The Al Pacino Collection

The long-awaited Al Pacino Collection, also known as Pacino – An Actor’s Vision, features four very personal films from one of the world’s greatest, most respected and legendary actors.

Emphasis on the word “actor”—while the compilation is reasonably entertaining and informative for those of us with no desire to ever read from a script, it’s really a digital master class for thesps.

The Al Pacino Collection features two rarely seen films which have never been broadly released in any format: “Chinese Coffee” and “The Local Stigmatic”. There is also the half-real/half-doc curio, “Looking For Richard”, and the never-before-released “Babbleonia”, which spans about an hour of Pacino and fellow Lee Strasberg Actor’s Studio lifer, Richard Brown, just riffing on the process of playing other people for a living.

One of the most interesting things that Pacino explains on the “Babbleonia” documentary, which resonated with me as a non-acting fan of the craft, is about how the difference between stage acting and film acting is like walking a tight rope—the one onstage is several feet high, while the one in front of the camera is on the ground. He goes on explore how and why, and reveals that even he still suffers from doubts and jitters in both mediums. Although the doc is almost an hour of two people just talking (and there’s not even a dinner with Andre!), the time still zips by. Furthermore, it ends on an appropriate high, humorous note.

“The Local Stigmatic”, based on a then-shocking mid-’60s stage play by Heathcote Williams, about two apathetic, nihilistic, working-class Englishmen who attack a local celebrity, is a 1990 film with Pacino and Paul Guilfoyle (who is currently playing Lt. Brass in the original “Las Vegas CSI” series) as the mentally unbalanced leads.

As a movie, “The Local Stigmatic” is pretty static—it is mostly conversation and prevarication, though some effort was made by director David Wheeler (who worked with Pacino previously on Broadway) to mix up the locations and have the people walking while talking. The yak-track, manned solely by Pacino, is actually more interesting than the film (or at least, it adds a lot of dimension to the standalone end product), as his recollections are so succinct yet fluid.

The other two films, “Looking for Richard” (1996), and “Chinese Coffee” (2000) were directed by Pacino and also feature him as the awe-inspiring actor he is.

Disc 1:

Chinese Coffee

-Widescreen Feature
-Commentary by Al Pacino
-Auto Play Prologue
-Epilogue
-Looking for Richard Trailer

Disc 2:

The Local Stigmatic

-Widescreen Feature
-Commentary by Al Pacino
-Auto Play Prologue
-Epilogue
-Looking for Richard Trailer

Disc 3:

Looking for Richard

-Widescreen Feature
-Commentary by Al Pacino
-Auto Play Prologue
-Epilogue
-Theatrical Trailer

Disc 4:

Babblelonia

-Looking for Richard Trailer
-Easter Egg