I watched it recently for the first time, and I really don’t get why it’s so loved. IMDB rates it as the second-best movie of all time, but it seems far worse than that to me. I like most old movies and see their hype, but The Godfather didn’t do it for me. What am I missing?
Don’t get it either. It is such a flawed product.
A. Crime movies are supposed to have everyone die at the end. The godfather dies a successful old man playing with his grandchild.
B. Holy shit is it long
C. It feels like it demands to be appreciated. Every scene we are being told that we have to appreciate every scene.
I liked the money pit.
I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never seen this “The god-FATHER”. Can someone please explain the plot of this “the God-FATHER” to me?
(A distraction? I don’t know what you are talking about.)
Are you familiar with the Nickelodeon show The Fairy Oddparents? Well if you ate not, that show is about how sad kids get fairy godparents to fulfil their wishes, so that they are not so sad any more.
Well that show is like a prequel to The Godfather, except that it takes place after The Godfather. It takes you through similar events to what happened to make the character of the Godfather how he is.
You see when he was a child he had Fairy godparents to furfil his wishes and make him happy. So when he grew up he also wanted to make people happy, by fulfilling their wishes, and he called himself The Godfather, after his Godparents. Who now was gone to help another kid in need.
A fun fact is that in The Fairy Oddparents we are actually following the same Godparents, just with a different kid, but on a similar journey. It was a very experimental form of a prequel, but one that worked marvellously well.
My theory is that The Godfather suffers from pioneer syndrome. It was incredibly modern at the time of its release, with ultra-naturalistic acting and new techniques of cinematography. Which everyone proceeded to copy. So that now it looks like just a decent film, maybe from the 80s. But at the time it was a breakthrough. That’s what it’s getting the credit for.
It’s a masterclass in acting, cinematography, and soundtracking. Not only that, but Mario Puzo’s novel which came out shortly before the movie was produced was a smash hit.
In the 70s, movies didn’t look like The Godfather. They looked like weird objective cameras put on a tripod and just filming actors, with not as much thought put into the “feel” of the film. FFC (as well as other directors such as Hitchcock and Kubrick) essentially invented modern cinematography. Remember watching Avatar for the first time? It was kind of like that for movie going audiences.
It was always hailed as an “epic drama” so you have to kind of temper your expectations based off that. It’s not a “murder a minute” gangster flick like a Scorsese picture.
