Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times:
"I thought Francis Ford Coppola was being cranky last fall when he badmouthed Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — the stars of Coppola's immortal Godfather films — for taking parts for the money and losing their passion for doing great work. 'I met both Pacino and De Niro when they were really on the come,' Coppola told GQ magazine. "Now Pacino is very rich, maybe because he never spends any money; he just puts it in his mattress. . . . They all live off the fat of the land."
[Right photo: Blythe Danner, De Niro, Teri Polo, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Ben Stiller in Meet the Fockers]
"Coppola was right on the money. The two icons of '70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves, making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
"Of the dozen or so movies that opened in Los Angeles on Friday, only one had a lead actor Oscar winner in the starring role — and it was the worst in the bunch, which is really saying something, considering the competition included a scarefest called Zombie Strippers (with adult film star Jenna Jameson!) and a gruesome murder-mystery about a gang of psycho medical students called Pathology."
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The Al Pacino vehicle in question is 88 Minutes (top photo), a Jon Avnet-directed thriller about a forensic psychiatrist who is told (by a psycho) that he only has 88 minutes to live.
Pacino and De Niro will be seen together in another Jon Avnet-directed thriller, Righteous Kill, to be released later this year.
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They're old and rich. They can afford to make garbage. Only the poor and the very young can afford to be idealistic.
It should be the other way around, but it usually ain't.
What a waste of talent! Aren't those guys rich enough that they can be a little more picky?
Jack NIcholson isn't much better than Pacino and DeNiro. Most of his movies are godawful. There's nothing that gets even close to Chinatown or Five Easy Pieces or even The Last Detail.