Exactly. Rankings don't mean anything. Or numbers. Or thumbs up or down. Those things can be fun to pointlessly debate, and they can generate discussion. But anything that isn't actually someone's feelings being articulated is virtually worthless.


That said, most movies that end up on greatest ever of all time lists aren't usually there just randomly. People ultimately have there reasons for choosing them and they are most often, at the very least, worth checking out (yes, even ones I think are shit). But, these lists and their ultimately silly rankings are only the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

And some people interpret numbers and rankings and et al differently than others do. I don't like some popular films but I can respect their place amongst the greats. That's why we discuss them, I think; to figure out what those arbitrary numbers and what not mean. At least that's my impression.

Amen to that. If all us MoFos made a personal Top 100 list and they we compared them all, which is a cool idea, I'm sure my own list would have little in common with other people. But then again after being here at MoFo I've learned we're all very individualistic and even eclectic in our movie taste.

Absolutely how I feel too.

"Greatest" is weird. I think Schindler's List is the greatest American film ever made. I don't know how much weight that carries, nor do I expect anyone to agree, though I'll accept it. I march to my own beat and I do it unashamedly. Anyone can like anything, but no one will like everything.

I think that's what makes discussing films here fun; we all have our tastes and criteria, and then we can banter about them.

I'm in violent agreement with all of this ...

My chief motivation for being here is to discuss what I like, or dislike, about a particular movie. I welcome being disagreed with. In fact, I crave it. When it comes to the movies I really like (such as The Godfather ... maybe we'll get around to discussing it more in this thread ;) ), I'll admit my mind might not be changed so much. I'm actually throwing my arguments out, hoping for dispute, so I can challenge myself to sharpen my views based on thoughtful (hopefully) opinions to the contrary. Trying to justify your views is a great way to exercise your analytical and rhetorical muscles, so to speak. But if you change my mind about something, I'll give you credit. Grudgingly. But credit all the same!

A Top 100 ... that might challenge our powers of comparison. But maybe something more focused, like a thread to compare our "most overlooked candidate for the world's Top 10"? But if you come up with some rules of engagement, sounds like an idea worth pursuing....

That's a solid idea for a thread, asking people to do a top 100 would be like pulling teeth. But one's most overlooked candidate for the world's Top 10 movies, that could be doable.

I think that's the broad appeal to the site. When I first watched the Best Picture Parasite, I couldn't quite grasp the ending, and so while I did like the film, I didn't really love it, so I discussed it with my friend, who knows movies too, and he explained what he had learned about it, so I watched it again with that information in mind. Then it made sense, and I fell in love with the film.

Sometimes it helps to get different perspectives and insights on films to help the individual approach it differently and maybe appreciate it more.

Maybe I missed what made Godfather so great. I'm not infallible so that can happen. What I saw were bad people doing bad things to worse people, although that's not full-stop, and what I considered poor pacing. I liked the music of the film and the performances weren't bad. I just didn't like the characters.

With the "bad people" thing, they did bad things, and came out ahead. The reason that's important, to me, is because in other films and miniseries I've seen where bad people do bad things to other bad people, either they get their comeuppance or they're not actually bad people; they're just thrust in a bad situation and make bad decisions. One of my favorite miniseries is Hatfields & McCoys, even though they're people who made bad decisions doing bad things to other people who made bad decisions. That shows their flaws and they recognize their flaws and no one came out ahead. So many people died because of their terrible mistakes and it spiraled out of control and no one won. It's also a historical piece and the characters were more interesting (at least to me).

In Godfather, Michael rises to power and is now a new crime kingpin. I know he reluctantly became head of the house, but he did it all the same. Because he did terrible things, he came out ahead. That's what I don't like. Technically there's not much wrong with it, aside from a meandering pace, which I probably didn't like because I wasn't invested in the story. I can handle slow if I like the characters.

Sorry; I kind of wandered a bit.

Thanks ... getting back to discussing The Godfather.

It's a topic worth exploring ... does The Godfather glorify violence, or validate violence as a way to achieve the "American Dream"?

My own take is that The Godfather is honest about who the Corleones are. They're criminals. At the intro, Michael tells Kay about a crime his father committed but declares he's not like that. Later, Don Vito is meeting with the heads of other crime families and lists where he'll go (prostitution, gambling) and won't go (drugs, a decision that nearly gets him killed). Toward the end, Michael acknowledges to the Nevada senator that they're both criminals; he acknowledges he's a criminal, but insists it doesn't apply to his family. But then in that opening scene, where community member asks the don to kill the men who assaulted his daughter, he tells Tom Hagen to find someone to beat them up who won't get carried away because despite what people believe they are not murderers.("Murder" here being defined as unequal punishment since the daughter was still alive.)

Of course, they are murderers. They murder the innocent (the prosititue whose death is used to snare the Nevada senator's support), but mostly the members of other crime families in retribution for various trespasses and wrongs. Neither is right, but in their world reasons make a difference.

I don't know of a major line of critical analysis that contends this is glorifying violence. The acts are depicted with realistic brutality (for the time). They are not softened to be "palatable". The Corleones are shown honestly for what they are: criminals, thugs, murderers. The Corleones acknowledge it themselves. No one anywhere in Parts I and II offer anything other than an "eye for an eye" justification for what they're doing.

So ... no ... I don't think the film can be really criticized for "glorifying" violence or the organized crime element. Shows it pretty much for what it is and I for one never come away thinking they're cool or enviable.

But to your point, should we criticize The Godfather because the criminals appear to prosper from their crimes. Mixed bag here. Don Vito dies quietly in his garden. Sonny dies in a hail of bullets. By the end of Part II, Michael sits alone in the garden, his family gone.

You'd have to admit that movies where the bad guys get their comeuppance are pretty common. In fact, so much so that, once you've watched a lifetime of movies, you can predict the ending because the bad guy has to get caught, die, or suffer some other retribution in the end. I think we have to be able to tolerate a break in the cliche when the story is strong enough to sustain it. Yeah, Michael doesn't deserve to be anywhere but jail at the end of both movies, but I don't think any of us would say he's living the kind of life we'd like to live.

We have plenty of similar outcomes. Chigurrh walking away at the end of No Country for Old Men (now there's a guy who deserves some jail time and that one does get under my skin). Likewise: The Usual Suspects; Basic Instinct; Primal Fear. All pretty well reviewed movies. Yeah, I feel it's "right" when the bad guy/gal gets their just reward. But the world would be pretty boring if I could guess the ending to *every* movie.

Re: Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?
 

This is a terrific idea.

My candidates (top 20 most overlooked, for the top 10 of all time):

Strike 1925 Soviet Union Sergei Eisenstein
Salt for Svanetia 1930 Soviet Union Mikhael Kalatazov
Limite 1931 Brazil Mário Peixoto
Day of Wrath 1943 Denmark Carl Theodor Dreyer
Stray Dog 1949 Japan Akira Kurosawa
Late Spring 1949 Japan Yasujirō Ozu
Journey to Italy 1954 Italy Roberto Rossellini
The Music Room 1958 India Satyajit Ray
Touch of Evil 1958 USA Orson Welles
The Naked Island 1960 Japan Kaneto Shindô
La Jetee 1962 France Chris Marker
Onibaba 1964 Japan Kaneto Shindô
Alphaville 1965 France Jean-Luc Godard
Pierrot Le Fou 1965 France Jean-Luc Godard
Le Cousin Jules (doc) 1973 France Dominique Benicheti
Stranger Than Paradise 1984 USA Jim Jarmusch
Taipei Story 1985 Taiwan Edward Yang
Landscape in the Mist 1988 Greece Theodoros Angelopoulos
Vive L'Amour 1994 Taiwan Tsai Ming-liang
Uzak 2002 Turkiye Nuri Bilge Ceylan

More than half of those are in my top 20 of all time, including I think the whole of my top 5, and with the possible exception of one or two, there's no or next to no chatter about them in these kind of circles.

Maybe "glorify" isn't the right word for its violence. "Make mundane" maybe? They use violence to get ahead, although I remember it always having some purpose other than, "You offended me." It was "I don't see another way to accomplish this."

Bear in mind I've only seen the movie twice, and the second time was about 13 years ago, so I'm hazy on details.

So near as the ending conundrum, where they don't get their comeuppance despite being villains, I can see how it's a turn of the norm and maybe fresh? Most films, at least with a story conclusion, the good guys beat the bad guys. Empire Strikes Back the bad guys win, except the story hasn't ended. Just that piece of it. That's just an example. At the end of Godfather, it feels like Michael Corleone is thrust into a spot he doesn't necessarily relish but accepts, so could he be a victim of circumstance? I remember he kills those guys in the restaurant and escapes to Sicily because he was the lowest profile of the brothers and they thought he could escape long enough it'd blow away (please pardon if I recall incorrectly) (it's been a while). I fail to remember why he killed them, but I remember it being for the family and a "last resort" sort of thing.

So it could be like a "necessary evil" thing, in their eyes? I personally won't kill my competition to get ahead. Then again, I'm not in the Mafia. You clearly know the film better than I do, so your knowledge holds more weight.

All of this talk about the movie has made me curious to watch it again. Maybe when I have fewer DVDs out from the library I can get to it. That sounds like a good plan.

Having sat through many operas, long ago I realized that they are really cheesy stories decorated with great music and sometimes stunning, in-person performances. I don't really care why that clown is weeping if he does it with a great song and the audience yells Bravo....."and, as the curtain closes and the stage is littered with bodies", etc.

The GF movies are like opera but without the singing. Like opera, the sketchy part of it is how the plot movie-fi-cation makes the characters seem less like thugs and more like tragic, star-crossed characters.

It's interesting to see just where the line is drawn. The GF movies made fictional anti-heroes out of murderous organized crime characters. Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you probably liked the Corleone family. So far the movie world has not done the same thing with murderous dictators, but who knows.

This sounds like a roundabout "yes" to my actual question: you feel it glorifies what they do. In that case, I think this is a very unusual opinion, definitely misreads the intent, and is at odds with a lot of what the film does. The film clearly condemns their actions, in ways large and small, obvious and subtle, and then it hits us over the head with a sledgehammer in the final act (both of this film and of the trilogy) just to make sure it comes across.

And to whatever degree you "like" them is, in fact, part of that condemning, because then the audience themselves is forced to participate in their rationalization initially, before it's made abundantly clear they've been manipulated into it.

Yes, I think this gets to the core of it for me. There are a lot of movies where the gangsters live high on the hog. Party hard, abuse women, maim or kill for pleasure. And their lavish lifestyle can be held up as something some viewers might lust after. But the Corleones live well, but they don't live large and lavishly. My criteria is this: At the end of it all, are they living a life that you'd like to live. In the case of Michael at the end of both movies, he's lost a lot of what was valuable to him. In Part I, he's now thoroughly trapped in a life he didn't want. In Part II, he's lost most of what was dear to him and he's alone. Not a cliched comeuppance of the criminal in cuffs being led to the gas chamber. But nothing we admire or glorify.

There was an earlier comment that the violence was a theme. I still submit the theme is family. Michael steps in when it becomes clear to him his father could no longer lead the family and he was the only one who could step in and protect them. He even had vague, and some would say completely unrealistic, aims of "going legit." Again, unlike the more extreme gangster films, this isn't a story about criminals who revel in their violence. Violence was a tool to achieve their aims.

Do, please, have a second look at least at Part I. I always have the feeling I shouldn't be enjoying some of this as much as I do. But the acting and direction is splendid. Soundtrack ... it will stick in your head for days. It also contains one of my most memorable scenes ... and it happens completely without words. When Michael and the poor florist who comes for a visit to the hospital have succeeded in scaring off the would-be assassins, Michael learns something very important about himself. See if you can spot it.

Glorifies, not exactly, but romanticizes, definitely yes. Ironically, by making them into operatic characters it's weird because so many operatic characters are villains or morally compromised. It's their failings that make the melody soar. Nobody wants to see either an opera or a gangster movie that doesn't feature villains, but, compared to a movie like Goodfellows, the GF villains are far more operatic.

Like operatic villains, it's important that their moral weaknesses lead them into existential gloom, a lot like how Michael starts out wanting to escape the family fate, but ends up worse than most of them. He's not happy with his success, but sees his impending moral doom and you can see it on his face. The characters seem to have come right from ancient Greek and Roman dramas where most of the characters end up in Hell, kinda like Odysseus, who's completely gone for 20 years, comes back and slaughters all of his wife's suitors.

By Coppola's own admission, the theme as it is explored in both of the original movies is closer to family in the face of capitalism.

Vito Corleone did not want to be a criminal. He was just a little kid when he saw his whole family murdered by the Italian mafia. He fled to America in search of a new start, and tried to earn an honest living... but even here, the forces of the mafia made it all but impossible to be a lawful citizen. He turned to a life of crime out of desperation, and the desire to provide for his family. He had grown up watching violence around him all of his life; eventually, he just came to the conclusion that there was no getting around it. It was what he had to do, to provide for his wife and kids.

But by the time we get to Michael Corleone - he ends up destroying his own family because of all of the greed and corruption that is around him and the effect it has on his closest ones - mainly, Fredo and Kay. It is, in effect, capitalism that ultimately proves Michael's undoing.

Remember the scene in Part II with Michael and his mom?

"Did father ever fear that, in protecting your family, you could also lose your family?"

"But Vito, you can never lose your family..."

"Tempi cambi...."

It's bad because it romanticizes the m, even though it depicts their "moral doom" and sends them to Hell? I'm afraid I still don't follow the logic there.

As I said, the film makes it condemnation of the characters obvious. It's unclear why you feel it being like an opera counteracts this. The implication of what you're saying would seem to be that it's impossible to depict villainy in drama because drama inherently romanticizes things. But even that sidesteps the point about how any romanticization only amplifies the horror of the conclusion.

Both genres (GF movies and ancient tales) have similar roots in classical tragedy, where heroes end up being corrupted into villains, not unlike the Darth Vader character in Star Wars, who started out as a Jedi ands up as Darth (don't miss how close that name is to Dark and all that black stuff he wore). Shakespeare did the same thing in his tragedies, which followed the classical tradition. Like those classical tragedies, the story often starts out in the middle, and goes to a conclusion with flashes back to an origin story or has a prequel. That's standard movie stuff, but it started out with the ancients.

We all secretly find the villains to be much more interesting than the heroes.

I like your approach and I wish I could say something relevant and challenging to you about The Godfather, but I can't. I can't because I've only seen it once and that was some years ago. As a result I don't remember any of the details and all I can say is very broad comments about why I don't personally levitate towards movies like The Godfather.

What I do remember of The Godfather is that it was very well made and well cast with talented actors. The movie was well crafted in that it made these people three dimensional and explored their inner relationships with each other and their power struggles, their conflicts and their friendships & loyalties. That's why people say it's like a crime soap opera as it's about the character's relationships much more than the action itself. I've noticed a lot of MoFos seem to not like movies about human inter relationships and the term 'soap opera' gets tagged onto movies they don't like. Myself I like well made soap opera type movies as I find character development and inter relationships way more rewarding than constant action. Hence I don't watch pure action films as usually fare.

The amount of violence in The Godfather came up earlier in this thread. I recently used IMDB's advance search to generate a long list of 1990s movies that I considered watching for our countdown. I read through way more than a 1000 synopsis and was surprised at how many movies involved murder as part of their plot. If it wasn't murder it was rape or something violent. So no, The Godfather is no more violent than other movies, I'd say less, as it doesn't dwell on killings as 'cool' or as the main draw.

The reason why I don't personally enjoy The Godfather is that I don't like movies about the mafia or organized crime. Something about their complete control over innocent people makes for an uncomfortable viewing for me. So while I can see The Godfather being called one of the great movies, for me it's never going to be a personal favorite.

Indeed, I always remember that first line, "I believe in America."

Don't disagree with your take on this. But personally I've always taken the "capitalism did it" as an over-intellectualization to detour the discussion. The Italian mafia was corrupt in Vito's Italy without capitalism. Why would that change in America? The problem I see with this interpretation is that Coppola and critics are using a rationalization for the movie that isn't reflected in much dialog or revealed motivation in the actual film. It feels like something overlaid later when everyone wanted a trendy and convenient explanation of why they like it. Not because it's an extremely well acted and directed portrayal of an American crime family. It's actually an expose of capitalism!

Michael does indeed go too far, take whatever "code" he thinks he's following from his father too far. It ends in ashes. But he didn't set out to do that. I never sensed his motivation was to become fabulously wealthy and live the high life. (Remember how he dismisses the room full of working girls in that first meeting with Freddo in Las Vegas?) The harder he tried to cling to his ideal of protecting the family, the more he crushed it.