Saw The Devil’s Advocate for the third time the other night.

No one in film has so dissected and anatomized diabolical corpi with more dedication and precision than Al Pacino.

Not even the combined forces of Martin Scorcese and the chilling characters he created with Robert DeNiro can come up with the living, breathing reality of what Pacino only began to discover with his Michael Corleone of The Godfather.

Prophetically and, I imagine, presciently, I initially spelled Godfather as Todfather.

Yes. The Deathfather!

That rather says it all.

Three film titles initially leap to my mind when I think of Al Pacino’s entire body of work: The Godfather (1972), Devil’s Advocate (1997), and Insomnia (2002).

Pacino’s greatest performance to my mind can be experienced with the film Insomnia, and his portrayal of the LAPD detective, Will Dormer, an indelibly scarred soul farmed out to Alaska. He finds himself in, of all places, Alaska. A town called Nightmute.  (more…)

My father Roger E. Tapson, a former United States Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of World War II, died five years ago and was buried near a small lake in the rolling, pastoral grounds of the Dallas-Ft. Worth National Cemetery alongside thousands of other veterans - their names, as poet Stephen Spender might say, “feted by the waving grass, and by the streamers of white cloud, and whispers of wind in the listening sky, the names of those who…left the vivid air signed with their honor.” It’s exactly the kind of place my dad would have described, without a hint of Oprah-fied, feminized, New Age devaluation of the word, as “spiritual,” which was the way I once heard him describe a still, brisk, early autumn morning on a gorgeously wooded golf course, his favorite place to be.

Spiritual indeed, but not in the same degree or kind as ”civilian” burial grounds. Not to diminish the final resting place of anyone interred in the latter; but to stand in a military cemetery among the unadorned, uniform white markers that stretch out in precise rows like an army-in-waiting, is to feel a spiritually heightened quality to your surroundings that demands humility, gratitude, and a more solemn reverence. The aura of a military cemetery is undeniably suffused with something extra, because it’s not merely a graveyard, but a memorial to qualities that constitute the best of humanity – honor, courage, dignity, service and sacrifice – and to the warriors who once embodied them. Those grave markers stand as a challenge to those of us who remain. (more…)