Hacker Cinema
The Godfather Part II
1974 · Film · 202 min
Part of The Godfather Collection
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
In the continuing saga of the Corleone crime family, a young Vito Corleone grows up in Sicily and in 1910s New York. In the 1950s, Michael Corleone attempts to expand the family business into Las Vegas, Hollywood and Cuba.
3 positive6 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
Hard disagree about declarative "X is Y". It's a failure of weakening attention span. There are plenty of excellent long movies:
- Once Upon a Time in America (1984) 3:49
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 3:47
- The Irishman (2019) 3:29
- Malcolm X (1992) 3:22
- The Godfather Part II (1974) 3:22
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 3:21
- Schindler's List (1992) 3:15
- Gandhi (1982) 3:11
- The Green Mile (1999) 3:09
- The Deer Hunter (1978) 3:03
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) 2:59
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 2:58
- Casino (1995) 2:58
- Braveheart (1995) 2:58
- The Godfather (1972) 2:55
- Django Unchained (2012) 2:45
What I most object to is lazy storytelling for lazy, second-screen audiences lacking in style and subtlety having a robotic, spoon-fed, infantile, unnatural, expository narration quality in every character like it's a commercial for an antacid.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Palme d'Or at Cannes, three Oscar nominations including Best Picture (which, amusingly, it lost to The Godfather Part II).
Great movie.
Or Empire Strikes Back, Godfather Part II, and plenty of other movies.
> the recommendations were better than those I get from Netflix
I can tell you exactly why Netflix makes such poor recommendations, and why almost anyone can do better with modest effort:
Netflix has to give recommendations for you from the 6000 movies that it's currently showing[1]. They can't recommend movies that they don't have. Whereas Taste.io can choose from the entire universe of ~500,000 movies.
An example should make this clear: If you liked The Godfather, it's an easy prediction that you'll like The Godfather: Part II and Part III. Suppose Netflix is currently showing The Godfather, but not the sequels. They cannot recommend the sequels to you. But Taste.io is not bound by that restriction; they can in theory recommend any movie that exists. It's much easier to find matches among 500,000 movies than among 6000.
[1] Netflix has just 6332 movies in the USA as of this date and even less in other countries (eg., 4365 in Canada). Most people are surprised by how few movies Netflix actually has. The Netflix user interface makes it very difficult to get a good impression of the number of movies; you can't just scroll alphabetically through the entire list for example. Source: http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.ca/
I think the psychological distance only partially explains the reversal in public sentiment from scorn to adoration. Obesity was never a serious problem in the communities I have lived in. The U.S's obesity epidemic is an abstract concept to me (as I have never experienced it first-hand), and yet I don't have any nostalgia for it.
Surely, it must be more than abstraction and omertà. Some drug organizations do not brand themselves with a public services front - see the TED talk by Rodrigo Canales http://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_of_drug_cartels?language=en.
I only speak for myself, but I like crime movies/drama for the allure of ruthless power. It's a unique sort of power that can only be obtained illegally, and at some great moral expense. This Faustian device makes for intriguing plots.
Who else can have a mountain of cocaine? Who else can execute business with such brutality? What other line of work involves Zero Halliburton cases stuffed with Benjamins, to go with high-powered handguns and sharp suits? These are proxies for power that a pleb like myself can barely begin to comprehend.
There's a scene in the Godfather Part II that I really like, when the nervous money-grubbing landlord comes into Don Corleone's office and gives him cash so that a previously disagreeable tenant can stay in his inn. The absurdity of the scene belies Corelone's power like the tip of an iceberg, and it's visually interesting to see a normal-looking guy wield such mysterious power.
This is echoed by the common "crime lord is the manager of a pizzaria by day" trope (Breaking Bad, Drive, Road to Perdition), where a seemingly weak front has a hidden-dragon kind of vibe.
To summarize, I think that "psychological distance" theory only carries the audience halfway, in that they don't feel the revulsion towards mobsters because they don't deal with them personally. I think most of the allure comes from the forbidden power.
OT: John Cazale had the most astonishing career of any actor ever. Six years, five movies, five nominees for Best Picture (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, Deer Hunter), three winners. And then he died. Just a remarkable life.
The source of the comment matters GREATLY.
For instance, I could say that Robert De Niro only got cast in the Godfather Part II because he was Jew. That just makes me a bigot or an anti-semite or whatever. But pointing out that there's a bigot in the world is not a story; it's not novel. However, if the original casting director for the movie says the same thing, then it is true and you have a story.
This article may as well be titled, "Someone Somewhere is Sexist". There's very little story here.
Edited: Removed curse word after reading child reply by calibraxis. Argument remains the same, but is more civil.
"Single"? I was married for years and then she died. I'm not going to get married again.
"Unemployed"? I'm an entrepreneur, not an 'employee'. I've been an employee of several large organizations, all very well known. At one, it was a startup but now is very well known.
Big organizations mostly don't need to get the work done and, thus, usually don't. They mostly don't need to get the work done because the organization has so much momentum that it can get by for years mostly not getting much work done. Getting the work done is not valued. Actually, about the work, next to nothing is valued. Indeed, anyone who tries to do very much becomes a threat to the rest.
People make progress via 'goal subordination', e.g.. forming coalitions that agree to occupy the high end of the ship as the other end sinks.
Large business organizations in the US are dinosaurs on the way to extinction.
The only reasonably promising path to financial security in the US is money in the bank from profits from being an entrepreneur. In particular, it is better to have an electrician's license and be an electrician sole proprietor entrepreneur than to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and try to work for a large organization.
The big, huge opportunity is exploiting Moore's law, the Internet, cheap storage, the ocean of good infrastructure software, and more as a base to deliver valuable, new information to all the world.
On women, you can believe me now or encounter disasters and believe me later.
Broadly, in the more industrialized countries, the data is overwhelming: Women are grand disasters on the way to extinction. Literally. No doubt. Exactly. Period. E.g., at Wikipedia, read that currently, on average, each women in Finland is having just 1.5 children. Finland did well beating Sweden, the Soviets, and Germany but is losing out to their women. At 1.5 children per woman, Finland is rapidly on the way to extinction.
F'get about Finland: The number of children per woman in all the more industrialized countries is too low to keep up the population.
Net, the women are distracted from concentrating on having children and, thus, are on the way to extinction.
In the past, the women had plenty of children whether they really wanted to or not. Now they have some choices so don't have enough children not to be weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree.
Beyond just children, on average the women are grand disasters at forming stable family units. The situation is very much as in the movie 'The Godfather, Part II' where Michael asks his mother if it is possible to lose one's family. His mother says, "You can never lose your family". Well, Michael's father Vito didn't have to worry about that, but Michael did have to worry about it and did lose his family. Michael said, "Times have changed". He was correct about one of the biggest issues in all of the more advanced countries.
So, Vito's wife had a walk-up, cold water flat, likely far too cold, in NYC, and near rags for clothes, and next to nothing else, had three sons and a daughter, and continued to play a solid role in the family for life. Michael's wife had the best luxuries in all of history, two children, aborted a third, and just HATED her husband and marriage and ran away from her marriage. BUMMER. And that has been the story USUALLY not just in that movie but all across the US and all the more developed countries for several decades now.
So, the women are going extinct. If anything is left, necessarily it will be women who are GOOD at being strong limbs on the tree, almost surely GOOD at being wives and mothers. Thus, in the more developed countries, humans are now in by far the fastest and largest change in the human gene pool of at least the last 40,000 years when, say, the genes of Western Europe split from those of Asia and the Americas.
So, it's both large business organizations and women that are going extinct in the US.
So, a man who wants financial security needs to be a successful entrepreneur. Then if he wants a strong family, he needs to make some very special efforts to 'guide' the situation, at least day by day, often hour by hour.
Right: Being an employee in a large organization sucks. And being a husband of the usual woman sucks.
'Feminism' is mostly just the ideology for an excuse for being a weak, sick, or dead limb on the tree. It's not new but goes way back, through women's movements for many decades and to Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew'. Now that ideology is on the way to being extinct.
So, young men: Avoid what is going extinct. Avoid being an employee in a large organization and be an entrepreneur instead. When forming a family, avoid any hint of 'feminism' and be very much in control, often hour by hour.
Got it.
This reminds me of my least-favorite scene in my all-time favorite movie. In The Godfather, Part II, there's a scene in Cuba where they pass around a 'solid-gold phone', and the actors have to pretend that it's heavy. Alas, it's clear from the way they handle it that the damn thing is just plastic, and very, very light.
Apparently they should have made it with tungsten. I hope they'll remember that if they ever make The Godfather, Part III. Wait... D'oh!