‘It would be trite to say that they were the flip side of the same coin. McCauley and Hannah share a singularity of intelligence and drive but everything else about their lives is different.' Like Pacino and De Niro. They also are not the flip side of each other. Pacino is 56 and De Niro four years younger. Next month there is another helping of the man who won his Best Actor Oscar for ‘Raging Bull' in 1980 when he reunites again with Martin Scorsese for another insightful look at the Mob. With ‘Casino' we are in Las Vegas where De Niro's Ace Ronstein is a casino runner, Sharon Stone is his falling-apart wife (drink, druks and Joe Pesci doing his perfect psycho turn) and life, you so terribly know, is going to go so dreadfully wrong with the bad guys watching the bad guys checking on the bad guys. De Niro, busier than ever, also has the title role of ‘The Fan' in which he becomes obsessed with Wesley Snipes playing a baseball star. With age he seems to want to do more. He's turning on the heat. As is Pacino who once waited several years between movies. He has two films -- ‘Two Bits' and ‘City Hall' -- planned for later this year and is at present in post-production on ‘Looking for Richard.' It is a focus on Shakespeare's ‘Richard 111' which Pacino directs and stars in. *another version Al Pacino's was considering the question which sometimes take longer than his movies but then he thought of one of his own:' Do you mind if a smoke this?It is a health cigarette.There's no nicotine in them. It smells like grass, but it's really good. When you're working on movies where you have to smoke a lot, I recommend them.' Holding his pack of Honey Rose herbal cigarettes( ‘I' ve given up,giving up properly') the superstar also known as Al Cappuccino because of his coffee habit explains:' I need them when I get nervous.' Al Pacino nervous? Pacino has played many characters who operate through a haze of smoke and vice and is responsible for one of the cinema's most chilling moments: at the conclusion of ‘Godfather 2' we saw him sitting alone in his Family compound having had his brother and his enemies executed and dismissed his wife from his life. It was dark and eerie. This was a man who peed iced water. In ‘Godfather 3' he took on a world of rival bad guys including those cloaked in the purple of the Vatican . It was operatic tragedy but with plans for ‘Godfather 4' there is always the power of the Hollywood resurrection -- or the flashback. Pacino, nerves or not, may return as Michael Corleone. Since his debut in the 1969's ‘Me, Natalie.' ("All I remember about that film is that Patty Duke was very nice to me') he's made twenty six films, had eight Oscar nominations and one win (1993's ‘Scent of a Woman') but will be forever linked to the Corleone Family.
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