen would make the connecting character a rabbi who's going blind ...
Woody Allen is not only one of our greatest directors -- he's also probably the most brilliant screenwriters of all time (he's been nominated for more screenplay Oscars than anyone in history). The Crimes and Misdemeanors script is perfect -- specifically the way that these seemingly unrelated stories are interrcut and made to relate to each other, the tightness and swiftness of the plots, the enormous amount of character development and emotional complexity in a few lines of dialogue, it is simply the best kind of storytelling you can ever encounter. The major overarching theme of this movie is seeing -- looking at what's in front of you and also trying to see something that may or may not be there. This is a movie, in some ways, about people who are looking not only for love but also for mercy and justice and order in the world -- a kind of God -- and not finding it. I remember reading that this is the movie where Woody looked for God and "found Him not there." This movie won't make you find God (in fact, his absence will only be confirmed) but you will certainly see a truly great movie by one of NYC's best filmmakers.
New York City is, fundamentally, a city of workers. We're not the richest and most powerful city in the country because we're a bunch of lazybones. There are numerous socioeconomic classes in NYC but combined they are all part of one big class -- the working class, the hard working class.
If you listen to the media, you'd be forgiven for believing that the "working class" is mostly elsewhere in "middle America" (coal miners in West Virginia that voted for Trump, for example). But the real working class, the biggest and most diverse working class in America, is right here in the buildings and streets of the five boroughs.
In fact, there's been a plethora of movies and TV shows over the decades of working class lives in NYC. Here are some of my favorites that are worth checking out:
The Nanny, the 1990s sitcom about a woman from Flushing who becomes not only the nanny but also the de facto mother for some rich Manhattinites (it stars the amazing Queens-native and current comeback Queen Fran Drescher).
Marty, the big Oscar-winning 1955 movie about a lovelorn butcher from the Bronx, starring Ernest Borgine.
Working Girl, the 1988 classic about a Staten Island secretary who takes on and beats corporate America. Melanie Griffith is amazing as the never-to-be-underestimated Tess!
And, if you want to look at the dark side of the NYC working class, there's no better movie than 1975's Dog Day Afternoon about a 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery gone very wrong. It features probably Al Pacino's best performance and is a look at what happens when working class New Yorkers run out of dreams and hopes.
All great movies and TV shows about hard workers New Yorkers (for better or worse) from all five boroughs!
This Sunday are the 92nd Academy Awards, and amongst the nominees are Bronx-boy Al Pacino for Best Supporting Actor in The Irishman.
I saw The Irishman right after it premiered on Netflix and it reminded me a brilliant quote from Blackadder: "The Teutonic reputation for brutality is well-founded: their operas last three or four days." The Irishman is a longggg movie and, worst of all, it feels like a longggg movie. It's not bad but it's not great -- despite it's director, despite its cast, despite its operatic subject matter. I don't think Al is a favorite to win (looks like Brad Pitt's gonna get it) but Al just might pull it off since it's his first nomination in almost 30 years and a great actor like him needs to have more than only one Oscar.
Of course the big deal about The Irishman is that it pairs Pacino with his fellow NYC acting legend Robert De Niro. Honestly, although they share lots of screen time together, most of their scenes are forgettable -- including the one where they're sitting around in a hotel room in their pajamas (tres bizarre). For my money, less is more, and the absolute best Pacino/De Niro pairing is from 1995's Heat. Although they only have one big scene together -- until the climatic finale --- the tension, the dramatic build, the high stakes, the raw humanity, the brutal honestly that these titanic talents emote in their scene is powerful. In fact, Heat is a better movie than The Irishman -- there, I said it.
Believe it or not, I've written a lot about Al on this blog over the years so, if you want to know Mr NYC's thoughts on all things Al, click here.
You can also ready my admittedly Dershowitz-like argument as to why Heat is a great NYC movie -- despite its most definite Los Angeles setting. Good luck Al! P.S. Here's the best scene, by far, from The Irishman.
Recently I was happy to find that one of my favorite movies from the 1990s, director Michael Mann's great crime epic Heat, was available on Netflix. I hadn't seen it in years but was surprised that it not only holds up but is better than ever. It's easily one of the greatest cops-and-robbers movies ever made.
But the movie is about so much more than the story of master thieves and the police who chase them: it's about relationships -- between men and women, friends and lovers, but, most of all, people who work together.
Heat is ultimately a movie about work -- about how it makes us who we are, about how it changes the course of our lives, about how our work is both our pride and our tragedy. In this case, the work is crime and fighting crime, and how they play off each other and ultimately merge. Heat is really a tale of existential angst in the guise of a crime drama.
If you've never seen Heat -- do it now.
It's nearly three hours long and has a complex plot but you can follow it if you pay attention. It's so visually stunning, so beautiful in its imagery and music, so thrilling with its action sequences (it has arguably the best shoot out ever captured on film), that you become hypnotized. Then, of course, there's the once in a lifetime cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Ted Levine, Natalie Portman, Tim Sizemore, and many more giving haunting, intense performances. Heat is a masterpiece, an action movie for smart people, a totally American movie with a very European feel. It's a miracle that it was ever made and you don't really see movies like it today.
I especially love the beginning, when you see a train pulling into a steamy nighttime station, and De Niro exits, a man on a mission that we don't know about yet. (Everything about it sets the solitary, melancholy tone of this film.) You see him descend from the station and walk into a hospital, you hear the beeping of machines, the clinking of tubes and the rolling of gurneys, voices in the background, and he gets into an ambulance and drives off. He's alone, always alone, and from there the story begins. Throughout the movie there are moments like these where -- between the action, between the confrontations, between the plot -- we get moments of contemplation, moments of being alone with the characters, moments where we get to reflect on the story, the characters, their dilemmas, and our own feelings about them. When so many other movies play down to our intelligence, Heat goes the other way -- it forces us to think, to feel, to ponder, to care. The movie gets under your skin, into your soul, in a way that few ever do.
The backdrop for this movie, for this web of complex personal and working relationships, is Los Angeles. Heat is about a city as much as it's about people -- about how this vast place contains and causes lives and relationships both to thrive and die. It's not enough to say that Los Angeles is a "character" in this film -- Los Angeles is this film. Heat and LA, like their cops the robbers, need each other, meshing into a complex whole.
There have, of course, been countless crime movies made about NYC but never one quite like this.
And yet, in a way, Heat is a New York movie: it's two main stars, De Niro and Pacino, are New Yorkers, and their distinct New York sensibilities, their quick wits, their no-nonsense attitudes, their senses of humor, their toughness, exude throughout the film. The characters they play -- De Niro's thief and Pacino's cop -- are, like the actors themselves, men displaced, men away from home, men searching their ways through a wild, vast, mysterious place. Being a New Yorker isn't just about living in this city -- it's about being an explorer, a person on the move, a person going after something. One of Pacino's lines in the movie is, "All I am is what I'm going after."
What's more New York than that?
When first I saw Heat back in the 1990s, I was away at college, far from NYC. I felt like a man displaced, a stranger in a distant land, finding my way, alone. It felt oddly personal to me. I realized then that you never feel more like a New Yorker than when you're away from it. The city stays inside you wherever you are. And this LA movie, in its various odd ways, feels like another kind of New York story.
NYC and LA have always had a weird symbiosis. They're so different -- and yet so similar.
In Heat, we learn that cops and robbers need and repel each other at the same time, that friends, lovers, and co-workers desire and detest each other at the same time, that the yin and yang of neediness and loneliness, the desire to be together and to run away, is perennial, forever in tension -- just like LA and NYC.
Heat understands the complexity of people and how they relate to each other and their surroundings.
And whether its NYC, LA, or anywhere else, this story of human duality, like the movie itself, will never get old.
Al Pacino is one of the greatest actors in history and still going strong -- he has a new movie where he plays Joe Paterno premiering on HBO in April, and he's making his third movie with Robert De Niro -- also his first with Martin Scorsese -- due out in the next year or so. But he has made so many great movies over the last almost 50 years that the time has come for "retrospectives."
And there's going to be a huge one in NYC starting next week!
If you love movies, love Pacino's acting, then you must go the Quad Cinema from March 14 to 30 where over 30 of his films -- from his 1970s classics to much more recent ones -- will be playing. All the greats, and some of the not so greats, are playing in it, and what's so cool is that Pacino himself was involved in putting this together!
All the movies you love him from are in this: The Godfathers, Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon, and Heat, among many, many others. Even better, a new movie and -- a documentary about the movie -- called Salome and Wilde Salome are premiering on March 30 to conclude this event.
Needless to say, many of Pacino's best movies are set in NYC (again, The Godfathers, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Panic in Needle Park, Sea of Love, The Devil's Advocate, and Carlito's Way). But the Boy from the Bronx also made other cities look cool, bringing his tremendous talent and New York attitude to Los Angeles in Heat, to Baltimore in ... And Justice for All, Miami in Scarface and Any Given Sunday, and Alaska in Insomnia. The man just oozes this city.
No actor I can think of has ever uttered so many memorable lines in film. Among them:
"I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!"
"Attica! Attica! Attica!"
"You're out of order!"
"Say hello to ma' lil' friend!"
"Who-ahhh!" "You want big time? You gonna die big time!"
"'Cause she's got a greeeattttttt ass!"
And many more. Pacino is an interesting cat, always discovering himself in the characters he plays. You gotta read this interview he gave about this retrospective -- he really is Wild Pacino.
In the early 1970s, the NYPD had become a notorious, brazenly corrupt institution that everyone in the city feared.
Politicians, the public, even honest cops themselves, dared not speak truth to power to expose the maggots that was eating away at the world's greatest law enforcement organization.
Until some people did.
You may have heard of Frank Serpico who blew the whistle on police corruption and was rewarded with a great 1973 movie starring Al Pacino called ... Serpico.
But he didn't act alone.
David Durk helped him and together the two braved exposing the corruption that led to the formation of the Knapp Commission. In many ways, he was even more responsible for it than Serpico.
Together, they saved the city.
David Durk died last week and the city should take a moment to remember and everything he did for it.
Can you believe "The Godfather" is forty years old?
Forty years ago this week, this classic movie opened and changed the course of American cinema forever. It became the highest grossing movie in history up to that time, replacing "Gone with the Wind" (which had held the record for 33 years). It remade the career of Marlon Brando, perhaps the greatest actor ever, making this star of the 1950s a big star again in the 1970s. And it made the careers of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, and James Caan (amongst others).
It's also a real New York movie. Yes, it's about the mob and crimes, but it's more than that. It has a grit, a toughness, a sexiness, and an honesty that screams NYC. It takes place on the streets, in the city's underbelly, and the actors sound like they grew up and live here. This movie may have been loved around the country and around the world, but it began here.
It also gave us some classic lines -- "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse"; "Leave the gun, take the cannolis", "Sleeps with the fishes" -- amongst others that are quoted by people (like yours truly) who weren't alive when it was released.
"The Godfathers" legacy is alive and well today. It sure doesn't sleep with the fishes (sorry, couldn't help it).
During my hiatus, the great movie director Sidney Lumet died at the age of 86. His career spanned decades and decades, and he made many classic movies, several set in NYC: 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince of the City, The Verdict (and many many more). A number of the actors and actresses in his movies were nominated for and won Oscars and actors like Henry Fonda, Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and Paul Newman gave some of their greatest performances in his films. He was a real New York great, a legend, and he made the cultural tapestry of this city all the richer.
And that's one of the great things about NYC: not only do we have amazing buildings and institutions in this town, we also have amazing people -- characters -- who go on to become what you might call "the greats." Boss Tweed, Fiorello LaGuardia, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, heck even that nutjob Donald Trump -- people whose personalities and work give this city its edge. The id and ego of this town.
The New York Press this week has two articles about two New York greats that you might not know much about but they definitely rank as greats.
One was George "Ginky" SanSouci who died last month and who many revere as one of the best pool players this city has ever had. I don't know much about the game of pool but apparently he was a dynamo -- think Tom Cruise in The Color of Money only real.
Another is Candy Darling, one of the first transgendered New York personalities whose was a part of Andy Warhol's Factory back in the 1960s. Candy was a flamboyant, outrageous figure in the downtown art scene -- the kind of person who knew everybody, went everywhere, did everything (and everyone) and did a whole lot of living in her short life. Candy is the subject of a new documentary and she has become a gay icon over the last several decades. Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground dedicated a song to her called "Candy Says" and she's an important character in the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. Candy was a real New York great whose spirit still lives on and forms our city today.
In this multi-media era, there's nothing more old school as theater. These days, when it comes to entertainment, if you can't throw it up on YouTube or watch/listen to it on an IPod, it seems like no one cares. The idea of actually going to a theater and watching real live people performingon a stageseems almost ... quaint.
And yet, here in NYC in the second decades of the 21st century, theater is booming.
Theater in NYC has always been a big industry. After all, this is the town that invented the theatrical brands of "Broadway" and "Off Broadway" and "Off Off Broadway" shows. But right now this seems to be a particularly exciting time -- perhaps historic -- in the annals of NYC theater.
Where else but in NYC can you see not one but two Oscar winning actors play Shylock in The Merchant of Venice? Just as Al Pacino is finishing up his Broadway run in the iconic role, another version starring F. Murray Abraham. Amazing. And, in fact, if you like Shakespeare, there's going to be a play by The Bard on stage somewhere in NYC for the next several months. Even more amazing. Call this Shakespeare NYC.
And over in Brooklyn, at BAM, Geoffrey Rush just debuted in Diary of a Madman. And very shortly Derek Jacobi will be coming into town with King Lear.
And right now there's a very little seen Tennessee Williams play being staged, a Redgrave is on Broadway, the always brilliant Mandy Patinkin is back, and the amount of off Broadway and alternative theater is absolutely booming.
Plus a revival of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is headed to town -- and Mr NYC already has tickets!
And yes, the saga of Spider Man: Turn off the Dark rolls on. Now the geniuses behind this show are calling in someone to re-write the show completely. I hope this show stays open if only because it's such a welcome distraction from the real problems of the world.
Seriously, you should read the Theater section of the Times -- it's a show unto itself.
For those of you looking for good deals on tickets to this extravaganza of old media, you should go on TheaterMania to find deals. This a wonderful time in NYC theater and everyone should want to be a part of it.
I almost called this post The Face of NYC, but I think Extreme Makeover NYC gets more to the point (besides shamelessly riffing off the popular reality show).
As many of you know, plastic surgery has skyrocketed in popularity over the last couple of decades. People now shell out large chunks of their life savings in order to change their appearances and make themselves look younger. Wrinkles, moles, blemishes, bumps and odds and ends can be vanquished by the surgeons scalpel. Indeed, entire decades can be removed from the visages of those willing enough to pay the price and risk the consequences.
Here in NYC, however, it's not that simple. Plastic surgery is an industry but, like so many things these days, it's a niche one. Standards of beauty differ from culture to culture, and people from different cultural backgrounds who want plastic surgery want different kinds of operations. Asians, Russians, Latinos, in particular, have become big customers of plastic surgery but want very different kinds of augmentations. This fascinating article gives you an insight about the plastic surgery business in NYC and how, in order to survive in this competitive market in this competitive town, plastic surgeons better understand what kinds of enhancements their customers are going to want based on their ethnic backgrounds.
But it's not just the literal face of our citizens that are undergoing big changes. The face of this city has changed dramatically in the last forty years. Currently at Film Forum there is a retrospective of Al Pacino movies from the 1970s. Obviously The Godfather movies are his most famous but he made some other classics like The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Serpico (1973) and Dog DayAfternoon (1975) all set in NYC. As this article points out, the city we see in these movies is a very different place than it is today. The face of NYC from the early 1970s to the early 2010s has changed dramatically. Instead of trash and junkies, we have bike lanes and yuppies. Instead of run down rent-controlled buildings, we have glass condos. Watching any movies set in NYC in the 1970s is like peering through the looking glass, seeing a place that is at once totally familiar but also completely alien.
By the way, not all movies set in NYC in the 1970s were scary ones. 2011 marks the fortieth year since Woody Allen released his second movie, and his first real big hit, Bananas. Watching this very funny trailer below from 1971, you see that they don't make movies -- or trailers -- like this anymore.
I'm a blogger, not a journalist, but this past week I decided to do a little shoe-leather reporting to see if I, a regular working stiff, could get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. And the results were disheartening. Consider this the first Mr NYC Investigative Report.
First, some background.
Shakespeare in the Park was the brainchild of Joseph Papp, the legendary founder of the Public Theater here in NYC. The child of immigrants, Papp grew up in dire poverty in Brooklyn and always believed that theater in general, and Shakespeare in particular, could enrich and change the lives of anyone exposed to it. He wanted to democratize theater, bring it the masses, bring it to people who couldn't otherwise afford to go. His vision for the Public Theater was of a place that would discover new playwrights and dramatic voices -- and also be affordable for average people.
In 1957, he started the Shakespeare in the Park festival where the best actors in the world would perform the Bard's plays in the open air at the Delecorte Theater -- and it would be totally free. This meant a welder from Brooklyn, a cab driver from Queens, a garbage collector from Staten Island, a store owner from Manhattan, or a housewife from the Bronx could take their kids to see a Shakespearean play and give them a cultural experience their economic circumstances would otherwise deny them. This was the heart of Papp's vision for Shakespeare in the Park, his driving dream.
Sadly, Papp's vision has fallen into complete disarray. Today, Shakespeare in the Park has become the exact opposite of what he intended -- an elitist, snobby, and expensive experience. It needs to change.
Last year it was announced that Al Pacino would appear in "The Merchant of Venice" at Shakespeare in the Park. I excitedly blogged about going to see it. I had tried and failed the year before to see "Twelfth Night" with Anne Hathaway so I was determined to see this production this year. But first I had to get tickets.
Now there are a few ways to get them: 1) get free tickets at the Delacorte the day of the show; 2) enter an online lottery at midnight on the day of the show; 3) make a $350 donation to the Public Theater.
Option 2 is obviously the least time-consuming, most cost-effective way to get tickets but you're more likely to get into Harvard Medical School with a full scholarship than actually win it. Option 3 is the most direct way but only rich people can afford $350 on theater tickets.
Too whit: I was recently listening to Howard Stern who said on air that some entertainment hot shot he knew in LA was flying in to see the show and had invited Howard to go with him. The fact that some out-of-town hotshot can "donate" $350 for tickets and take fellow hot shots with them is not, I think, what Papp envisioned for Shakespeare in the Park. And every ticket purchased through these "donations" is one less free ticket available to the public.
So, you might say, why not just go to the Delacorte and get the free tickets that are available? Aye, there's the rub.
See, only about half of the tickets for any given show are available at the Delacorte theater. The free tickets that are available are distributed at 1 PM the day of the show (the performance is at 8 PM). And this is where it gets crazy. People literally begin to line up an entire day in advance! The entrance to the Delacorte is at 81st street and Central Park West. Central Park doesn't open until 6 AM. So people literally sleep overnight outside the park. And the line starting at 81st street goes on ... and on ... and on ... and on ... and on ... and on ... and on ... and on ... you get the idea.
This past week I showed up at Central Park West and 81st street around 5 AM. I had gotten up at 3:30 AM and shlepted all the way from Queens to get there at that time. (I would have gotten there earlier but the trains and public transportation run slowly in the middle of the night.) I showed up and had to walk to 89th street to get to the end of the line. As I walked down the line I noticed that most of the people camped out were young and white, looking mostly like students, tourists, or the unemployed. Some of the people were clearly homeless but most of them were the aforementioned. (Just so you know I wasn't wrong about my observations: the people right ahead of me in the line were tourists from North Carolina. The people right behind me were unemployed educators. So there.) At 6 AM the park gates opened and the line was herded into the park. Under the supervision of the line enforcers, we all walked down a path where the line stretched back ... and back ... and back ... and back ... Many of the people behind me (and there were lots who arrived after me) were told they had no shot at getting seats and were told to leave. People in my part of the line were told we had a 50/50 chance of getting tickets. We waited ... and waited ... and waited ... for hour after hour.
Finally, at 12:45 PM, we were told to stand up and get ready for the distribution. The line inched forward slowly. Then, at about 1:20, people in my part of the line were told that no more tickets were available (each person can get two free tickets, hence it's a crap shoot). Needless to say, I was pissed.
And that's when I had the revelation: if you are a regular New Yorker then you are basically denied the chance of seeing the very theater that was created just for you. Now don't get me wrong: I'm all for the homeless, students, tourists, and the unemployed getting to see Shakespeare in the Park. But it is impossible for ordinary, working New Yorkers, people with families and responsibilities, people who don't have the time or the freedom to camp out overnight, to get tickets and see the plays. Also, people from the outer boroughs like yours truly have a tough time getting into Manhattan at that hour to line up. And I think it's really sleazy that you can actually pay for tickets but that the price is so high that middle class and poor folks -- the very people Joseph Papp wanted to see these shows in the first place -- can't afford them. And why are rich people from out of town able to get tickets at all?
This ticket-distribution system is totally out-of-whack. Joseph Papp's vision is being discarded and the people he envisioned Shakespeare in the Park for are being shafted. Yes, I recognize that students and the homeless and unemployed aren't exactly elitist money grubbers but I hope you get my point: you shouldn't have to be either really rich, really young, or utterly destitute to see the plays.
And the thing that also galls me, and that's as big a part of the problem as anything, is that Shakespeare in the Park has become like a nightclub: just getting in and gawking at famous people is all it seems to be about now. Al Pacino! Anne Hathaway! That guy from Law and Order! That guy from Modern Family! Shakespeare in the Park is no longer about Shakespeare or good drama or the unique experience of watching it in the beauty of Central Park. Instead, it's become an elitist experience, it's become about celebrity and exclusivity -- not theater that can transform lives.
Joseph Papp would be rolling in his grave if he saw what his great creation has become.
If Shakespeare in the Park is really about bringing theater to the masses, then it would stop performing exclusively at the Delecorte and instead present the free plays all over the city -- Prospect Park, Flushing Meadows, Van Cortland Park, etc. -- in barebones productions with real theater actors and not vacationing movie and TV stars. This would be truly be theater for the people, the kind of people that Joseph Papp came from.
How many people would actully show up to see these less glamorous producitons? I don't know. It might expose the fact that maybe people aren't quite as interested in actually seeing Shakespeare as they are in celebrities. But at least it would return Shakespeare in the Park to its original vision and would be appreciated by the people more interested in seeing Shakespeare and good drama than famous people.
So for now I'm boycotting Shakespeare in the Park until the Public Theater changes the ticket distribution system, makes it more sane, and ends these phony "donations". I urge all Mr NYC readers to do the same. Tell your friends! Perhaps we can start a movement to return Shakespeare in the Park to the vision and spirit that Joseph Papp had for it more than half a century ago. We shall see.
While gritty old NYC certainly has its charms, it also many downsides -- like massive police corruption. In the early 1970s, honest cop Frank Serpico became world famous for blowing the whistle and exposing the NYPD as basically being a criminal enterprise. His story and what he did became justly famous, leading to the Knapp Commission and reforming the city's police department. It also lead to the great 1973 movie Serpico starring Al Pacino, hot off The Godfather, in one of his greatest roles. The New York Times has a wonderful article about him today. Serpico is still alive, living in the woods upstate. Our city was lucky to have him and owes him an eternal debt.
