Anybody ever read the Godfather book? It’s… kinda weird. Every time a new character is introduced, it’s goes into their sexual history. Like, do we really need to know Rocko is an attentive lover with a string of girlfriends that he has no trouble keeping satisfied before he goes and kills some dude?
And then there’s a part of the book that is about… How do I put this…
a woman getting a pussy tightening surgery.
It’s the bridesmaid that Sonny fucks in the closet at his sister’s wedding. She sought out Sonny, as did all the other women “with big mouths and wide hips” because he had a legendarily big cock and it was her only hope to get any pleasure, on account of her gigantic pussy and all.
After he dies, she tried to commit suicide. Not because she cared for him, she just figures she’ll always be alone because no one else in the world will have a cock that will be adequate to work with her ginormous pussy.
But much later in the book, she’s living at the family casino in Nevada, and her doctor boyfriend finally talks her into having sex and discovers her pussy is huge and convinces her that he knows a great plastic surgeon that can fix it. It walks through the consultation and surgery and everything. Not in explicit detail, but, like, it’s so weird.
And there’s weird comments like (not a quote) “Don’t worry, doll. I do great work. I’ll fix you up so nice he’ll be calling me every day to thank me.” Shit like that.
And it worked. After she has the surgery and they have sex, her doctor boyfriend immediately proposes to her.
So, anyway, yeah… I don’t know why they left the great pussy tightening subplot out of the movies.
From Here to Eternity is like that. The book is truly a great piece of literature, but the movie (made in the 1950s) excises pretty much everything worthwhile in the book. Just as one example, the book has a character who can’t get any contact with women in pre-war Hawaii so he starts getting blowjobs from gay men in parks. Eventually he builds up so much guilt from this that he shoots himself in the head in the barracks. I can’t remember whether the character was even in the movie but obviously no hint of those activities show up. There’s also the main character taking up with a prostitute who is magically not a prostitute at all in the movie.
The book has so much stuff like this in it that I can’t understand why they even tried to make a movie out of it in 1953.
I have the opposite issue. I tend to only enjoy older films. Recent films tend to have this digital colour-graded look and a style of editing (millions of 1 second cuts) that make them pretty much unwatchable for me.
I really love films that take their time, both in plot and character development, as well as in how shots develop to establish the scenes. I also have a passion for photography and for me that’s a really big part of films. I want to see beautiful photographs that took a lot of time and experience to set up (and wait for the right moment, in the case of outdoor scenes). I love practical effects that were built and painted by hand, explosions rigged with real explosives, much more than CGI.
I think there is an issue with attention spans though. The modern films that I mentioned above seem to be ideal for people with short attention spans, whereas older films tend to be boring for these folks. This makes it hard for films to appeal to both audiences!
This video makes some great points about how movies don’t feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don’t give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.
Wow thanks for this! It’s so helpful to learn about and have a language for describing why these new movies feel so wrong to me. I’m going to watch this after work and share it with my film club!
Fully agree about the attention span stuff. I kind of think TV drove it initially, especially animation.
After a season or two The Simpsons started to pick up pace, and for its time it was kind of frenetic. South Park picked up that ball and ran with it. Then when Family Guy came along I thought this is nuts, and I wondered if there wasn’t an active effort to erode attention spans on a large scale.
There are plenty of other examples outside animation, but I picked those because they’re still well known.
I consider myself fortunate to have seen the progression first hand. And to have had an older boss way back who had an infectious love for well made art, particularly in films.
I found Sinners to be nice and slow moving for most of it, plus Pluribus the TV show is slow and but l both are cinematic. They are fewer but not gone.
The Godfather is far from being a difficult movie to watch. It has a rich story, plenty of action, great scenes,… You want serious stuff? Try Nouvelle Vague French movies from Eric Rhomer or Jean-Luc Godard, German or Finnish movies where absolutely nothing happens and it’s just people eating soup. Try Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. It’s great, it’s a classic, but you’re going die out of boredom if The Godfather is already too much for you.
Try Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. It’s great, it’s a classic, but you’re going die out of boredom if The Godfather is already too much for you.
And if you survive that you can move right on to Eraserhead.
Yeah, some of these criticisms are bad just on their face. Godfather is too slow for you? Come on. Is Rambo to slow for you as well? What about Speed?
Some of this just feels like kids who just graduated from watching Paw Patrol deciding they should veto what anyone else puts on the TV.
If you want to throw a fit because everything isn’t Marvel, I guess that’s fine for you. But don’t be shocked when you’re not invited back to College Movie Night.
But I can’t watch the Godfather and doomscroll at the same time, so it’s objectively bad.
You know what my favorite food is? A plain pepperoni pizza. Absolutely love it.
You can take me out to dinner to the fanciest restaurant: five Michelin stars, the best trained chefs, the most expensive ingredients, the perfect ambience… and it would be utterly wasted on me. Because nothing beats a plain pepperoni pizza.
Some people are like that with movies. Even movies which are objectively some of the best ever produced in the history of cinema, will have people who don’t like them. And that’s perfectly fine.
Plain and pepperoni are two different things!
In a similar vein, I’m a sausage pie guy. Give me some ground sausage on pizza and I’ll eat that for life. Anytime I get together with people, there’s always the “what toppings” discussion, and people bring their fucking bullshit to the table, and I say get sausage, and people go mehhh mehhh mehhh, and you know what? Everyone eats the goddamn sausage, and were left with olives and mushrooms, and peppers and onions, and fucking Hawaiian.
So I appreciate it. The classics are classics for a reason.
Well, it’s just pain compared to some other options :D
I love sausage on pizza though! Meatballs, minced meat as well. And I recently discovered ‘nduja, ever had that? Tastes great on pizza. It’s a spicy, spreadable pork sausage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Nduja
I do also enjoy a Hawaiian on occasion though…
You might want to actually try one of those fancy restaurants, you might be surprised.
But also maybe it’s better to not bother and be happy with what you gotOh I’ve been to some :D
One time our boss took us to a fancy restaurant that had a Michelin-starred chef owner. We did some ad work and publicity for him, so this was sort of a thank you, and a way for him to go all out and make a surprise menu to try things. Basically, we were dining for free there.
They go all out. Nine course meal. And as you’d expect, that means giant plates with tiny portions.
Now, thing is… our company is more of a steakhouse crowd.
Halfway through, they serve a perfect steak. Cooked to heavenly perfection. Best steak I’ve ever had in my entire life. And garnished with gourmet fries. They serve those in this tiny ramekin, intended to share. Basically, everyone gets a handful of fries.
One colleague sees the steak, grabs three ramekins and proceeds to load up his plate. He promptly flags the waitress and asks ‘hey, can you get some more fries?’.
Waitress comes back with some more. Colleague again: ‘hey uh, you wouldn’t happen to have a bottle of curry sauce?’ The look on her face was priceless. That was not a question this restaurant had ever had. ‘I’ll go ask… the chef’
Luckily the chef had a good sense of humor about him: out comes this wild, tattooed, giant bearded mountain of a man carrying the biggest kitchen knife I’ve ever seen. ‘WHO’S THE FUCKER WHO JUST ORDERED CURRY SAUCE IN MY RESTAURANT??’ Colleague meekly raises his hand. Chef hands him the bottle of curry sauce he was holding behind his back 😂
Not only do I love the Godfather and The Godfather Part 2, but this past weekend my wife and I watched the Godfather Epic. It’s the first two movies edited together in chronological order. It’s a bit more than 7 hours in one movie.
It would probably kill you.
Yesterday afternoon, my wife had a doctor’s appointment at the hospital. When she was in the lobby, someone was playing the Godfather theme on a piano. Then I see this post. The universe can seem weird sometimes.
And then, sometimes, you watch it years or decades later and it clicks. And other times you are just convinced everyone who likes it are saying so because critics like it.
I think I nodded off like 3 times when watching Dune. It’s just so damn boring.
Casablanca can suck it from here to eternity.
OG Nosferatu (1922) was pretty good though. And the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Casablanca is unironically one of my favourite movies! It’s better than most of the chaff coming out in cinema today.
It builds tension on so many levels throughout its length, while also being funny and evocative. It puts admirable people in vulnerable places where they rely on other uncaring and self-motivated individuals, and then does it again with higher stakes. When tension is at its maximum its then deflated all with a single line callback to the start of the movie.
You should watch 2001 A space Odyssey it is exactly like this.
It is a historical documentary set in the early days of AI and Space Travel before SpaceX and ChatGPT, it’s kinda neet to see how far we’ve came in such a short time though.
In 2006 I fell asleep watching that movie. Highly recommend falling asleep watching that movie. The background noise is artistically stunning and sleep-promoting soothing.
Citizen Kane
Can you name 3 movies you actually liked?
Are you asking rhetorically?
I liked a lot of things. Would be hard to name 3
They didn’t say your favorites. Just name three. For instance, I’ll name three that I like, but aren’t necessarily my favorites:
- A Knight’s Tale
- Ready Player One
- Ron’s Gone Wrong
It insists upon itself.
You’re in luck, OP, I’ve got some genuinely riveting cinema for you, and it’s wholesome as well. Watch the quirky, classic Russian comedy movie Come And See (1985).
I’ll be sure to check it out
Heh, I loved most of the movies mentioned in the comments and I love old movies. I was expecting a lot more obscure cinema, not Godfather.
More controversially, I did find Lynch to be a boring film maker. I thought his more mainstream titles like The Straight Story (which I loved) or Elephant Man were the better of his work.
Also thought Yasujiro Ozu was pretty boring. I get his point, and I get how he plays with movement with smoke and wind and every scene is well thought out, but I couldn’t get behind the stories he was trying to tell.Blue Velvet was good, lots of fun weird shit but also a plot that moved along. It made me rent Eraserhead which in turn almost made me give up movies entirely.
I’ve tried to watch it several times but always shut it off.
It’s a movie that’s constantly aware of itself and tries to push that onto the audience through self-conscious directing—which explains all the nepotism in casting too—and hat makes for disengaging storytelling and characters. And then there’s the cinematography that tries too hard, so it’s more a technical exercise than an effective one, but was successful in its era for that uniqueness.
Not to nrglect it’s an awful portrayal of organised crime, much like The Hurt Locker is at war. And Luca Brasi, ugh. It’s just awful.
In the modern day, I’ve understood the trilogy to be a go-to for “movie buffs” that are vulnerable to ad populum.
Exactly, it insists upon itself
