It was the movie that tuned me to the frequency of cinema as a purely sensory instrument. If Anything In This Life Is Certain, If History Has Taught Us Anything: If I’m defensive it’s because I owe a good chunk of my life to my love of Apocalypse Now Redux. Who’s gonna stop him, you? Until they let him make Megalopolis, his long-gestating sci-fi epic (and uhh tick fucking tock, moneymen, he’s 81 years old), he should be allowed to do what he pleases. At the very least, I’m sure it made his pandemic time fly by a little quicker.
Well, if they won’t let the man who made the goddamned Godfather make new movies, why shouldn’t he just mess around with his back catalogue. His last movie, 2011’s Twixt, the closest thing to American Godard not directed by Spike Lee, was so radical and fun and absurd that it couldn’t scare up distribution and kind of just dissolved into the ether, one more experiment from a man who used to be famous for them. Why does he do this? You know, other than because he was fucked with by studio heads more than almost any other living director? Because he can’t get financing to make anything new. I Made My Bones When You Were Going Out with Cheerleaders: Coppola’s been going back to his back catalogue for a lotta years now, shaping a perfect version of Apocalypse Now and making The Cotton Club better by half.
Rudolph Valentino would have given that performance! That’s a beautifully ridiculous performance. Let’s not forget, people were also complained about Keanu Reeves in Dracula and you know what? They were wrong, too. If you were looking for realism - in a movie starring Al Pacino of all place - you were in the wrong place. Coppola was painting frescos with blood and candle light. In hindsight, it never really mattered what Sofia’s performance was like, because Coppola’s movies aren’t really movies in the way of a Frank Capra or a James L. Yeah, Sofia was untrained at the time and freezes up a little on camera (not surprising, given how much she’s tasked to do so early on), but she’s luminous, an old-school Italian screen beauty like Silvana Mangano or Lisa Gastoni. Granted, they aren’t really any better, either, but here’s the thing: They were never as bad as people said. There’s a little less of Eli Wallach’s Don Altobello, what feels like a little more of Talia Shire’s Connie Corleone, and the scenes featuring Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone are tighter. The movie - now titled Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone - is more centrally about Michael. The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (Paramount) Coppola flipped around a decent amount of the first act, opening not with a solitary Michael meditating on his legacy, but with Michael fixing up his Vatican deal that eventually undoes him. Personal Business: So what’s the difference between the much-loathed 1990 version and this new one? About 20 minutes have been shorn off most importantly, some old stock footage (the same thing that killed Robert Towne’s Chinatown sequel from around the same time this was released). It’s still got the same story - Michael trying to keep his family close to him as he prepares a future for them that involves him stepping away at long last from the family business - but it’s tighter, leaner, and, especially now that the movie is implicitly about looking back on past mistakes, has that glow about it of an ugly but beautiful past. Well, after 30 years of thinking about it, director Francis Ford Coppola returned to the original negatives and carved out a better cut. Go ahead and post about it on social media, someone will find you and tell you about it. They’ll come out of the woodwork to tell you The Godfather Part III sucked. The third Godfather movie, which sees Michael’s past replay itself in a violent burlesque? That’s a movie over which people are still personally aggrieved. The Godfather Part II, about Michael leveraging the last bit of his soul for control that isn’t his to take, broke a rule it could just as easily have created: it’s a sequel every bit as good as the original. The Godfather, about the semi-reluctant rise of Michael Corleone ( Al Pacino) to become the head of his family’s criminal organization, is one of the most watched and venerated American movies. The Pitch: The Godfather trilogy has to be the most beloved hated idea in popular cinema.
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