The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

New Francis Ford Coppola edit of 'The Godfather: Part III' heading to theaters

What the hell, man?

 

What else have they had to do for the past six months?

 

I think "The Snyder Cut" of "Justice League" is the ultimate extension of directors' cuts: no movie will ever be considered "finished" -- especially a flop movie.

So why wouldn't Coppola go back and try to "fix" GF III?

Problem is it won't do too much good if they can't insert a CGI 55-year-old Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen to play out the storyline as it was originally supposed to be (and cut the kissin' cousins storyline of Andy Garcia and Sofia Coppola down to about 15 minutes).

 

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

Well, won't have to worry about spoiler alerts.

 

Does this one keep Sofia Coppola behind the camera, where she is actually quite good?

 

A disgrazia

 

The very first sentence of the story is moronic.

The Godfather: Part III is considered by many, including a movie critic by the name of Roger Ebert at the time of release, to be the worst of the three Godfather movies.

Put pretty much any movie up against the first two, and it's going to be the worst of the bunch.

 

It’s an awful movie.

 

It was nominated for Best Picture, and arguably was better than the film which won ("Dances With Wolves").

It was disappointing and disjointed, and its problems were almost completely due to off-screen financial wrangling, which angered fans because it all could have been avoided. But there's about 2:00 of a very good movie in there. The final operatic sequence is pretty awesome.

To fix it, Copolla needs to cut out most of the Vincent-Mary romance, cut it down to about 20 minutes screen time, and figure out somehow to make Michael's problems with Joey Zasa some kind of long-term chain-reaction event resulting from the final rupture of the relationship between Michael and Tom Hagen, the sequel they spent about the last half-hour of GF II trying to set up. Maybe they could get Pacino to do a voice-over of a sequence explaining that Tom had been drawing away from the Corleone family in the late Sixties, and was responsible for Joey Zasa rising in the ranks before his (Hagen's) "sudden death."

Michael would say, "It wasn't like Fredo; I didn't order Tom's death. But when it happened, I wasn't sorry; it saved me the decision a few years later." The subtext of course would be that it was probably Altobello, on orders from Lucchesi in Italy, who had Tom rubbed out, and elevated Zasa in the Mafia pecking order.

 

The story of the death of Michael Corleone’s humanity was Godfather 2. There was nothing left to his story and no need for the third movie.

 

That's about 15 minutes too much.