I sometimes wonder if I'm ever-so-slightly obsessive-compulsive. I have a tendency to get "hooked" on particular things, bands, authors, actors, movie genre etc. where for a brief period I'm only interested in watching, listening or reading stuff that fits in with that particular obsession. Recently it's been films with Al Pacino, starting with when I bought a copy of the DVD box set featuring 3 of his films: Pacino: An Actor's Vision. Which as well as including Looking for Richard, which I always thought was somewhat underated over the UK, also includes 2 other films that Pacino directed or co-directed: Local Stigmatic & Chinese Coffee. Stigmatic is something of a cause celebre to me. When I was a student I read about this semi-mythical film of a play called Local Stigmatic that Pacino had directed a movie of (actually co-directed with David Wheeler) but decided not to release, opting instead to tinker obsessively with the film on and off over the intervening years and occaisionally show the film to friends like Harold Pinter in order to get their feedback. I'm always a sucker for these sort of industry stories, they must appeal in some way to the movie geek in me. Anyway, having read this I set out to try and track down the play itself. I managed it, it took me two years, but I managed it and ended up directing and acting in a production of it in my final year at university. I never ever expected to able to see a copy of Pacino's film of it though, but low and behold - now I have it...I keep putting of watching it though for fear that it won't live up to my expectations...
In the meantime, however, I've been catching up on some of Al's other work, including the restored "Crusing" which looks markedly different from the video copy I had from a few years back, which looked so fuzzy that it must have been created from a second generation master. The dvd, in contrast, as well as looking like it was shot yesterday is actually in its proper aspect ratio. I read a review of the dvd online which stated that there had been some changes to the film for this dvd release. Apart from the omission of the original title card disclaimer, put in place to appease certain elements of the gay community who protested against the film, and the inclusion of a title card with name of the film at the start (the original just faded from the United Artists logo to the first shot) I didn't notice much that had been added. The reviewseemed uphappy about the inclusion fo some optical effects during one scene where Al is dancing; frankly, I thought they were so minor as to be barely noticable.
Something altogether more noticeable was the blatant mutilation of Scarface on German DVD, a copy of which I bought unknowingly the other week. The film's running time has been slashed from around 170mins which is what the English dvd version runs at to around 148 mins. I got as far as "the Chainsaw" scene about 30 mins into the movie, when I realised that not only the whole of that but also Al shooting the outside just afterwards was gone I switched the dvd off in disgust, I just couldn't bring myself to find out what else they'd done to the movie - who knows maybe in this version, seemingly edited so that 12-year olds can enjoy the movie, maybe Tony sees the error of his ways and checks himself into rehab. Whatever, I don't want to know...
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