Jack

“Jack,” released in 1996, is a film with two different stories. It starts as a comedy like “Big,” but then it gets serious, just like “Big.”

The transition from comedy to drama was trembling, but the film manages the trick. Jack Powell, played by Robin Williams, is a boy who is aging at four times the normal rate. When he’s 10, he looks 40. (This is a fictional version of Progeria). His parents Karen (Diane Lane) and Brian (Brian Kerwin), keep him at home and have him tutored by Lawrence Woodruff (Bill Cosby). They finally agree to send him to school, where he has trouble adjusting. At least Jennifer Lopez is his teacher.

The story is very funny for the first half of the film and then it gets serious when Jack realizes that old age is catching up with him fast. Real fast. He finds out he doesn’t have very long to live and begins to wonder what the point is to even going to school anyway. It ends emotionally, not sadly, but definitely seriously.

The film touches on some interesting themes. The hard time parents have to “let go” of their children and let them grow up, the loss of innocence, the transition part of life. The film deals with these issues in a positive, intelligent, and moving way. Robert Roten said in his review, “Like "Phenomenon" and "Charly" this is a film about an extraordinary person who wants nothing more than to lead an ordinary life, but just can't.”

It helps that Williams and Cosby are both very much in their place with their own “inner child.” Both bring good performances. However, Diane Lane is the real surprise, as she gives an amazing performance as Jack’s mother. She shows a wide range of emotions without going over the top.

Roten noted, “The film appears to have been edited ruthlessly down to 113 minutes. There are dead ends as story lines open and then don't lead anywhere, but the end of the film is powerful.” There are a couple of scenes that has to make most people teary-eyed.

I remember seeing an ad for this movie during the credits of one film, saying that “Jack” was available for free on VOD. I saw it and I did like the movie. I know people didn’t like it, probably because of how Progeria was fictionalized or maybe certain performances or the overall story, but I still thought this was good. The ending, as previously mentioned, doesn’t fail to make me breakdown. I didn’t when I first saw it, but now that Williams is gone, I breakdown when I watch that clip. Fran Drescher is in here playing a mom of one of Williams’ friends. Watch this on Disney+ and at least give it chance.

Thank you for joining in on “Francis Ford Coppola Month.” I can finally say I have reviewed “The Godfather Trilogy,” and hopefully everyone enjoyed my reviews. Stay tuned next month for what I will end the year off with.

The Godfather Part III

Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part III,” released in 1990, isn’t just a disappointment, it’s a failure unlike any other. Undeniably, “The Godfather” I and II, which every says are among the greatest American films of all time, are a tough ones to follow. A very good film might be put alongside them and still not level them. Hal Hinson said in his review, “"Godfather III," though, adds little more than a sad footnote to those earlier works.”

The film completes the arc of Vito Corleone and his sons, bringing us from the part where the second film ended to the present day, from the look of a secluded Michael, reprised by Al Pacino, looking out from his boathouse office as he orders his brother be murdered, to the anticlimactic ending. However, when giving the final chapter of the story, it also spoils what came before. You just want this film never to exist.

Hinson noted, “Coppola's star has dimmed significantly over the 16 years since the last "Godfather" film, but to see this third installment is to watch it fall out of the sky altogether. "The Godfather Part III" is the work of an artist estranged from his talent, a lost soul.” Continuing the story of the Corleones, not only does Coppola fail to build on what he and his screenwriter Mario Puzo previously made. He also seems oblivious to what made his story so gripping to start with.

The characters that return from the earlier films have little resemblance to themselves. Hinson said, “The dread curve of Michael Corleone's life, which provided a dramatic spine for the family saga, has lost its sinister bend.” At the start of “Part III,” Michael has come very close to realizing his dram of a completely legitimate family business. At a ceremony in his New York penthouse, he receives the Order of St. Sebastian from the Catholic Church, a proud honor that may be connected to the $100 million donation given to the church by the Vito Corleone Foundation, a charity run by Michael’s daughter, Mary, played by Sofia Coppola. Hinson said, “But this first act doesn't have the dramatic resonance of the wedding scene in "Part I," or the celebration of Michael's son Anthony's first communion in "Part II," because Michael no longer sits like a malignant spider at the center of his Mafia web. Michael is a businessman now, and in divesting himself of his criminal interests he has lost what made him interesting, his murderous darkness.”

Hinson said, “It's nearly impossible to see how the relentlessly brutal middle-aged man at the end of "Part II" could have grown into the relaxed, polished, easy-moving older one we see here. In some scenes -- like one in which he urges Vincent (Andy Garcia), his brother Sonny's hotheaded illegitimate son, to make the peace with a rival, Joey Zaza (Joe Mantegna) -- he seems almost charming -- a smiling, glad-handing lightweight. The action here takes place past the point where there is anything at stake, and it has, at times, an almost meditative quality, an old man's summing up.”

With Michael missing from the film’s focus, the rest of the action looks ungrounded. Hinson said, “it loses its moral dimension and becomes just another mob story.” The two main plot points concern the Corleone family’s dealing with the Vatican, and Vincent’s rise as Michael’s replacement. The motives for Vincent aren’t split, the way Michael’s have been. Violence is natural to him. Hinson said, “He suffers no pangs of conscience when he takes revenge on his family's behalf, and in this he is supposed to be strong in the uncomplicated way Don Vito Corleone was. Garcia, as a result, seems to be the only actor in the film who knows what he's playing, the only one with a clear mission, and he gives a thrilling, feral performance.” That’s the film’s strongest.

For his part, Pacino thrashes around inside his character. Hinson criticized, “His makeup is superb, though if he had been allowed to sweep back his hair it might have connected him physically to Garcia (and to Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, as well).” Sometimes his choices are interesting, and at times he does something interesting to the exterior of his performance. Hinson said, “For the most part, though, he busies himself by paying attention to the details of playing an older man -- Michael is around 60 -- and goes not much deeper than that.”

Some of Coppola’s choices – for example, having Michael suddenly faint into a diabetic coma when it was never mentioned that he was diagnosed with that condition – look to have been inserted out of desperation. Also, some of the story – particularly the handling of a conflict between the Corleones and the Luchese family over control of the Vatican’s giant corporate business – it caught beyond words. Some scenes – like the ones with Diane Keaton as Michael’s wife, Kay – are in the film because of studio politics, and not because Puzo and Coppola have anything of importance to say in them.

Hinson said, “Even though she is authoritative in the role, Keaton suffers tremendously from having no real function except to nag Michael for his past sins. (She's also anchored with some of the film's most painful dialogue.)” Eli Wallach has a few dramatic moments as Don Altabello, an old mob friend who turns out to be an enemy. Bridget Fonda, who plays a journalist, has only two small scenes that contribute nothing at all, and George Hamilton contributes a few appalling moments as the family’s PR man. Hinson noted, “Talia Shire's part as Michael's sister, Connie, has been expanded in "Part III," but the conception for the character seems to vary from scene to scene, so that at one moment she's a screaming crackpot and the next a power-hungry behind-the-scenes plotter.”

Hinson continued, “The romance between Mary and Vincent is one of the film's main subplots, and as Mary, Sofia Coppola is hopelessly amateurish.” Still, the part is a relatively small one, and her failure – contrary to a lot that has already been written – contributes very little to what is actually wrong with the film.

It may be that Coppola was right to delay this sequel all these years. From the evidence here, he had nothing more to say. Hinson said, “As an epic metaphor for the American dream, the first two "Godfather" films are nearly perfect. The connections they made go deep into the story of this country, deep into our sense of ourselves and the contradictions in our lives. As a generational story, they had the richness and scope of Shakespeare. But the man who made those two masterpieces is not the man who has given us this failed final chapter. Though he reassembled many of the members of his old team -- his actors, Puzo, cinematographer Gordon Willis and production designer Dean Tavoularis -- his talent for filmmaking is eclipsed now by his gift for self-destruction.” If that amazing earlier director ever had a chance to resurging, it was here. But he didn’t and you can’t help but see “The Godfather Part III” as his headstone.

Guys, I was really hoping for a great ending to the trilogy. However, just like a lot of trilogies out there, this last one is one of the greatest failures in cinematic history. This third part is boring. I felt like I was going to fall asleep when I saw this. If you liked the first two movies, I don’t recommend this last one at all. I know critics have given this film positive reviews, but I’m in the same boat as a lot of people when I say that this third part is the worst in the trilogy and one of the worst sequels ever made. Never see this one because there is nothing I can recommend about it that is good. You will be so bored by this one.

Alright everyone, we have now looked at “The Godfather Trilogy.” I had been wanting to talk about this trilogy for a long time now, but I don’t know why I never got around to it. However, better late than never, as they say. Still, we’re not done with “Francis Ford Coppola Month.” Next week, we’re going to end the month by reviewing a film that I like, but everyone else doesn’t. I think everyone might guess which one I’m talking about, but just wait and see.

The Godfather, Part II

Moving through the deep shadows and heavy miseries of his huge manor, Michael Corleone supervises over the destruction of his own spirit in “The Godfather, Part II,” released in 1974. The character we remember from the first movie as the best and smartest of Don Vito’s sons, the one who went to college and joined the Marines, grows into a cold and cruel man, obsessed with power. The film’s ending give us first a memory of a long-ago family dinner, and then Michael at mid-life, cruel, closed, and lonely. He’s clearly implied as a tragic character.

The Corleone story, as created by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo in two films with a runtime of nearly seven hours, has been a type of success story backwards. Roger Ebert compared in his review, “In a crazy way, “The Godfather” and its sequel belong in the same category with those other epics of immigrant achievement in America, “The Emigrants” and “The New Land.”” The Corleone family worked hard, was ambitious, remembered friends, never forgave betrayal, and started from modest beginnings to become the most powerful Mafia business in the country. If it were not that the family business was crime, these films could be an inspiration for everyone.

Coppola seems to have a certain contradiction toward his work. Don Vito Corleone as played by Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” was a man of honor and dignity, and it was difficult not to sympathize with him, playing with his grandchild in the garden, at peace after a long lifetime of murder, blackmail, and the noises. What exactly were we supposed to think about him? How did Coppola feel toward the Godfather?

“The Godfather, Part II” goes back and forth from the events in “The Godfather,” trying to tell us about the Corleones. Ebert said, “In doing so, it provides for itself a structural weakness from which the film never recovers, but it does something even more disappointing: It reveals a certain simplicity in Coppola’s notions of motivation and characterization that wasn’t there in the elegant masterpiece of his earlier film.”

First off, he gives us the beginning of Don Vito’s life. Ebert described, “His family is killed by a Mafia don in Sicily, he comes to America at the age of nine, he grows up (to be played by Robert De Niro), and edges into a career of crime, first as a penny-ante crook and then as a neighborhood arranger and power broker: a man, as the movie never tires of reminding us, of respect.”

The parts of Don Vito’s youth takes up maybe a fourth of the film’s 200-minute runtime. Coppola spends the rest on Michael Corleone, who has taken over the family’s business after his father passes, has moved out of New York, and merged business in Nevada, and wants to expand in Florida and Cuba. Michael is reprised by, and brilliantly, by Al Pacino, and among the other reprising cast are Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, the family’s lawyer, Diane Keaton as Michael’s increasingly hopeless wife Kay, and John Cazale as the weak older brother Fredo.

Coppola handles a lot of this material very well. Ebert said, “As in the earlier film, he reveals himself as a master of mood, atmosphere, and period. And his exposition is inventive and subtle. The film requires the intelligent participation of the viewer; as Michael attempts to discover who betrayed him and attempted his assassination, he tells different stories to different people, keeping his own counsel, and we have to think as he does so we can tell the truth from the lies.”

Ebert continued, “Pacino is very good at suggesting the furies and passions that lie just beneath his character’s controlled exterior. He gives us a Michael who took over the family with the intention of making it “legitimate” in five years, but who is drawn more and more deeply into a byzantine web of deceit and betrayal, all papered over with code words like respect, honor, and gratitude.”

However, what was his sin? It was not, as we might have imagined or hoped, that he controlled over an evil business of murder and destruction. No, Michael’s fault is pride. He has lost the common touch, the self-respect he should have received from his father. On top of that, because he has lost his humanity, he must suffer.

Coppola suggests this by contrast. Ebert said, “His scenes about Don Vito’s early life could almost be taken as a campaign biography, and in the most unfortunate flashbacks we’re given the young Vito intervening on behalf of a poor widow who is being evicted from her apartment. The don seems more like a precinct captain than a gangster, and we’re left with the unsettling impression that Coppola thinks things would have turned out all right for Michael if he’d had the old man’s touch.”

The flashbacks give Coppola so much difficulty in maintaining his pace and narrative ability. Ebert said, “The story of Michael, told chronologically and without the other material, would have had really substantial impact, but Coppola prevents our complete involvement by breaking the tension. The flashbacks to New York in the early 1900s have a different, a nostalgic tone, and the audience has to keep shifting gears.” Coppola was reportedly advised by friends to forget Vito’s story and stay with Michael, and that was good advice.

Ebert noted, “There’s also some evidence in the film that Coppola never completely mastered the chaotic mass of material in his screenplay. Some scenes seem oddly pointless (why do we get almost no sense of Michael’s actual dealings in Cuba, but lots of expensive footage about the night of Castro’s takeover?), and others seem not completely explained (I am still not quite sure who really did order that attempted garroting in the Brooklyn saloon).”

Ebert continued, “What we’re left with, then, are a lot of good scenes and good performances set in the midst of a mass of undisciplined material and handicapped by plot construction that prevents the story from ever really building.”

For example, there is the brilliant audacity of the first communion party for Michael’s son, where Coppola directs as contrast to the wedding scene at the beginning of “The Godfather.” There is Lee Strasberg’s (acting coach and director of the Actors Studio) double-sided performance as Hyman Roth, the boss of the Florida and Cuban business. Ebert noted, “Strasberg gives us a soft-spoken, almost kindly old man, and then reveals his steel-hard interior. There is Coppola’s use of sudden, brutal bursts of violence to punctuate the film’s brooding progress.” There is Pacino, suggesting everything, telling nothing.

However, Coppola is unable to bring everything together and make it work in a way of easy, gripping narrative. The fabulous text of “The Godfather” is replaced in “Part II” with prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions.

You are missing out if you haven’t seen this movie. People have said that this is better than the first, but I still prefer the first one over this. Not to say that I didn’t like this sequel, no way. This is an A+ sequel to one of the greatest movies of all time. This is currently streaming on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Paramount+, so I give it a high recommendation of seeing this sequel if you have seen the first. This film has the famous lines, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart,” (my brother used that line on me so many times as a child, which got old really fast), and “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” This sequel is another one of my favorite films.

Stay tuned next week when I look at the last, and weakest, of “The Godfather Trilogy” in “Francis Ford Coppola.”

The Godfather

This month, I will be talking about the remaining Francis Ford Coppola movies that I have not reviewed. Let’s get this month started with one of, if not the best film he every directed, “The Godfather,” released in 1972.

With countless books as the trailers, Paramount’s film version of Mario Puzo extensive underworld novel, “The Godfather,” has a large fanbase. This will boost the potential for the film which has a famous performance by Al Pacino and a strong characterization by Marlon Brando as the protagonist. There’s also excellent production values, so much excitement, and a phenomenal cast. However, it does have a runtime of almost three hours (without intermission), and occasionally confusing. While never so mild as to be boring, it is never so gripping as possibly the superior drama. This should not hurt Paramount’s box office expectations in any way, though some audiences may be disappointed.

A.D. Murphy said in his review, “Francis Ford Coppola directed the Albert S. Ruddy production, largely photographed in N.Y. Dean Tavoularis was production designer and Gordon Willis cinematographer (Technicolor) for the handsome visual environment, which besides World War II and postwar styles and props, is made further intriguing by some sort of tinting effect. There are people under 40 who grew up in the period of the film and who recall such color tones as evocative of 20 years earlier, that is, the end of the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. Evidently the artistic effect here is to show some sort of antiquity which no longer exists.”

Puzo and Coppola are credited with the adaptation which gives some look into the origins and heritage of that part of the population famous off screen (but not on it) as the Mafia or Cosa Nostra. Murphy said, “Various ethnic counter-cultures are part of the past and part of the present, and the judgment of criminality is in part based on the attitudes of the outside majority. Nobody ever denied that a sense of family, cohesion and order are integral, positive aspects of such subgroups; it’s just the killing and slaughter that upsets the outsiders.”

In “The Godfather,” we have the New York/New Jersey area, ruled by five “families,” one of them ruled by Brando. This is a place where emotional ties are strong, loyalties are kind of more flexible sometimes, and tempers are small.

Murphy compared, “In makeup and physical movement instantly evocative of Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane,” Brando does an admirable job as the lord of his domain.” He is not on screen for a lot of the film, but his presence is all over it.

Murphy said, “It is Pacino, last seen (by too few) in “Panic In Needle Park,” who makes the smash impression here. Initially seen as the son whom Brando wanted to go more or less straight (while son James Caan was to become part of the organization), Pacino matures under the trauma of an assassination attempt on Brando, his own double-murder revenge for that on corrupt cop Sterling Hayden and rival gangster Al Lettieri, the counter-vengeance murder of his Sicilian bride, and a series of other personnel readjustments which at fadeout find him king of his own mob.”

Murphy continued, “In a lengthy novel filled with many characters interacting over a period of time, readers may digest the passing parade in convenient sittings.” However, in a film, the audience is forced to get everything all at once. Murphy said, “Thus it is incumbent on filmmakers to isolate, heighten and emphasize for clarity the handful of key characters; some of that has been done here, and some of it hasn’t.” The biggest achievement here is the establishment of mood and time.

Among the famous performances are Robert Duvall as Hagen, the non-Italian second-hand man finally removed from authority after years of service, Richard Castellano as a loyal follower, John Marley as a Hollywood film tycoon forced into giving a comeback film role in a war film to Al Martino, a growing teenage idol, Richard Conte as one of Brando’s nasty rivals, Diane Keaton as Pacino’s childhood lover, later second wife, Abe Vigoda as an eventual enemy to Pacino, Talia Shire as Brando’s daughter, married to a weak and abusive husband Gianni Russo, John Cazale, another son who move to Las Vegas when that area was filled with the mob, including Alex Rocco as another recognizable character, Morgana King as Brando’s wife, and Lenny Montana as a mobster.

Murphy said, “Nino Rota’s fine score, plus several familiar poptunes of the period, further enhance the mood, and all the numerous technical production credits are excellent.” Bottom line: the film has a lot of terrific mood, one great performance by Pacino, an excellent character transition by Brando, and a strong supporting cast. That will be enough for some, only half the job for others.

If you haven’t seen this film, why are you reading this review? This is one of the top films of AFI’s Greatest Films List, and rightfully so. Everything about this film makes it deserve the title of one of the greatest films ever made. With a great cast, great writing, great acting, great drama, and the mafia action scenes are top notch. You can see this film either on Tubi, Pluto TV, or Paramount+. This film is famous for the line, “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” See this if you haven’t, I give it a high recommendation as it is one of my all time favorite films.

Sorry for the late posting. I fell asleep after coming back from work. Stay tuned next week when we look at the second in “The Godfather Trilogy” in “Francis Ford Coppola Month.”