Best movie ever: The godfather part 2

It has the best acting, story, dialogue, cinematography, and storytelling I have ever seen in my life

Eh, for me, it’s Casablanca. Which is a boring answer, but it has aged so well over the years, and has all of the above.

It's hard to pick a best. Right now I will say either The Skin I Live In (2011), Parasite (2019), For A Few Dollars More (1965), or The Battle of Algiers (1966).

But the switiching between movies makes it harder to follow than the first. It's still a perfect movie, but I'm a Godfather 1 man.

I could never get into Part 2. Part 1 I like a lot, but Part 2 I found to have jarring tonal inconsistencies when it kept cutting back and forth between the two stories. I felt it would have been better done if they had told Vito's story all chronologically, all in one shot, and then Michael's story all in one shot afterward, because then we can go from one tone to the other, rather than cutting back and forth randomly.

I also found the stories to be pretty predictable and guessed right on what was going to happen. Not much room for surprise I would say. But I've seen it twice and felt the same way both times. So I never got the hype with Part 2, but really like Part 1.

But the switching is what makes it work. Vito's journey from orphaned immigrant to powerful crime boss is almost heroic because he is the lesser of two evils next to the mobsters he takes down and doing so to provide for his family, whereas Michael's journey (which already starts with him as a powerful crime boss) sees him pursuing even more power as a means of maintaining his father's legacy only to end up losing his family due to his own ruthlessness. The climactic murders in both narratives drive this home...



The constant juxtaposition between one character's rise and one character's fall allows the film to move at a specific rhythm where they build upon one another - I can't imagine it working nearly as well if they kept the narratives separate.

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I understand the glory in it and I do really like the movie for it. However, when I compared it to the first, it was still harder to follow. Of course, comparing any movie to the first can be a hard game. Only reason LOTR 1 isn't above Godfather for me is because it ends on a "first part" style cliffhanger.

Yeah, if you want to get technical about it, then switching back and forth between two stories is harder to follow than just one story (albeit one that spends its middle hour flipping back and forth between Sicily and New York anyway), but that doesn't make it Primer either. I'll agree that the only real problem with Part II is that it doesn't completely stand alone as its own film.

But I didn't really see Michael's journey as a fall at the end. He seemed to gain even more power at the end, and by loosing his family, he has no one else to time him down, and he didn't seem to care about losing them at all and just wanted the power. So it seemed like a rise for him or at least that is how I read it.

He loses everything. He's lost his way. He's forgotten who he once was. The power is empty. Power isn't a victory in and of itself. Something that is pretty clear when contrasted with the DeNiro portion of the film (and our memories of Michael in the first one).

That too.


Never saw Primer.

I don't see how he loses everything though. He shuts the door on his wife and kids, but he doesn't seem to care and his attitude seems to be, well if you wanna leave, seeya... So he didn't seem to care that much and was not hesitant on closing the door there. So I didn't care about him losing everything, since he didn't seem to care. Plus it seemed that the power was worth more to him which he won, so I guess that is why I saw it that way.

But it also felt like a repeat of the ending of the first movie. In the first movie he starts out good, but then turns evil, and this one he is evil and just turns slightly more evil compared to the end of the first one. So it felt like they just recycled the same ending. But I could be wrong, and could watch it again.

I remember once on television they cut and pasted Godfather I and Godfather II into a whole narrative - so there was the Robert De Niro part of Godfather II, then the whole of Godfather I then the Al Pacino part of Godfather II. I remember it offending my sensibilities as to leaving films alone and showing them how they're meant to be shown. I can't imagine they would have been allowed to do that without Francis Ford Coppola's permission though.

Ahh, here it is, The Godfather Saga.

It's been a long time since I've seen the second one, so I guarantee I remember some things wrong, but my memory is you aren't supposed to look at him closing the door on his family as being some passive shrug. It's not just some "I can get a hotter wife, whatevs" moment. He pushes them out because they are getting in the way of an empty and morally abject way of life he believes he has to live up to. It's a tragedy. And for us to be able to see how sad it is, it's kind of important he isn't aware of his fall as we watch him fall.



Is it an extension of the first film, though? Well, yeah. It follows through on the inevitable down fall of Michael Corleone. And you can say that's an obvious trajectory. But it was never supposed to surprise in the first place. It's a deliberate inevitability. And it exploring that inevitabilty is why it hits harder. And why we need to have it so directly tie back to the past, when there was a more understandable morality at play. As a direct comparison to how far Michael has fallen astray.

Oh okay, I guess I felt that in the first movie Michael started out as so good then turned so bad, where as in the second he only seems to turn a little more bad, so it feels like a drop in the bucket compared the first movies character arc, or so I saw it as.

But I guess if we are suppose to feel sad that Michael doesn't feel anything on kicking his family out because they getting in the way of his way of life, I guess I just had trouble feeling sad for a character that doesn't seem to feel anything.

This one one reason why I think I prefer Part III because in that one Michael gets some humanity back and actually feels upset when dark things happen to him, but that was just how I saw it. I can watch Part II again perhaps.

But he does care. Providing for his family is given as his motivation (he certainly cares when assassins attack his house at the beginning), so there's dramatic irony in the two sub-plots; one where Kay's miscarriage turns out to have been a deliberate abortion on her part as a rejection of all that Michael had come to stand for (especially since he was supposed to be moving into fully legitimate business but just ended up deeper into organised crime) and one where his brother betrays him, prompting him to commit his deepest sin yet in order to maintain his commitment to "the family". This is driven home by the very ending, which has one final flashback not to Vito's past but to Michael's, where he reveals he's signed up for WWII and every family member criticises his decision except for Fredo, who actually defends him - that this flashback then fades into the film's final scene, Michael sitting alone in the middle of his estate in deep thought suggests that he has just recalled this moment of genuine bonding between him and the man he had killed, leading him to well and truly realise just how bad his decision was and how it was ultimately not worth his soul. It's a subtle acting move on Pacino's part, but I think he nailed it. I do like Part III a fair bit, but it is ultimately rendering that same sense of regret in a much broader fashion.

Well he cared in the beginning a bit for the family but then didn't care once he found out the truth about his brother and his wife, or it seems and therefore if lost his care, I did to, but maybe I am just reading it wrong. Maybe I didn't see the acting at the end, because Pacino just has this blank stair on his face, like emotionless so, compared to Part III. But maybe I need to watch Part II again.

Another thing in the plot that bothered me is Kay's abortion because they never explain how she was able to get one if she was never able to leave the house. Unless I missed something? And if she were to escape the property, why didn't Pacino ever scold his guards for letting her go, or try to find out how she got out to get the abortion?

I'm pretty sure the problem is you're using "cared" as binary. This is a recurring issue in a lot of these questions, many of which are based in the assumption there's no such thing as ambivalence or nuance, and if someone chooses something to take priority over another thing it indicates some kind of total shift in their priorities or something.

That Michael chooses business over family is very significant, of course, but it's significant precisely because he still cares about them.

The God father 1 was one the most epic movies I watched in ages..... The story was outstanding...