• Al Pacino made two trips up the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, with a pair of movies about aging, regret, giving up and letting go. But fear not -- the 74-year-old actor says he's not about to lower the curtain on his own career. Pacino plays a small-town Texas locksmith with a key for everything except his own unhappiness in David Gordon Green's Manglehorn, one of 20 films competing for the festival's Golden Lion prize. And he's an aging actor who has lost his mojo, and his grip on reality, in Barry Levinson's The Humbling, screening out of competition at the festival. He said he could relate to his Humbling character's desire to pack in the rigors of acting -- but hadn't lost his own appetite for the job. "I feel very lucky, I have to say," Pacino said. "When I think of my life and my background, where I came from -- like all of us, I had issues as a youngster and had to overcome things, and I found something in life that I love to do." The title character of Manglehorn is an emotionally stunted grump who sends countless letters to a long-lost love, all of which come back marked "return to sender." He reserves his affection for his granddaughter and his cat, rebuffing tentative romantic overtures from a sweet-natured bank teller (Holly Hunter). In The Humbling, waning actor Simon Axler rattles around his half-empty mansion like a Connecticut King Lear, pinning his misguided hopes of love and redemption on a much younger lesbian, played by Greta Gerwig.
• It's pretty hard to find a novel way to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by now, but two-time Grammy-winning rapper Pras Michel, a founding member of the Fugees, has done it -- getting his dousing in the center of North Korea's capital on Sunday. Pras had two buckets of ice water dumped on his head along Pyongyang's Taedong River, much to the surprise and bewilderment -- and laughter -- of North Koreans out for a stroll or some fishing on their day off. The American rapper and documentary filmmaker said he wanted to join in the immensely popular charity challenge and thought Pyongyang -- where the ice bucket craze is unknown -- would be the perfect place to do it. "I thought I'd put a little twist to it," he said. "When we go to places, my crew, we stick out. You can tell instantly these guys aren't from this neck of the woods. But the people have been good to us." More than 3 million people around the world have joined in the challenge, which has raised more than $100 million for the ALS Association.
A Section on 09/01/2014