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A few reviews

ParanoidAndroid

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The Godfather: A Novel for Television (1977)
This was how I first watched 'The Godfather' films (or rather the 'The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980' version), edited into chronological order and extended in length. It was sometime in the early 90s, when my family borrowed the big black VHS boxset from the library. I don't think I've seen it since. The extended first movie is much like the longer version of 'Fellowship of the Ring', in that it's lovely to have more of a good thing but the original shorter version is just as good. The real reason to savour this version is for what it does with the second film. The young Vito prologue and Robert De Niro scenes now begin the story and are extended so they form their own 1-1/4 hr movie. The attention to the tiniest details of character and place in these scenes mean they feel completely natural preceding the original film, so the Sicily sequences in that work just as well as callbacks to the prologue (instead of the other way around). It allows this material to be enjoyed as a complete story but it also means the 1950s GFII story is set free from being interrupted by it. Combined with a few extra scenes, this concentrated GFII flows so much better, is better paced and easier to follow (Michael's machinations wise) and feels equal in quality to the first film. It's still a meaty 2.5-hrs in length. Again, this is how I was introduced to these movies and why I've spent decades watching them again and again. I'd still recommend it today for new viewers to the saga.


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Is this the actual "Novel for Television" you saw? I can recommend @Wraith's Magnum Opus to anybody!
 

mnkykungfu

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The Godfather: A Novel for Television (1977)
This was how I first watched 'The Godfather' films (or rather the 'The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980' version), edited into chronological order and extended in length. It was sometime in the early 90s, when my family borrowed the big black VHS boxset from the library. I don't think I've seen it since. The extended first movie is much like the longer version of 'Fellowship of the Ring', in that it's lovely to have more of a good thing but the original shorter version is just as good. The real reason to savour this version is for what it does with the second film. The young Vito prologue and Robert De Niro scenes now begin the story and are extended so they form their own 1-1/4 hr movie. The attention to the tiniest details of character and place in these scenes mean they feel completely natural preceding the original film, so the Sicily sequences in that work just as well as callbacks to the prologue (instead of the other way around). It allows this material to be enjoyed as a complete story but it also means the 1950s GFII story is set free from being interrupted by it. Combined with a few extra scenes, this concentrated GFII flows so much better, is better paced and easier to follow (Michael's machinations wise) and feels equal in quality to the first film. It's still a meaty 2.5-hrs in length. Again, this is how I was introduced to these movies and why I've spent decades watching them again and again. I'd still recommend it today for new viewers to the saga.


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So when you watch this, is it still in the form of 3 separate films, but re-organized chronologically? So like, the first film is all the prequel stuff from Godfather II, then goes into the original Godfather? Or do they just have breaks on the ...discs?...at different places but present it as all one long story?
 

Moe_Syzlak

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Is this the actual "Novel for Television" you saw? I can recommend @Wraith's Magnum Opus to anybody!
Absolutely. I much prefer the non-chronological version, but Wraith’s work here is great. Which reminds me I need to finish watching this so I can review it. I’m with @TM2YC in that the extra scenes, while nice to have for diehard fans, are not necessary. The original two movies were perfect!
 
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ParanoidAndroid

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Absolutely. I much prefer the non-chronological version, but Wraith’s work here is great. Which reminds me I need to finish watching this so I can review it. I’m with @TM2YC in that the extra scenes, while nice to have for diehard fans, are not necessary. The original two movies were perfect!
For fans of the traditional structure, @Wraith has you sorted there too!



 

Moe_Syzlak

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TM2YC

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So when you watch this, is it still in the form of 3 separate films, but re-organized chronologically? So like, the first film is all the prequel stuff from Godfather II, then goes into the original Godfather? Or do they just have breaks on the ...discs?...at different places but present it as all one long story?

It's all one long story with just a couple of "sometime later" style on-screen titles to mark the joins. Although the 1977 "Novel for Television" version I just re-watched doesn't include GF3 but since that's chronological anyway it doesn't much matter. The various different versions are detailed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather_Saga

The original two movies were perfect!

For me, the first one is perfect but the 2nd has always just been very, very, good.
 

Moe_Syzlak

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The first one is more satisfying but I get more out of the second one.
 

Wraith

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I now only see them all as a WHOLE....
 

TM2YC

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House of Flying Daggers (2004)
There is lots of graceful fight choreography here but it too often feels bloodless and not just because we know it's play acting within the story. Zhang Yimou's trademark use of bold colours is present but the visuals look flat, lacking the beautiful Christopher Doyle cinematography and atmospheric lighting from the previous film 'Hero'. I also wasn't feeling the required romantic chemistry between Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Some of the plot twists are predictable, some were a genuine surprise and some didn't go anywhere. The fight in the bamboo forest forest in the middle and the one in the snow at the end stood out for me.


^ LOL at the shameless use of the 2000 'Gladiator' music in this trailer to try and get that crowd in.
 

TM2YC

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Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
I don't really like anthology movies but I love the work of the four directors involved, so I was curious to see this infamous production. The first two John Landis/Steven Spielberg segments suffer from being one-idea stories that go on for half an hour anyway. Joe Dante's third segment didn't really grab me character/story wise but it's got a lot of crazy style and inventive creature FX to keep you entertained. George Miller's final segment is by far the best, driven by another brilliantly unhinged performance from John Lithgow and the gremlin creature is brilliantly realised. I couldn't tell how it was done, if it was a guy in a suit, a puppet, or stop motion, or more probably a mixture of all three to fool the viewer. The horrific behind the scenes history of this movie is more interesting and more terrifying than the actual overall finished film.

 

asterixsmeagol

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It's been years since I've seen the movie and I don't remember if the four stories tie into each other at all, or is there a hard break with exit/intro narration between each? Would it be possible to re-cut it into a 4-part miniseries of half hour episodes?
 

Moe_Syzlak

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It's been years since I've seen the movie and I don't remember if the four stories tie into each other at all, or is there a hard break with exit/intro narration between each? Would it be possible to re-cut it into a 4-part miniseries of half hour episodes?
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it myself. But I think that it wouldn’t even be much of an edit to do that. Its major failing IMO is that it doesn’t do anything new. It is basically a bunch of name directors of the time remaking their favorite episodes.
 

mnkykungfu

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^Besides the bookends, the stories originally were all episodes, though they've been remixed with bits from other episodes somewhat. It's been a long time since I've seen this, but I loved how each one had a bit of a different vibe, fitting with the directors' work. The Dante-directed Matheson-written 3rd story about the godlike child has stayed with me since I first saw it and I absolutely love it. It's almost like a classic Star Trek episode in the way it explore the pure Sci-Fi of a simple idea, and Dante's visuals and gradual upping the suspense were visceral to me.

Maybe most Horror films and Fantasy of the past 20 years have amped things up so much that this all would feel "mid" by comparison, but for me this film is a very solid 3 1/2 star film, which is more than I can say for most more-recent Suspense/Horror that relies so much on the visuals but cares so little about a tight script.
 

TM2YC

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Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
I feel a philistine for saying that a film taking the lucky viewer inside a 32,000 year old cave to explore the oldest human paintings ever discovered was a bit dull, especially when it's by Werner Herzog. His trademark voice-over musings on humanity are the best bits. Maybe this was more impactful in it's original theatrical 3D presentation, rather than the middling quality 2D stream I watched at home.




Moonage Daydream (2022)
I'd recommend this to fans of experimental cinema and fans of David Bowie but not necessarily just fans of the latter. It's a hallucinatory semi-linear voyage through time, space and human consciousness, with heavily saturated images from Bowie's life coming at you like the stargate sequence from '2001: A Space Odyssey' (which is referenced for obvious reasons). It truly earns it's upfront epilepsy warning card. I've already seen all the standard Bowie documentaries that a fan could want, so I loved this daringly different art-house vision. I really wish I'd been able to see this on the big screen, with the kaleidoscopic images and sound collages washing over my eyes and ears in the darkness of a theatre. If I had to criticise, while the overall style is wild, the application of that style is quite uniform and could've done with more variety of tone, approach and pacing over 140-minutes. I watched this with somebody who has been a lifelong Bowie fan, having watched him live way back before his first proper album even came out, and they were much less keen on this movie. I think they wanted a film that simply showed you Bowie performing and stuff, rather than a film that is trying to induce the experience of being inside Bowie's mind.

(I'm sure this cinematic trip could only be enhanced by "taking your protein pills and putting your helmet on" before hitting play.)

 
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Gaith

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Road House (1989) (currently on US Netflix)

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Based on the goofy premise (a roving, in-demand bouncer??), and the mostly gentle poster featuring a relaxed Patrick Swayze, I figured this would be a lighthearted action romp, maybe in the vein of Tango and Cash - and for the first third, it mostly was, albeit with more swears and nudity than I was expecting. It gradually gets coarser and more violent, however, and I ended up howling with disbelieving laughter during the very brutal lakeside fight. As fun as the escalating WTF-ery was, however, I was also kinda disappointed to find the plot was a too-straightforward "white knight rides into town, defeats the local baron" sort of story, and the 114-minute runtime was excessive. A fan edit could help the flick dial back the redundant action.

Grade: B-
 
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mnkykungfu

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^How dare you, sir. Road House is perfect as-is, and that throat-rip is leg-en-da-ry.
Is there any chance that Jake Gyllenhaal as a ripped-AF MMA fighter turned bouncer will make a modern re-telling better? Not at all. Will I be there opening night anyway? Well, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a man who's untruthful...
 

TM2YC

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Galaxy Quest (1999)
My previous watches of this had me thinking this was a "perfect movie" but this time I couldn't get the abandoned "beryllium sphere" mine plot-point out of my head. So there just happens to be a real historic galactic trade economy built around sourcing and refining vast quantities of a fictional energy source into balls that look exactly like those sketched on the back of a napkin by an Earth TV writer in the 1980s? They should have stuck more closely to the Star Trek thing they were riffing on, the bit in ST4 where Chekov and Uhura need to gather photons to re-energise the Bird of Prey's dilithium crystal. The Enterprise crew didn't go looking for an abandoned dilithium crystal emporium! By the way, this was watched with people who love Star Trek and people who don't give a damn about Star Trek, and everybody laughed just as hard.


^ A lovely 35mm fan scan of the trailer.
 

TM2YC

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Fallen Angels (1995)
There were moments and scenes where I was greatly enjoying the sexy style of the characters, or Cinematographer Christopher Doyle's super wide angle shots, or the quirky comedy, or the assassin action but there weren't enough across 96-minutes. There is an overall theme of various alienated nocturnal Hongkongers being disconnected from each other (sometimes literally), or unable to communicate properly with each other (sometimes literally), wondering neon streets and hanging in midnight eateries and moody bars. A companion piece to Wong Kar-wai's previous film 'Chungking Express'.

 

TM2YC

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Cobra Verde (1987)
This has the reputation of being the least (and the last) of the five (in)famous collaborations between Director Werner Herzog and actor/maniac Klaus Kinski, and so it proves. Kinski looks far too old to play the part as written and seems unusually subdued and taciturn. It needed his brand of crazed acting to enliven a central character who is vaguely drawn, or unknowably inconsistent in his actions and motives. He's just a dubious protagonist for us to follow around and observe bizarre things. It seems odd to me that Herzog would make a whole film about slavery, without taking the opportunity to say very much about it, except a couple of lines in one of the final scenes, where Kinski's brutal slave trader suddenly says "er, it was probably bad and stuff?" out of nowhere. There are some amazing crowd scenes though, with so many people, vibrant colours and chaos, that you wonder how it was directed. I realised halfway in that 'Cobra Verde' includes a fictionalised depiction of the female Dahomey warriors, recently dramatised in the 2022 film 'The Woman King' (which I've not seen yet). I watched the English version, as the dubbing on the German version looked fairly bad anyway.

The trailer is mildly NSFW:

 

TM2YC

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Widows (2018)
I meant to see this when it first hit cinemas (but nearly 5-years have gone by) because of the killer cast, Director Steve McQueen and curiosity about how it would turn the original 1983 UK TV series into a film. 'Widows' was on Netflix and I fancied an action-packed heist thriller at the end of my week. So I couldn't help but feel a bit short changed when this turned out to be more of a complex character drama, well written and well acted. The heist takes a backseat to why the women are doing it, what toll it will exact, and takes it's time to explore the city's corrupt political system and the racism lurking beneath the surface. Once again, Elizabeth Debicki is the standout but everyone is on top form. Perhaps Daniel Kaluuya goes a bit too far with his cold-hearted gangster shtick as the movie goes on. This probably requires a 2nd watch, when I'm not expecting this to be something it isn't.

 
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