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Glengarry Glen Ross
Gloomy Sunday
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
The Godfather, Part III
Gods and Monsters
Godzilla, King of the Monsters
The Goebbels Experiment
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Glengarry Glen Ross 1992 James Foley (written by David Mamet) 4.0 Alec Baldwin in one of his earlier roles as brutal, vicious, insulting real estate boss, who appears at the beginning of the film to instill in the salesmen and then disappears; Al Pacino spell-binding in role as the real estate company’s smooth-talking, sometimes almost Satanic-seeming top salesman; Jack Lemmon slack and elderly in excellent swan-song performance as somewhat over-the-hill salesman who can sell something only to customers who are conning him; Ed Harris as very angry and foul-mouthed (well, ok, they all are) salesman, who plots revenge against the company and then disappears in the last act; Alan Arkin as nice-guy (only one?)mild-mannered echo of Harris; Kevin Spacey as frustrated and unhappy sales coordinator – he is supposed to be the local boss, but he gets nothing but insults from his men; Jonathan Pryce as the only customer – rather wimpy, he backs out with darting eyes and guilty look when his wife refuses to go along with the sale maneuvered by Pacino. Brilliant adaptation of famous David Mamet play for the screen; remains as a talkfest delivered by a perfect cast of consummate Hollywood professionals, but environment is opened up some by varied interiors in a sleazy part of Chicago (the office is terminally drab and shabby, the Chinese restaurant gleams with garish reds), driving in cars, and an almost continuous driving rain. Concerns a bunch of more-or-less shady real estate salesman who are told by Baldwin in the beginning of the film that if they don’t deliver on the next set of “leads” (supposedly people who have already been contacted), they will be fired. After 24 hours of hostile conversation and mostly pathetic attempts to sell (one assumes worthless) land in Arizona and Florida, the film ends with the lives of most everyone in shambles. The sales made during the film both fall about: Pacino’s mark appears in the last act and reneges; Lemmon’s sale, about which he is very proud, turns out to be a con on him by a lonely couple that likes to play with salesmen. Almost all the dialogue is classic Mametese matching the characters and relationships of the hapless cast. Characters spit insults at one another, thrust and parry in their insults, use a lot of profanity (Lemmon outdoes his fellows in a surprise outburst at the end), interrupt, repeat, double back, spin hostile and insulting patterns in their conversation. The dialogue expresses the desperateness of the salesmen: they are in dead-end jobs and would probably be better off working at Starbucks; they are in competition and secretly hate one another; they see themselves as expert predators, and yet they are classic victims – of the company and their bosses, and sometimes even of their customers; hence their misery and their desperation. Film ties in with Mamet’s ‘House of Games’, since selling property is really a con game perpetrated on the customer and often on the salesman. Pacino provides the classic demonstration in his long conversations with Pryce in the Chinese restaurant, but even the king of the salesmen is humiliated in the last act. Outstanding play, outstanding adaptation, outstanding performances, although not something you would show your children.


Gloomy Sunday 1999 Rolf Schubel 3.0 Joachim Krol as pudgy, good-hearted, and loving owner of Budapest restaurant in the 1930s; Erika Marozsan as the stunningly beautiful Ilona, a server in the restaurant and lover of Krol; Stefano Dionisi as pianist hired to play in the restaurant – Ilona and he also fall in love; Ben Becker as German customer who also falls in love with Ilona but is rejected by her. Romantic melodrama that turns into a Holocaust story in the last third. Most of the time the film is about the love triangle between Krol, Ilona and Dionisi: they all work in the restaurant, both of the men make love with Ilona in deliciously moderate detail, and the three seem to get along pretty well. From the beginning the film has a tragic undertone, since the famous “Hungarian suicide song”, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ that is composed by Dionisi appears to drive people to suicide (could it be because they are tired of listening to it?). Meanwhile, Ilona rejects Becker, and when he attempts suicide by jumping into the Danube, he is saved by Krol. The narrative has a flashback frame: it begins with the sudden death of an older man visiting the restaurant many decades after the war, and then with a shot of a photo of the divine Ilona the flashback takes us to the amours of the 1930s. The film takes on a tragic tone toward the end when the Germans arrive in Budapest to implement the Final Solution for the Hungarian Jews. Becker, who is a higher SS officer, turns out to be venal: he sells exit visas for Jew who can afford to pay, and he and his associates ship the jewels and money off to Germany to start an import-export business after the Germans lose the war (were there many SS officers so realistic?). But when he is persuaded by Ilona to save Krol from the Auschwitz train leaving from the station, he neglects to follow through on the bargain and he saves another Jew who could be more useful to him later. The epilogue then takes the viewer back to the 1990s, where we are informed that the man who had dropped dead in the beginning of the film is Becker, who is a prosperous, rich and respectable German businessman, and – much to our surprise – that the owner of the restaurant is Ilona, who has exacted her revenge with the same vial of poison that Krol had not been able to use back in 1944. The mixture of languid three-way (almost four-way) romance with revenge melodrama is perhaps a bit forced, but the film holds your attention and resonates afterwards. With her perfect facial features, medium brown hair, and slight but shapely body, Marozsan is a paragon of beauty; she contributes immeasurably to the romantic spell cast by the film.


Go West 1925 Buster Keaton 3.0 A sweet brown cow plays his close friend. At times slow-moving Keaton film (70 minutes) with low-key action and fewer well-planned gags, but the film has a sweetness lacking in most of his films since the Keaton character is lonely (his names his Friendless) and the only human relationship he establishes is with a brown car. Keaton can’t cope with life in the big city, so he heeds Horace Greely’s “Go West, young man!”, which he does by hitching a freight train to a western ranch. He gets a job, but he is of course completely incompetent at cowboy activities – he twists himself in the rope when he tries to lasso, he rides a mule instead of a horse, he is incompetent to court the pretty (?) girl that lives in the ranch house, every time he sits down to eat at the mess table, everyone else gets up and leaves (?), etc. His only achievement is to befriend the brown cow, whom he protects from branding and from coyotes/wolves, on whose head he ties reindeer antlers to help her protect herself against the bulls; he becomes very upset when the ranch owner announces that he has to send his entire herd to market (in railroad stock cars) to keep himself from going bankrupt. Once he arrives in the market city (actually the streets of Los Angeles), Keaton continues his campaign to save his cow. The herd of cattle wanders through the streets, crossing the street under the direction of the traffic cop and wandering into several shops and hotels disturbing the customers who usually run for high land to escape the cattle; Keaton has to intervene to shoo them out of the shop. Keaton does a lot of pratfalls and generally maintains his Stoneface; even when a gunman tells him to smile when he talks, he tries by using his fingers to raise the corners of his mouth, but he just can’t. His last gag is the best: because he saved the boss’ cattle herd, he tells Keaton that he can have whatever he wants; Keaton then points to his left where the daughter is standing and says he wants her; when his beloved brown cow walks into the frame, father and daughter realize that Keaton means the cow and not the girl. Not Keaton at his most ingenious and inventive, but he makes up for it partially by pulling harder at our heart strings.


The Godfather 1972 Francis Ford Coppola 4.0 Al Pacino in moving performance ranging from callow youth to steely ruthless mafioso; Marlon Brando irritating with all the cotton stuffed in his mouth but surprisingly gentle in his attachment to his family and his old-fashioned ways; James Caan percussive and convincing as the hot-headed eldest son; Diane Keaton; Robert Duvall as the non-Italian, cool-headed consigliere; Sterling Hayden bigger than life and a little foolish as a police captain in the pay of Barzini; Abe Vigoda; Talia Shire; John Cazale as the not-so-bright Fredo Corleone; Richard Conte as Don Emilio Barzini; Al Lettieri as Sollozzo. Outstanding drama about the transition of a New York mafia family from the old days – under Brando with gambling, rackets, perhaps prostitution – to the new world: either drugs, which are considered very profitable, or legitimate business, which seems to be Michael’s decision when he moves the family to Las Vegas at the end of the film. Dramatically the story is about the transformation of Michael from a respectable war hero (engaged to a very WASP Diane Keaton) to a completely ruthless, cold-blooded mafia don at the end of the film. An outstanding passage stretches from the family’s meetings about what to do after the attempt on Don Corleone’s life to Michael’s murder of the “Turk” (Sollozzo) and his client, Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden). Sonny (James Caan), the hot-headed oldest brother, argues with Tom, the temporizer. In a series of dramatic scenes, Michael, the younger brother, is transformed from a callow war hero and college guy in a button-down collar to “maturity” and willingness to kill his family’s enemies in the interest of “business.” Michael performs the murders in a bravura scene in Louis’ restaurant, where he cold-bloodedly shoots both of his enemies twice in the head at close range. Coppola shows himself as a master of characterization (the four brothers are all very different). He makes Michael into a sort of tragic hero, a nice fellow who would like to have been normal, but who is drawn by circumstances and rock-solid clan loyalty into the underworld at the head of the family. In a dazzling display of ironic parallel editing toward the end of the film, Coppola shows the ruthless murder of Barzini and his henchmen in several different locations intercut with scenes of the baptism of Michael’s second child. The film ends with a psychologically shocking scene between Keaton and Michael: when Keaton asks her husband point blank whether he is responsible for the killings, he looks her square in the eye and replies “No”; Keaton completely accepts the lie and dissolves in utter relief in his embrace. Coppola is a master storyteller, who by a good script that establishes well delineated characters and by meticulous direction keeps the film exciting and the viewer on the edge of his seat. He plays constantly on the film’s main theme: although the Corleone brothers are affectionate family men (note how they hug each other goodbye when Michael leaves for the killing) and devoted to the trappings of their Catholic religion, they do not hesitate to kill in cold blood; family togetherness (eating, long wedding ceremonies) and religious ceremonies (marriages, baptisms, and funerals) coexist uncomfortably in this film with illegal activity and extreme violence. The film is implicitly critical of American culture, often suggesting a comparison between normal American families and businesses and the mafia families and their business. Nino Rota’s music appearing in key spots is unforgettable. Other memorable scenes: reluctant Hollywood mogul finds a bloody severed horse’s head in his bed; Sonny’s ambush at the toll station; Brando’s affecting death scene in the presence of his grandson; numerous scenes in which Brando and Michael say, “We will make him an offer he can’t refuse”.


The Godfather Part II 1974 Francis Ford Coppola 3.5 Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, who has a major meltdown scene when she kisses off Michael, Robert Duvall, John Cazale as Fredo, Robert De Niro as Vito Corleone as a young man in New York, Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth, Michael’s seemingly mild-mannered bête noire in Miami. Sprawling continuation of Part I, focusing mainly on Michael Corleone as he gains control over most Nevada gambling, and with big flashbacks to events in Sicily (assassination of Vito Corleone’s father by Don Ciccio) and New York (Vito [of course played ‘later’ in Part I by Marlon Brando] as a young man in New York becoming a mobster style protector in the Italian community). Film has less violence than the first movie; and it has less dramatic rigor and consistency. Perhaps film should have focused exclusively on the riveting story of Michael’s increasing moral corruption and personal isolation and have left out the Vito background material: the flashback sequences, which take up over an hour of the film change the tone of the film from dark and brooding to light-filled and even nostalgic – it seems that Vito and his family could have turned out better given DeNiro’s positive traits. Wonderfully told individual sequences that keep one’s attention: the cross-cut triple murder at the end (including Fredo on Lake Tahoe); Michael’s near death in his bedroom at the beginning and our attentiveness as we follow Michael through his search for the killer, etc. Film would have had more inner consistency if Coppola had focused exclusively on the tragedy of Michael. Pacino and the family are holed up in the dark mansion next to Lake Tahoe. Pacino is terrific in subtly portraying the tension between Michael’s quiet, rather easy-going, family loving exterior and his fierce, roiling inner demons. He never forgives or forgets an insult or a betrayal; he must always take revenge against his enemies – he has his own brother Fredo murdered as he watches from the window of his Tahoe mansion despite his sister’s pleas for forgiveness (what would his father have done?); he becomes increasingly bitter and lonely until he is left almost alone at the end – all his brothers are dead, his wife is estranged, he has no human warmth with anyone. He has broken his promise to Kay (Keaton) at the end of Part I to move the family into legitimate business. Was it unyielding pride that turned the sweet kid of the beginning of Part I into the murderous near-monster of the end of Part II? Surely we can’t ascribe it all to the requirements of the job! Some narrative questions remain: what was the point of the extravagant and long section on moving into Cuba? And who did actually order the murder of Frankie in New York (almost everybody blames Roth, but the killer gave Frankie a greeting “from Michael Corleone” as he started to garret him). Fascinating film with marvelous components that could have been a true masterpiece in its own right if perhaps the nostalgic flashbacks had been eliminated or minimized.


The Godfather, Part III Francis Ford Coppola 3.0 Al Pacino looking gaunt, a lot older, and more frail; Talia Shire turned into a rather ruthless sometimes shrew ordering deaths of family enemies; Diane Keaton boring as Michael’s estranged wife, who will never forgive him for what he did in Part II; Andy Garcia as Sonny’s hot-headed son, who increasingly takes control of the organization; Sofia Coppola as Maria, the striking but awkwardly performing daughter of Michael; Eli Wallach as old, seemingly doddering family Mafioso, who turns out to be a scheming traitor to Michael. Final, overly long, under-edited part of the Godfather series. Takes part largely in Italy with shots of the Vatican and a lot of locations in Sicily, including the exterior and interior of the Teatro Massimo, where Michael’s son Anthony is performing (well) the lead role in ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ toward the end of the film. Film has dual thrust. One is the drama of Michael, forever caught between on the one hand his love for his family and his desire (frustrated once before in Part II) to take his family legit and opn the other the dynamics of a mafioso – almost impossible to get out; film ends tragically with the shooting death of his daughter on the steps of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, and then in the last scene he, a very old man, (in a long shot) falls dead off his chair, recalling the death of Vito in ‘The Godfather’. The other is a swipe at the Catholic Church, or at least at certain corrupt circles in the Vatican, who have connections with top crime families in Italy, and who resist Michael’s attempts to take over a traditional European real estate company with close ties to the Vatican, to the point of murdering members of Michael’s organization. Michael in the end wins the contest with his adversaries, but this doesn’t mean much since he and his daughter die. The climactic action includes the ‘murder’ of Michael’s decent ally John Paul I (the film implies that JP’s predecessor, Paul VI, was either a fool or complicit in the crooked dealings of the Vatican bad guys). Film moves slowly with too many scenes developing Michael’s remorse (including one where he kind of confesses to the Cardinal future Pope John Paul I) and preparing entry into the Vatican intrigue. Ends with a long (15 minutes?) cross-edited sequence between the murder of the Vatican bad guys and the performance of Anthony in ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’, where assassins are trying to get to Michael; assassin with gun couching in a box and taking aim at the proposed victim while the music crashes of course reminds one of the assassination scene in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’, but without Doris Day’s timely scream. The sequence successfully evokes the lurid, emotionally over-the-top character of Italian opera. Since story and filming were good, the film could have been a lot better with tighter editing and some performance tweaks.


Gods and Monsters 1998 Bill Condon 3.5 Ian McKellan in show-stopping role as older, flagrantly gay James Whale who is slowly dying from a stroke, Lynn Redgrave unrecognizable as grouchy housekeeper who as a Catholic disapproves of the old man but really loves him (kissing his corpse on the lips when he is fished out of the swimming pool at the end), Brendan Fraser as a young lawn cutter whose life is so far a failure, who can’t maintain a permanent relationship with his girlfriend (Lolita Davidovich calls him a “kid”), and who then befriends Whale. Sleeper film about preparing for death and accepting it; it won an AA for best adapted screenplay in 1998. Quietly directed in colorful, posh Los Angeles setting. Whale, whose mind is slowly disintegrating, is very vulnerable, thinking constantly about death, and flashing back to previous experiences – his erotic attachment to a beautiful British soldier in the trenches of World War I, the skinny dipping parties attended only by men in his swimming pool, the making of ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ with Elsa Lanchester in her impossible hairdo standing between the gay Colin Clive and Professor Pretorius. He appears to be looking for a romantic glow in his attachment to Fraser – he even shows him off at a hilarious garden party given by George Cukor (also a flaming gay) for Princess Margaret – but in a lurid surprise he reveals that he wants Fraser to kill him; being killed by a beautiful strong man in a sado-masochistic situation would be his way of making death acceptable. Film is good at keeping us suspended about what its theme is, and then honing in on the experience of dying after a life filled with fun, love, and professional fulfillment. Ending has bits of Hollywood sentimentality, as Fraser becomes strongly attached to Whale, grieves when he dies, and then passes on his legacy to his son, whom he is showing Whale’s film in the last scene. Several clips from “Frankenstein’ and ‘Bride’ shown to different characters throughout the film. The real strength of the film is the acting: Fraser does a creditable job, but the fussy Redgrave and the elegant McKellan turn the film into a memorable experience.


Godzilla, King of the Monsters 1954/1956 American Version (Japan) 2.0 Japanese actors; Raymond Burr added for US version. Godzilla, a 400-foot dinosaur/lizard, appears out of the deep, completely lays waste Tokyo, and after military achieves little, he is finally destroyed by secret weapon, Oxygen Destroyer. Focus of film is special effects 1950s style – miniatures of urban landscape (railroads, buildings, electric power towers, etc.) approached and crushed by (stop action?) lumbering monster, who breathes smoke from mouth catching whole city on fire; generally then cut to reaction shots of the public panicking and running. American version has many scenes with Burr watching and reporting back to the USA about happenings in solemn, purple prosy Edward R. Murrow type reportage; intercut with Japanese footage, often to awkward effect; Burr scenes much sharper and more contrast compared to washed out, scratchy Japanese footage; some dubbing, but always terrible; most remarks of Japanese are translated or summarized by Burr. Science and the military team up to defeat the threat coming from the outside, after several failures. The monster is spawned by Hydrogen Bomb tests that have altered some creature in the depths of the ocean; scenes of Tokyo reminiscent of firebombing of World War II (only ten years before) or of what the city would look like after a nuclear attack. Attempt to keep our interest with cheesy romantic triangle; and the inventor of the OD finally sacrifices himself to make sure the creature is turned to a skeleton -- much solemn elegiac music toward the end. The latter was afraid to use the weapon “for fear it would fall into the wrong hands.” Film has no humor. One of the early prototypical monster movies; civilization is threatened from the outside, but we manage to save ourselves by trusting in science and the military.


The Goebbels Experiment 2005 Lutz Hachmeister (Germany) 4.0 Outstanding different style of documentary about infamous Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Film has virtually no narration – only a few printed subscripts now and then; it consists of excerpts from Goebbels. diary narrated in deadpan, non-committal tone by Kenneth Branagh and illustrated with fabulous film footage from German television and film archives: scenes of German streets especially in the 1920s; and once he became well-known, of Goebbels doing most everything in his brief 12-year period of glory: paling around with Hitler and Goering, riding in fancy automobiles with them, walking into a performance of ‘Tristan and Isolde’, which he criticizes rather bitterly, giving speeches about many subjects, including the wonders of modern radio technology and the beauty and effectiveness of Soviet and Czech films (he found the former’s approach to propaganda too obvious, and he found the latter charming, mainly because it contained a ravishing Czech actress caressing her own breasts – she later became Goebbels’ mistress). Since it concentrates almost exclusively on the entries in Goebbels’ diaries, the films skips many of the key events and attitudes of the Nazi regime: if Goebbels writes about it, it’s in the film. He is presented as an ambitious fellow frustrated by petty jobs in the 1920s economy and by his disability – he had to wear a brace on one of his feet; and he found compensatory fulfillment in his adoration of Hitler and a fanatical commitment to the cause and ideology of National Socialism. He remained insecure and was convinced that party rivals such as Goering, Strasser, and Himmler, all of whom he characterized on occasion as schemers and fools, were out to get him. Although he remained completely attached to Hitler, he at one point criticized him as weak. The film shows him as rabidly anti-Semitic, although there is no indication that he played any direct role in the persecution of them. During the war, he rarely mentions the Americans, and devotes more vitriol against the English (although he comes to a reluctant admiration of the rhetoric of Winston Churchill) and, to a lesser extent, the Russians. There is a lot of footage of him and his beloved Magda (they had six children) at home or of the children wishing their father happy birthday on film. His opinions are very strong and often very self-serving, e.g., English propaganda is infinitely inferior to the German variety, several of the German films made during the war are among the masterpieces of the world. He comes across as a strong orator, who could speak without notes almost poetically about technological progress, or heatedly and rabidly about the Jewish menace or the dire need to defeat the Russians so as to protect German women against the Reds. It is apparent that he is a master of propaganda and that much of the success of the Nazi regime in snuffing out dissent and disagreement in Germany is due to his propaganda campaigns, but there is no analysis of what made it so effective. Not many entries in the last weeks of the war. His fate is shown by Russian film of his and Magda’s charred bodies lying on a sheet next to the intact bodies of their children (poisoned!) – his foot brace is apparent. Fascinating work that remains rather puzzling: in some ways his life and character seems ordinary, way out of proportion with the extent of Nazi evil; and he seems somewhat on the periphery of events, commenting on them in his diary and justifying them to the world and the German people.