Download ##BEST## Revolution Al Pacino
Shawnda Mangicavallo
Pacino plays Tom Dobb, a monosyllabic fur trapper traversing the waterways of upstate New York with son Ned (future EastEnders star Sid Owen). On a trip to New York, the boy is press-ganged into the revolutionary army to fight the British. Rather than let his son march to certain death, Tom signs up to protect him.
Ned is captured by the British, conscripted as a Redcoat drummer boy, and beaten when he refuses to go to an officer's tent. Tom risks his life to sneak into the enemy camp to free him. Both are saved by Indians sympathetic to the colonials. Soon Tom, Ned and his Indian friends are scouting for George Washington. Ned no longer believes that his father is a coward, and they become committed fighters in the revolution.
Revolution jumps about in time in a way that makes the characters' story sort of an ongoing sidebar to the momentum of the revolution. This historical attitude frustrated and bored audiences expecting Tom Dobb and Daisy McConnahay's story to turn into a romantic adventure, sort of a semi-urban Last of the Mohicans. Actually, the way the love story is curtailed is almost guaranteed to disappoint romance fans. The film is really the story of father and son, and as such compares interestingly with Robert Mitchum in River of No Return or Burt Lancaster in The Kentuckian. Al Pacino isn't exactly Mr. Action Man; he's no replacement for either of those outdoorsy male stars.
al pacino keeps trying to convince us that this movie is good. all i got to say to that is: al, baby, i love you with all my heart, i've seen all your movies, i own like 30 of them, i got two posters of you in my room, but this movie is bad.
genuinely one of the worst films i've ever seen . it was barely a film it was so incoherent . pacino at least was sick w/ pneumonia for two months of it . i so wish i could say the same for everyone else........
LOS ANGELES (AP) - "Going muzzle to muzzle with the redcoats in an open field. It's madness," groans Mel Gibson's character in "The Patriot."
Maybe that explains why Hollywood has been gun-shy about the American Revolution, depicted in only a handful of films before "The Patriot," which opens Wednesday.
It's madness, perhaps, to expect movie audiences reared on action to turn out for the archaic, bizarrely passive spectacle of 18th century "gentlemanly warfare": opposing forces marching together in slow columns, then plugging one another like tin ducks in a shooting gallery.
And for Hollywood, there is the memory of Al Pacino's "Revolution," a huge critical and commercial flop in 1985.
"I hadn't recalled seeing a Revolutionary War film that worked," Gibson said in an interview. "I wasn't aware that there was some kind of curse about it until (producer) Dean Devlin informed me about it, after I had signed on."
Twentieth-century wars, particularly World War II and Vietnam, have dominated Hollywood's battlefield sorties, from "Sands of Iwo Jima" and "The Deer Hunter" to "Platoon" and "Saving Private Ryan." Those modern wars are closer to moviegoers' hearts, and provided the sort of dramatic action - whether on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Southeast Asia - that today's audiences can relate to.
The Civil War also has been popular with Hollywood since the earliest days of film, which saw D.W. Griffith's silent epic "The Birth of a Nation." Buster Keaton set his comedy classic "The General" in the Civil War, and dozens of films followed, from "Gone With the Wind" and "Shenandoah" to "Glory" and "Gettysburg."
But the American Revolution? Nick Nolte starred in the 1995 "Jefferson in Paris," though it focused on Thomas Jefferson's time as ambassador to France, after the war. (And bombed at the box office anyhow.)
There were a few silent films based on such figures as George Washington, Betsy Ross and Paul Revere, and Griffith worked his way back from the Civil War to the Revolution with "America" in 1924.
Aside from Disney's "Johnny Tremain," a family flick in the 1950s, and the musical "1776," there's not much else. Pacino's "Revolution" was such a bomb that critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his Movie and Video Guide that "it'll be 2776 before we get another" Revolutionary War film.
But it took only 15 years for Hollywood to go once more unto the breach.
"The Patriot" stars Gibson as Benjamin Martin, a widower and hero of the French and Indian War who resists the call to arms in the Revolution until the British inflame his lethal-weapon instincts.
It may be that Hollywood has shied away from the Revolutionary War out of fear that audiences would view it as a history lesson, said Mark Gordon, one of "The Patriot's" producers.
"The American Revolution hasn't been a sexy arena to tell a story in," Gordon said. "For people now, it seems a less emotional conflict than the Civil War, which was very clear, North and South, slavery vs. anti-slavery, brother against brother. And the Second World War, you had the most fabulous antagonists in history, Adolf Hitler and the Germans."
The Revolution simply feels remote - a war fought by a still-unformed nation, in a time before photography.
"We've been very successful in our country in humanizing other wars," said Caroline Keinath, deputy superintendent of Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Mass., which is dedicated to the legacy of the John Adams family and the Revolutionary War.
"People who visit Manassas or other Civil War battlefields ache with pain at recreations of those battles. They haven't really done that to this point with the Revolution," she said.
Gibson compared the Civil War to "neighbors sort of slugging it out ... It's like watching Tyson and Holyfield go at it.
"But with the Revolutionary War, it's a totally different thing. It's something (American audiences) never experienced, because they live in a free country. They were never part of a colony of another country that was oppressive."
There's also that outdated style of fighting. "The Patriot" depicts such prissy though deadly warfare early on, but once Martin enters the fray, he assembles a motley band of guerrilla fighters who chip away at the British troops and morale with ferocious ambushes.
Anyone expecting a pure history lesson can check their textbooks at the door. Directed by Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "Godzilla") and written by Robert Rodat ("Saving Private Ryan"), "The Patriot" is heavy on action.
Though the movie runs a hefty two hours, 40 minutes, Gibson's star power and its bloody, frenzied battles make for a likely box-office hit.
George Clooney, whose "The Perfect Storm" opens two days after "The Patriot," already has conceded the weekend's box-office crown to Gibson's flick.
"The Patriot" also has two romantic subplots and the lure of a doting father trying to protect his seven children.
"Men will go, 'Oh yeah, lots of guns blazing,"' said Heath Ledger, who plays Martin's oldest son. "But it has a lot of passion, too."
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, now working on the World War II epic "Pearl Harbor," said he had been toying with the idea of a sweeping film about the American Revolution before "The Patriot" stole his thunder.
"Right before they announced 'Patriot,' I was thinking we've got to do something about the Revolutionary War because it's such a rich area," Bruckheimer said. "We're all really revolutionaries."
He said another reason why the Revolution has tended to discourage filmmakers is that it played out far differently than later American wars.
"It doesn't have the drama because we really didn't win a lot of battles," Bruckheimer said. "It was the French that came in and saved us. It was Ben Franklin going over and getting money and troops."
Action, bloodshed and romance aside, "The Patriot" has one clear advantage over other Revolution films in Gibson, doing for 18th century America what he did for 13th century Scotland in "Braveheart."
"As you see in the flick," says Ledger, "there's a lot of Mel Gibson."
It certainly isn't unusual for studios to invest money in director's cuts of films that were critical and box-office successes, but in a highly unusual move, Warner Home Video has made it possible for director Hugh Hudson and star Al Pacino to revisit and improve upon one of the most notorious box-office bombs of all time: the 1985 epic Revolution. The film was ravaged by critics and a disinterested public virtually ensured the movie would go down in the annals of Hollywood financial disasters. Yet, like Heaven's Gate, it's a film that is often mocked by people who probably haven't even seen it. I had only viewed it once - when it was first released on VHS. With the widescreen image cropped and the shoddy transfer work that was the rule during those dark days of the pre-DVD era, I was not impressed with the movie- though I felt it had far more qualities than its reputation might indicate. The story centers on Tom Dobb, a poor widower who comes to New York City with his young son Ned to sell his furs. He finds the city in a state of revolutionary fervor, as colonists are on the verge of all-out rebellion against King George. Dobb is apolitical, but soon he and his son are ensnared by the events of the day and are virtually forced to serve in the rapidly-formed colonial army. The plot follows father and son through the early days of the revolution, when independence seemed to be a foolish dream. George Washington's forces lost most of the major battles and the troops starved and froze before the tide of battle turned.
There are two other major characters in the film: Daisy (Nastassja Kinski), a rebellious teenager disowned by her Tory family for obsessively fighting for the cause of the revolutionaries, and Sgt. Maj. Peasy (Donald Sutherland), a soft-spoken but sadistic British officer with a penchant for molesting little drummer boys. In the original version of the film, director Hugh Hudson (fresh from acclaim for Chariots of Fire and Greystoke, The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes) found himself under great pressure from the financing team that was backing the film. He had to make some drastic artistic compromises and knew full well that the finished film released to theaters was far from his original vision. What he didn't expect was the sheer venom extended to his movie. The criticism was scathing and much of it was directed at star Al Pacino, who garnered the worst reviews of his career. There was little mention of the magnificent battle scene, the outstanding production design or the stirring score. The film vanished from theaters and both director and star suffered career set-backs.