Best of 2024

Best I Can Come Up With For The Year List

Too much life going on, had an extremely limited viewing selection this year, a more mainstream list than I’d like. In ascending order, the best of what I saw:

Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Megalomania

Came out of Megalopolis feeling a lot of things but what I did not feel was disappointed-- not a bad thing but not necessarily a good thing either. 

I run hot and cold on Francis Ford Coppola. Thought his first two Godfather films were classically well-written if visually conventional, too-carefully curated portraits of a corrupt  American family, thought Apocalypse Now was a vividly directed Vietnam war movie that had little to do with the actual war, thought The Conversation (easily his best early work) was a nicely done portrait of loneliness and introverted paranoia. 

I actually prefer Coppola's wilder less disciplined later works: the lowkey monochromatic Rumble Fish, the emotionally extravagant One From the Heart (my favorite), the beautifully mounted Bram Stoker's Dracula (despite Keanu Reeves as an alleged British solicitor, and a haphazardly grafted love story), and now this, his wildest most undisciplined yet, basically a retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy transposed to modern-day New York. 

A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014)

Year of living dangerously

Got to hand it to Mr. Chandor: he doesn't do anything the same way twice, from the ensemble thriller Margin Call (set during the '08 financial crisis) to the Robert Redford chamber piece All is Lost to this (released in DVD/Bluray last April), his biggest most daring production yet--daring in that it has the effrontery to invite comparison with Francis Coppola's Godfather films.  

Tetro (Francis Coppola, 2009)

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Bohemian rhapsody

Tetro (2009) is the first Francis Coppola film I've seen in years, and it seems  clear Coppola has not forgotten how to make films. It's beautifully shot and lit, with the deep shadows and dramatic pools of light found on the opera stage, only in black and white (Can you imagine opera in black and white--how it must look and sound and, above all, feel?). The detail and texture of the cinematography belies its digital origins--if this is digital cinema, analog cinema has less and less reason to consider itself superior.

Strangely enough, for someone who started out writing for Roger Corman (The Haunted Palace (1963)), went on to win an Academy Award for his clever screenplay for Franklin J. Schaffner's 1970 Patton (clever in that it allowed you to both condemn Patton as paranoid warmonger and praise him as geopolitical maverick, whichever your preference) then went on to write his first two Godfather movies and The Conversation (1974), Coppola's scripts have often been the weakest element in his films. Perhaps not in the case of The Godfather films--the first was a model of film adaptation, the second an imaginative extension of themes put out in the first.

At this point, I have a confession to make: familiarity has not made the heart fonder of Coppola's most famous pair. I like them, think they're excellently done, but can't consider them absolute greats anymore--my heart now no longer races when I glimpse the TV screen and it happens to be showing the scene where Clemenza (Richard S. Castellano) teaches Michael Corleone (Al Pacino, oh so very young) how to cook proper spaghetti: “You start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; you make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs. And a little bit of wine. And a little bit of sugar, and that's my trick."

Despite my Godfather apathy, I'd like to nominate that as one of the greatest cooking scenes in all of cinema. Simple recipe, delicious, wonderfully representative of what the film is like and all about--basic (garlic fried in oil), practical (meatballs, sausage), not adverse to a touch of decadence (wine, sugar), and all about family (“you never know, you might have to cook for twenty guys someday”). Clemenza does it all on-camera, right in front of your eyes, in real time (let's see James Cameron pull something like that out of his ass without reaching for a digicam).

Tetro is also about family--it even has a patriarch figure haunting the margins of the film, in the guise of Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a celebrated composer, and father of both Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) and his older brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo). Bennie's run away from military school, and has temporarily fetched up at Tetro's apartment to rest and presumably recover his bearings; Tetro with all his problems is hardly any help. He's an aspiring novelist who walked away from his father and has since lived a life of unfulfilled ambition, writing reportedly brilliant plays that “have no ending,” in a crabbed, near-indecipherable handwriting he shows to no one (shades of Charles Crumb, there).

If writing seems to be Coppola's Achilles' heel nowadays, casting is a pillar of a strength--Ehreneich and Gallo are wonderful together as brothers, one all dewy and innocent, the other all twisted anguish. Gallo, famous for his controversial projects (The Brown Bunny, (2003)) brings the right amount of passion and guilt and charm to the role--whenever Benny comes close to penetrating his secret or reading one of his hidden manuscripts, Tetro blows up and starts pushing people around; after he's offended everyone in sight he's all hangdog, begging for forgiveness; one only has to think “art film director” and his eccentric behavior is entirely believable. Tetro in effect is a monster of a brother, impossible to live with yet impossible not to care about--perhaps Ehrenreich's best achievement is in convincing us that he has enough love in him to want to care for Tero, flaws and all. Maribel Verdu is all angles, a charming, sharp-chinned beauty, but given little to do beyond being a nurturing mother figure (Tetro being her full-time spoiled brat of a charge); more intriguing is Carmen Saura as Alone, a prominent theater critic who can make or break Tetro's stalled career--there's a playful tension in her scenes with Tetro that suggest cat and mouse, Mephisto and Faust.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffman (1951) is quoted extensively here; there's the image of the clockwork girl disassembled--but beyond a rivalry between Tetro and his father for a girl's affections (hence possibly the image of a woman disassembled), women aren't really crucial to this story. A more useful predecessor is Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), where the father's presence looms over the brothers' psychological landscape, warping their development and relationship together. If Tetro's a monster, in effect, that's because his dad was monstrous too.

But that's subtext; unfortunately Coppola doesn't provide much more in terms of normal, aboveboard text. The film rambles, is ruinously self-indulgent (you need not just an Introduction to Cinema but a detailed dossier on Coppola's life to capture all the in-jokes), and meanders more than marches to its mildly startling revelation. Is Coppola of The Godfather back? Has he made a solidly entertaining film? No and no though to be fair I'm not sure he wants to (come back and make mere entertainment, I mean). He's doing personal films again, and the opportunity has re-vitalized him; there are pleasures to be had here, more for the eye than ear.

A fifteen million dollar independent production from a former major director, about two brothers and their domineering father. A hard sell, even if you mention the “R” rating. Perhaps what this picture really needs, after all is said and done is a scene where someone explains his culinary secrets to a young gun, the enticing results poured out onto your plate in a cloud of steam. If not--if a hot spaghetti recipe isn't needed to rock your world--then bon appetit.

The DVD:

The DVD is handsomely produced, with the sound in particular capturing Walter Murch's (a crucial Coppola collaborator)  design, down to the moth wings plinking against a light bulb. Coppola's commentary is crammed with anecdotes and personal reminiscence (the film might actually be better listening to him instead of the dialogue). Four behind-the-scenes featurettes round out the special features.

First published on Businessworld, 5.27.10

The Godfather: "You broke my heart. You broke my heart."

(Warning: plot of both films discussed in close detail)

I don't quite know why it is I've fallen out of love with The Godfather--is it a case of 'familiarity breeds contempt?' A need to admire something newer, fresher? Is it that the flaws have become too glaring, the virtues too faded? A perverse reaction to seeing it on top of every 'best picture' and 'greatest films' list known to Man? I don't know.

We're familiar with the genesis of the film, from a novel that at the time of the film's production wasn't a bestseller yet, but grew in popularity during production; the pressures exerted on its neophyte director (thanks to all the fan expectations) grew accordingly. Coppola recalls he was constantly in danger of being fired after the first week's shooting, and it was only after the powers-that-be saw his staging of the Sollozzo hit--of Pacino as Michael walking out of the bathroom with a calm, distant look in his eyes--that they saw something there; the possibility of a good film, maybe even a hit. 

We know Coppola basically took a lurid potboiler of a crime novel, reached deep inside, and pulled out the book's true heart--a family epic that captured the mood and thoughts (somewhat dark, somewhat cynical) of America at the time. Instead of the book's pulpy pacing, he adopted a statelier rhythm, as befits a Major Production (he might have taken for inspiration Visconti's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963)--history and epic drama, in effect, told at a processional pace). Coppola had many collaborators, but two are crucial--Gordon Willis with his shadowy amber lighting (supplemented by Bill Butler in certain sequences), and Nino Rota with his swooningly sentimental score. 

The Godfather may be the peak achievement of '70s Hollywood, the supreme example of their brand of storytelling, but after all is said and done, it's just, well, pretty much conventional storytelling. It has, as Godard might put it, a beginning, a middle, an end, and arranges those elements in the usual order. It uses an omniscient point of view, only zooming in to identify with characters at specific moments (say, Michael during the Sollozzo hit) the way Tolstoy kept to the conventionally omniscient point of view in his novels, breaking convention only when necessary (Pierre plotting to kill Napoleon, say). 

Another perhaps more serious charge is that it glamorizes the Mafia--even their flaws (the sexism and racism, the cruelty, the cold-blooded murders) are depicted on a larger-than-life scale. This is a fairly accurate portrait (the inaccuracies--the Godfather's stance on drugs, for example--being more subtle crimes of omission and distortion than outright fabrications) warts and all, but of the overall impression one comes away with a feeling like--"Wow, I'd like to be in a family like that."

The Godfather Part II is a correction to that impression--a correction to both major objections I have to the first film. We see the ugly underside of both business and family relations, the destructiveness and decadence; at the same time Coppola attempts a more ambitious time scheme, taking the story of the father's rise, and pairing it with the son's consolidation of power and eventual isolation from anyone and everyone he knows or loves.

It's not perfect; fact of the matter is, I'd admire it less if it were perfect. Perfection implies absolute mastery over tried-and-true practices, implies a minimization of risk-taking, the avoidance and absence of imaginative leaps. Coppola does take considerable risk in attempting this scope and density of storytelling in not one but a pair of narratives, and as a result half the film--the '50s era story--tends to suffer in terms of coherence. Someone attempts a hit on Michael; the possibility is raised that there is a traitor in the family. Who is behind it and who involved takes up too much screen time--compare the plot to that of the original's first half, where we had a clear villain (Virgil Sollozzo) capable of plotting devious machinations and springing constant surprises on the hapless Corleones. Sollozzo created suspense; he managed to put the Godfather in a hospital bed, and you wondered what he was going to do next. His eventual elimination would take much of the momentum out of the film (in which case the question of succession--of who would take the Godfather's place in the family--came into play), but there's no real equivalent to the man in Godfather II.

Arguably there's no need for such a villain; Michael is his own worst enemy. One might say that Part II is basically a character study, the tragedy of a man losing the very thing he fought for--the subject of some of the greatest dramas (it's Shakespeare's favorite plotline, for one).

If the question of succession is the motor that drives the first film's latter half, Michael's conflict with his brother is the motor that drives the second film's latter half, and it's compelling enough--what does one do with the irredeemably weak, especially those of one's own blood? Mario Puzo objected to the possibility that Michael's older brother Fredo might be murdered, but that's the only direction Coppola can go. None of Michael's enemies can really touch Michael (even Hyman Roth (a.k.a. Meyer Lansky), memorably played by Lee Strasberg, is a rather ineffectual antagonist--or at least his most effective attack, assault by senatorial investigation, isn't as visually charismatic as, say, Sollozzo's hospital-room maneuver). It's people close to Michael who have the power to hurt him, either his wife Kay or his brother  (Fredo's actual betrayal wasn't much either, though Michael if were less quick-witted he would have been dead; it's the emotions evoked, of anger and betrayal, that deeply wound Michael).

As an example of epic directing I've mixed feelings about Coppola's twin achievements. He's inspired copycats through the years, of less and less subtlety and interest (Brian De Palma's Scarface comes to mind, all profanity and little substance; that said, his Carlito's Way is possibly what Coppola was trying for and failed to achieve in The Godfather Part III: an irredeemable man's attempt at redemption, done with poignancy and style). I suppose we can't entirely blame the progenitor for his bastards, though going through both films again, one can't help but notice how many of Coppola's devices, so fresh then, seem like hoary cliches now. It's a challenge to keep context in mind, to remember--and more to the point, feel--what was fresh and new back then in what is now considered old. If art has a sell-by or expiration date, this might be the basis for the establishment of such a date.

Then there's evolution--in art and not just biology. I believe that, say, Hou Hsiao Hsien's Bei qing cheng shi (A City of Sadness, 1989) unrolls a richer tapestry of changing relationships and passing time, presenting them in an atmosphere and against a delicate emotional texture that puts anything Coppola does in shadow, if not shame.

I believe Johnnie To's Hak se wui (Election, 2005) and its sequel (Hak se wui yi wo wai kwai, (Election 2: Harmony is a virtue, 2006)) both outdo Coppola in terms of plotting, action staging, suspense, economy of storytelling, and overall ambiance (a difficult-to-define combination of sentiments, from cynicism to despair to an invincible faith in man's capacity to seriously screw up his fellow man).

I believe Matteo Gorrone's Gomorra (2008) is a more persuasive, less glamorized depiction of the Mafia. And as for The Godfather films' combination of old-style visuals and punk-rock action filmmaking, James Gray's We Own the Night has set a new high water mark.

Mind you, most if not all of these films owe a huge debt to Coppola's twin epics; at the same time, Coppola's epics are not set on an unreachable pedestal, nor should they be; new filmmakers will come with new ideas, with films that speak to new times with greater, more relevant power. At least I believe these films do.

Even amongst Coppola's own works one might find superior fare, as Coppola himself might agree. I doubt if Coppola ever bettered himself in terms of action filmmaking when he did Apocalypse Now; I think he'll agree when I say he attains greater visual virtuosity and design in films like One From the Heart, Rumble Fish, even the dramatically flawed Dracula (which I consider more a celebration of old-school special effects than a straight horror film). Even a hard-to-like film like his Tetro speaks more directly from the heart, shows more integrity in its stubborn refusal to tell its story in an accessible, audience-friendly manner.

Basically what I feel about the two Godfather films is this: they work well, they're wonderful examples of understated, stately filmmaking, then and even now. But they don't speak to me with force anymore. They've run out of things to say to me (though I do feel something even now, watching them again), and everything I can say or write about them has basically been written down, somewhere else on the internet. Though I've tried through this piece to be more articulate and coherent about my sentiments, it comes down to this: I've fallen out of love with these films. They don't rock my world anymore. 


5.31.10