Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Godfather Part 2!

Theme: The Godfather (Theme) - Fantômas

Contains SPOILARS.

There exist two schools of thought: one, that The Godfather Part 2 is by far the best one in the series, and two, the wrong one. The real controversy is whether the original release, which segues between 1950s sequel and 1900s-20s prequel scenes, or one of the multiple edits that place the scenes in chronological order (some of which include the third film), plays best. My answer may SHOCK you: I don't care, but Part 2 works perfectly well without the flashback scenes, which you can easily skip with your DVD remote as you suck Werther's Originals and rock back and forth gently in your rocking chair. Fuck, I'm old.

"See CHUDS? Without immigration you wouldn't have had heckin wholesome murderous crime lords like Don Vito in America. Checkmate, natzees!" - Francis Ford Coppola, verbatim.

Never has a protagonist been so relatable as Al Pacino's Michael who means to get around to divesting his legitimate business interests from organised crime one of these decades, sort of like you mean to go on that diet or I mean to stop pissing everyone off with my 100% correct politics takes. Yet, just when he means to pull the plug, eventually, maybe, events contrive to drag him back into the cycle of intrigue and murder, and by "events", I mean his dipshit brother Fredo and GOAT villain of the cinéma Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg).

This is the scene everyone remembers but in no small part because he's so composed and charming in his other scenes.

It's a classic archetypal deal with the devil, only Coppola couches his accidental honesty in the plausible deniability that it's all a critique of CaPiTaLiSm and CoLoNiAlIsM, which reminds me of the way /leftypol/ made their own safe-edgy happy merchant who was some pig guy in a top hat. When was the last time The Man ever wore hats that big?

Reeeally makes you think.

Much more compelling than how young Vito became old Vito is the tragedy of Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), the best and most sympathetic of all the rogues' gallery on display, whose erstwhile loyalty and faith in the Famiglia are only dashed when Roth's goons stage a botched hit on him, framing Michael, in a well-worn gambit known as the "Lavon Affair". Godfather stans like to compare the films to Shakespeare tragedies, and Frankie reminds me of both Cordelia and Kent in King Lear: had Michael listened to Frankie's street-smart counsel in the beginning, much might have been averted and little to nothing lost: the Cuba deal is ruined anyway owing to Castro's bullshit.

Something something Blumpf, something something Eff Bee Eye.

Is it really Michael's desire to root out the traitor in his own ranks that persuades him to string things out with Roth, or is he still halfway tempted by his greed for profit and legitimacy? How about daddy's posthumous approval?

When you dance with the devil, the devil always leads.

When Frankie belatedly realises that it wasn't Michael who betrayed him, and that he's flipped for nothing, he accepts his fate with stoical dignity. RIP Frankie; you were the unsung MVP of Godfather films.

We actually wuz.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Any Gun Can Play!

Theme: Desperado - Alice Cooper

Spoilers all the way.

Ever see a western actually do the tumbleweed from cartoons? You have now.

Any Gun Can Play has my new favourite movie opening: three strangers ride into town. One is clearly meant to look like Clint Eastwood's Dollars character, another like Lee Van Cleef's (the third doesn't look anything like Eli Wallach but what are you gonna do?). They're hyped up with a succession of low angles and dramatic zooms into the frightened faces of townsfolk observing from their windows. This goes on for a few minutes.

The undertakers in these flicks must live like kings.

Then they're suddenly killed by our surprise protagonist (George Hilton), who will be known henceforth as Stranger, which he tells us people call him, for he is too autistic to realise it's not a cool nickname; they just don't know who the fuck he is. Anyway, Stranger merking Sergio Leone's protags in effigy is the most hilariously spiteful way to ring in a movie since For Your Eyes Only, and is such a characteristically Mediterranean display of audacity that it makes me grin like a deranged retard (more).

"Psshh...nothin personnel...kid..." - actual dialogue.

What makes this act of celluloid effrontery funnier still is that Gun rips off the Good the Bad and the Ugly formula so blatantly, like Enzo G. Castellari (of whom, needless to say, you have not heard) was telling Leone, "hey, nice template, kid, but seriously, this is how it's done". The fact the rest of Castellari's ouevre is Z-schlock like The New Barbarians makes this bravado more impudent still, which warms the single cockle of my walnut-sized heart. Never let it be said that Patrick H. Bastard does not root compulsively for the underdog.

He also made The Bronx Warriors, starring my mutuals racially diverse neonazis as its heroes. Based? Pozzed? Who even knows anymore?

Yet, while immediate followup One Dollar Too Many lapsed too hard into slapstick silliness, Gun maintains an excellent heightened tone, making surrealistic genre satire with a straight face, like Twin Peaks or the early Bondkinos. It transcends the obvious and breaches that dream-realm of normative cinéma where neckbeards never reach. Sure, Gun is a spaghetti western satire, but, like Scream, it still feels like a real movie, which today's bathos-peddlers can never achieve (yeah, I'm talking about you, Rian Johnson).

Real movies look like this.

Any Gun Can Play also stars Gilbert Roland as bandido Monetero, beside flagrantly Italian hottie Stefania Careddu, billed as Kareen O'Hara, as his Mexican moll (????).

"¿Faith and begorrah, gringo, where's me lucky charms? ¡Viva la raza! ¡Andale!" - Kareen O'Hara.

Together with Edd Byrnes' defector from finance, these form the amoral triad/quadrangle that will variously team up and backstab one another for a haul of cash, leaving about 250,000 incidental goons dead in their wake. Since everyone in this movie is just as bad as everyone else, you're refreshingly free to choose who, if anyone, to root for, but Stranger alone is graced with an opening title theme song in the vein of classic westerns like 3:10 to Yuma but, I suspect, more directly inspired by the grandiose themes from James Bond kinos like Thunderball.

It even plays over a train montage, compounding the tism allegations. One of us! One of us!

The only thing that makes this arguably not by far the GOAT spaghetti western is the unaccountable absence of Morricone music, but I won't dock it a star because you'll come away from it humming his Dollars scores anyway. Is that a fair way to rate movies? Who cares? Watch Any Gun Can Play, you stupid fucking asshole.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Shack Out on 101!

Theme: Red Sharks - Crimson Glory

Even though 99% of movies are to the left of Lenin and always were, disingenuous dorks still wail and sob over the small and undistinguished run of low-budget anti-commie B-joints in the late 40s and 50s, most inexplicably infamous of which is guaranteed sleeping aid Woman on Pier 13, AKA I Married a Communist. Fortunately there was one kino noir in the set, which shares an oneiric oceanic opening motif with the 50s' best noir of all, Screaming Mimi:

The setting also reminds me of Tormented!. For some reason pairing curvy hotties with west coast beaches was a popular way to open 10/10 kinographs in the late 50s.

Terry Moore stars as Kotty, the waitress at a coastal diner whose unhappy lot consists in fending off the advances of rapey slimeball Slob (Lee Marvin) and the diner regulars. Sure, she could easily become the country's top model or movie star, or just marry any man with money, but shhh, if we pull on that thread they'll stop casting Sydney Sweeney in movies I'm never going to see too. Much of the runtime is actually chewed up in Clerksian vignettes of workplace banter and shenanigans, such as these two trying out scuba gear in the empty diner:

Movies could have been so good, you know.

But then the plot kicks in and the suspense begins to rise: IS everyone around our Ter Ter what they seem? WHOM can she trust, if anyone? WHO will survive, and WHAT will be left of them? Oh wait, that's the tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, incidentally the second best tagline of all time, after A Nightmare on Elm Street's "if Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all!". CAN you remember a tagline from any post-80s movie? I can't.

Too soon?

There's just one other thing about this kino that makes it still relevant, though I imagine it's entirely incidental. There's no actual mention of communism, the USSR or any other specific identity for the enemy faction soliciting nuclear secrets from our cast of shifty fuckers, which makes one wonder whether some other foreign interest might just as well be behind it all. For obvious reasons, it's not a double meaning H*llywood would ever knowingly let slip into a movie, but it's grimly lulzy to consider all the same.

The way she then turned to camera and said "yeah, I'm talking about you, Ben Shapiro" was really ahead of its time.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Jawbreaker!

Theme: Candy Pop - LEN

One million years ago I came up with a movie pitch that was essentially Mean Girls meets The Death of Stalin, which, of course, I called The Death of Stacy (w/t DONUT STEEL).

This is a parody edit I made from some tumblrcore feminist agitslop, which only makes it funnier.

I even wrote a first draft of a short screenplay, but never really cared for it enough to bother with a second. Fortunately, someone or other in the 90s had the same basic insight: that clique flicks must be structured like mob movies. Jawbreaker is basically a Scarface or Goodfellasesque rise-and-fall narrative set within the shiny halls of that familiar celluloid vista, 25-y/o High.

Trooning out solely so I can go into the girls' bathroom and make cat noises obnoxiously as they beef.

Scream's Rose McGowan plays the usurping Casey whose prank kidnapping of alpha queen Stacy Charlotte Ayana cuts short her reign and life, leaving McGowan presumptive leader of the pack. Sycophantic Macy Julie Benz has her back but conscience-addled Laci Rebecca Gayheart (Urban Legend) wants out, which incurs the ostracism of the newly crowned Stacy (no, they don't actually have rhyming names, like in my screenplay, but they should).

#relatable #justgirlthings #xoxo

Yet the coverup is jeopardised by incidental witness Becky (not her name either) (Judy Greer), who Rose McGowan buys off with a Faustian offer of popularity. But will the new Casey get too big for her designer heels? Will there be tears, recriminations, character assassinations, catfights, double-crosses, sass and sabotage? Of course, but, better still, there's heightened art direction that makes everything you've ever seen look phoned in.

Round shapes as of the titular candy haunt the characters' headspace...

Hang like an albatross around their necks...

Or loom overhead like the sword of Damocles.

Here, the Jawbreaker (1999) looks like the planet from Eraserhead...

"I've seen Blue Velvet too!" - director

Oh, don't mistake me, this is 100% a Stacy-bashing high school angst revenge fantasy. The director clearly favours the gay-theatre-kid and tryhard-scenester side characters, wilfully blind to the fact they're every bit as cliquey and bitchy as the very meanest hot girls IRL. The name of the school, Reagan High, also speaks to soybitch resentment (yeah, I hate Reagan too, but for based and redpilled reasons. Hollywood libs hate him because they think he was good).

"Classic Americana MUST be rotten with hypocrisy, otherwise I'd be the one who's wrong, and that's impossible" - Cope & Seethe, Attorneys at Law.

But, like all mob movies, they can't help but make their villain protags look cool, making Jawbreaker as hard a self-own as Starship Troopers and The Joker. The reason rappers see Scarface not as a cautionary tale but as a wish fulfilment fantasy isn't despite Tony's violent downfall, but because of it: going down in flames at the height of your glory is part of the dream; to burn out, not to fade away. No one wants any less to be a cool Stacy at the head of a clique after seeing Jawbreaker. Get real!

I come not to bury Stacy, but to praise her.