100

"In looking at The Godfather as a whole, I simply fall into its rhythms and then three hours pass by, waking up as if in a stupor. It has the immense capacity of feeling as if this stretch of continuity is liquid – flowing by like a river. And yet, The Godfather is a section of a life lived, a rise and a fall, and its ultimate accomplishment is condensing it into an easy-going popular entertainment that still shocks like a lightning bolt. There’s a reason why it’s both so revered and imitated, even today. It’s funny as hell, the screenplay is a statue carved out of the trashy marble of Mario Puzo’s source material, and the drama is High Drama, often leading to surreal violent sequences that are, once again, still sought after in their impact and brutality. Martin Scorsese’s work found a rabid fervor in the savage brushstrokes of violence in films like Goodfellas and The Departed, but The Godfather, when it explodes, is unlike anything in cinema history. Often brutally sad, loud but quiet, and captured in extreme detail. The assassination of Sollozzo and McClusky would be nothing without the strong punctuation mark of the ethereal blood splatter when Michael pulls the trigger. The blood hanging in the air left a mark on cinema’s interest in violence – and The Godfather was instrumental in its continued evolution."

New on my Patreon: I talked about why exactly I like to watch mob movies in November, and why these films by Francis Ford Coppola, in spite of being deemed again and again as "masterpiece" status by the general public and critics alike, are still kind of underrated as pinnacles of Hollywood cinema.

www.patreon.com/posts/43899226