Bryce Zabel's MOVIE SMACKDOWN!

The Godfather (1972) -vs- The Godfather, Part II (1974)

Vote Now: An Offer You Can't Refuse...

The Smackdown.  By now it's all become a part of our collective cultural memory -- the horse's head showing up in the bed, making an "offer he can't refuse" and that haunting score by Nino Rota.  Imagine being in the theaters though, almost four decades ago when the original "The Godfather" was in release back in 1972. For years new viewers of the Godfather Trilogy were exposed to either increasingly degraded theatrical prints or VHS or DVD copies that were, in many cases, even worse.  For the past two years, though, Francis Ford Coppola and a small army of digital restoration experts have been at work reclaiming the golden glory for high-definition Blu-ray, standard DVD and even a few more theatrical prints out in some major cities.  It's not the purpose of this Smackdown to lay out that process but if you want to know more about "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration," there have been some excellent articles including The New York Times and Slate Magazine.

What is most astonishing about "The Godfather" which won the 1972 Oscar for "Best Picture" is that two years later "The Godfather, Part II" also won the Oscar for "Best Picture."  This pretty much qualifies the second film as the unquestioned best sequel of all-time (although there are supporters now for "The Dark Knight").  And, of course, it triggers a Smackdown to find out which of these two extraordinary films is the best.  We'll give the competition our usual treatment with an added bonus.  Five of our critics weigh in at the end with their individual essays.  Joe Rassulo, Scott Baradell, Sherry Coben, Mark Sanchez and Jay Amicarella all come at the material with damned unique POVs, and it's a fun read.  Finally, at the end of this review, you can put in your own two cents by voting in our Smack-Poll.

The Defending Champion.  If you think about it now, the "Godfather" films are the modern world's version of those Shakespeare plays about kings and princes.  This is the film where Vito Corleone, the aging Don of a powerful Mafia family hands off the power, reluctantly, to his youngest son Michael, delivering one of the saddest lines in cinema, "Michael, I never wanted this for you."  Al Pacino's Michael Corleone is one of the greatest acting performances on screen ever and his transformation from shy son to ruthless criminal makes you forgive any of the actor's excesses over the years.  The film opens on a wedding where Michael has returned from World War II just in time to see his sister Connie get married. All of the men in Michael's family are involved with the Mafia and it's assumed that the older brothers will handle the criminal duties while Michael lives a legit and decent life. It's truly the story of the family but the engine that drives the action is about a drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo who wants Don Corleone (Marlon Brandon) to go into the drug trade with him.  Corleone refuses, gets shot by hit men, barely survives.  This opens the door for his son to begin a violent mob war against Sollozzo that changes him and his family forever.  It's the story of the old ways surrendering, violently, to the new ways.  You probably know all this.  Beautifully photographed, scored, directed, written.  Most people have it on their Top Ten lists and more than a few place it as #1. 

Sex and the City (2008) -vs- The Women (1939)

Ladies Who Lunch

The Smackdown.  In this corner, catty, clever and classic, The Women. Mother of all chickflicks. And striding confidently into the ring high atop a pair of Manolos, currently raking in the big bucks all over the world, the HBO phenom brought to the big screen with big hype and big box office to match: Sex And The City.  It's a cat fight for the ages.  Ladies?

The Challenger.  Carrie and Miranda and Samantha and Charlotte leave the small screen behind for the multiplex in Sex And The City (2008). Older but no wiser, they give their legions of fans a little taste of what ever happened to. Will she or won't she? The earthbound screenplay grounds them from taking full flight with only the pale rhythm of wit and no real follow-through. The four squeal like schoolgirls and act like little kids playing house and dress-up. (A word about the real heroine of the entire franchise: costumer Patricia Field. Yoinks. Evoking oohs and ahs with every costume change, this visionary never stops to ask herself: "Does this go with that?"  Taking Japanese street fashion ethos and raising the couture ante and price tag to astronomical, a ride so exhilaratingly awful it's actually quite wonderful, Ms. Field might be True Genius. Possibly an evil genius but genius nonetheless. Kudos.)

Sunshine (2007) -vs- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Spaced Far Out

The Smackdown. Exactly how crazy can you go during a long space journey -- as you begin to realize you probably won't surivive, or maybe just that the rules have changed so much, nothing you knew before really mattered? Before putting "Sunshine" in our Smackdown cage, I considered "Solaris," "Alien,"  and even, briefly, "Event Horizon," as the opponents. Seeing the promotional build-up, though, I realized that the filmmakers were actually going for the championship belt, and the only film-on-film fight that would do justice to their aspirations would be to put their movie up against the One True Champion, namely, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Let's get one thing out of the way right now -- "2001: A Space Odyssey" is a true film classic, it deserves its praise, and it deserves to be seen in any good film school program. If you haven't seen it, you should. But it does not have a lock on this decision. It's almost forty years old now, much has changed: in the world, in filmmaking techniques, in the reality of spaceflight. At this point in time then, in 2007, which is the better space journey film? Which one will truly blow your mind, be beautiful to look at, and feel important?

"Back when we were still worried about global warming, if there was one thing you could count on, it was the sun coming up in the morning. Oh, and that '2001' was even better when you were tripping on something."

The Challenger. The same team behind "28 Days Later" -- writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle -- want you to believe that, this time, instead of a zombie infestation, the sun is actually dying about four-billion years before we thought it might. The kick is that, as in their earlier collaboration, for the most part they actually make you believe it. "Sunshine" tells the story of an eight-person astronaut crew speeding toward our sun in a small space-ship attached to a Very Large Bomb. The idea is to fire the bomb into the sun, jump-starting it back to health. Have I mentioned that this is probably a suicide mission? Yeah. And let's not miss the irony here. While we're holding world-wide consciousness raising concerts to battle global warming, the Earth in this film is freezing... fast.

I saw this film at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood -- this is a place with reserved $14 seats and no commercial ads, the house was packed, and the screen and sound were state-of-the-art. The special effects are convincing in every way. The design if realistic, looking exactly like you'd expect a ship like to look like. The film looks and sounds just fantastic.

The acting here is first-rate, too, led by Cillian Murphy who the filmmakers worked with on "28 Days Later." He plays Capa, the ship's physicist. He gets, for me, the most arresting scene in the film when he attempts to tape a message to send back to his parents and has to go through numerous takes to get it right. This is the often-neglected territory of space-flight movies. In reality, there is no two-way conversation. If you have something to say to anyone back home, or they to you, it all has to be done in message units. Because of the vast distances, there's no back-and-forth. That simple fact alone should tell you just how isolating being blasted away from the Earth can (and, someday, will) truly be. So, yes, these crew members will ultimately get on each other's nerves, but they pull it off by not trying to be action movie heroes (this is no "Armageddon"). Instead, they all play first rate astronaut/scientists.

The first half of the film is a wonder of increasing dread that is composed of bits and pieces of conversation, duties and science and, taken together, it solidifies the reality of the piece until you are completely sucked in. As mentioned, the film then takes a more conventional turn when the crew picks up a distress beacon from the ship that preceded it, then disappeared. The closer to the sun these people get, the more things fall apart, and the more scary tricks are played on us as viewers.

"I know you're afraid, Hal, but the thing is, you've turned into a murderous, psychotic A.I. and it's kill or be killed time, baby. Now, goodnight."

The Defending Champion. If you're old enough to have seen "2001: A Space Odyssey" when it first came out in theaters, you remember how it simply blew you away. Nothing like it had ever happened before in a movie theater. If you've seen it only as a piece of film curiosity, not all that different from, say, watching "The Wizard of Oz" these days, then you probably cannot relate to the extreme emotional connection it made with the vast majority of its audience. I was blown away.

Turning away from that aspect, however, the story is simple. A giant, "intelligently designed" monolith has been found on the moon. It is emitting a signal straight to Jupiter. A massive ship is constructed, crewed by two pilots, and sent to investigate. Along the way, these two men (who so underplay their roles you have to see it to believe it) begin to believe that somehow, the computer, an AI named "HAL" is behaving strangely. Hal kills one of the pilots, and the other is forced to kill Hal in return. Then, in the last half-hour, ships, computers and everything that came before goes out the space portal and we enter into the "odyssey" part of the film that audiences have been debating now for four decades.

The Scorecard. Both "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Sunshine" share a similar complaint with some critics: that they are uneven and portions of each are powerful, terrifying, insightful and others are confusing or conventional. It is clearly true that, even today, you can't get a roomful of people who have seen "2001" to agree on what's actually happening at the end. And it will be equally true in the future that people will say the first half of "Sunshine" is more ominous and scary than the last half which some will see as lumbering and slow.

Both films have talking computers, awe-inspiring space vistas, loneliness and otherwise normal intelligences that have gone berserk. "Sunshine," though, isn't a clone of "2001" or, if it is, it unintentionally got some other film's DNA mixed in by accident.

"2001" hasn't aged well, specifically because it attempted to be specific about the future before it was, well, the future. It's got a feeling of Cold War with the Soviets, the technology of its 2001 was probably too advanced even from 1968's perspective, and instead of fantastic spacecraft sailing to the outer planets in 2001 we got 9/11. All that, plus the ape costumes weren't great, the peaceful civilian use of space is still a dream and it missed the Internet. Yet it did give us HAL as an A.I., the early colonization of the moon and human politics in space, all things that will probably still come to pass. It's not perfect, but it's still wonderful.

On the other hand, "Sunshine" gets a lot of details right in many of the small areas but in the larger canvas of the mission to the sun, it's not that easy to buy into. You have to buy that the sun will go south on us billions of years before it's supposed to, that we can build a ship capable of towing a Manhattan sized bomb and get it into orbit and on its way, and that this ship and its crew can survive a close-encounter with the sun. You also have to buy a rather large plot device in the last third that is hard to accept and, even if you do, seems out of place in the storyline as its developed.

The openings of both films, though, announce different intentions. "2001" means to feel important, from the apes discovering the monolith, to the docking with the space station to classical music. There's no dialogue for the longest time. "Sunshine," in contrast, opens with a voice-over because, I guess, they don't think the audience, having paid their money, will have the patience to sit in their seats and watch the film unfold. I hated the voice-over. It should never have been in this film. Shame on the person who probably forced the filmmakers to put it in. And, if they did it themselves, don't do that again, okay?

Read on for our decision...

The Good German (2007) -vs- Chinatown (1974)

Review by Bryce Zabel 

The Smackdown. The trouble with being a Man Who Wants to Know Too Much is that you can take a real beating for your curiosity. Now that "The Good German" is out on DVD, we're set up for a Smackdown between two film noir mysteries where the men who keep asking impertinent questions of powerful people both get their faces mutilated for their troubles. Both Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown" and George Clooney in "The Good German" play characters named Jake and wear hats most of the time while poking around in the shadowy corners of power. Nicholson literally got his nose sliced by Roman Polanksi for sticking it where it didn't belong and Clooney gets his ear ripped at during a shadowy attack for trying to hear too much. As a consequence, both spend a great deal of screen time with white bandages on their heads which, for actors at the top of their respective games, can only be described as a bold choice for their characters.

"Wait a minute. I thought the homage was to 'Chinatown.' Now we're going with 'Casablanca'?"

The Challenger. Watching "The Good German" takes the viewer into a none-too-subtle time-warp whipped up by director Steven Soderbergh as an homage film with his buddy George Clooney, invoking all kinds of great 1940s movies. Written by the talented Paul Attanasio from a Joseph Kanon novel, it's a black-and-white faux-"classic" set in partitioned Berlin just after the end of World War II. Clooney gets to play a jaded war-correspondent sent to Germany to cover the Potsdam conference. Naturally, his old girlfriend is a femme fatale who Cate Blanchett plays like Dietrich, full of doomed glamor and, honestly, she's great. Not so for Tobey Maguire's f**k-spewing, amoral American corporal plundering Berlin for black-market profits. Because the piece needs to sound important, the backdrop includes lots of drama involving Nazi scientists wanted by both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the opening volley of the Cold War.

"That looks like it hurts. Shaving accident, I suppose?"

The Defending Champion. Robert Towne wrote the best screenplay he's ever written and Roman Polanski directed his best film and both of them were beyond lucky that Jack Nicholson agreed to play J.J. Gittes. The result was "Chinatown." Nicholson's Gittes is no cliche -- he's no broke Philip Marlowe-loner. Instead, he's a private eye with a decent practice, who's seen enough human nature to be deeply cynical about it and, yet, he has a moral code and he's sticking by it. Of course, all of this must involve a dame and, in this case, that's Faye Dunaway. I have to admit the first time I saw this film I wasn't entirely sure what was going on with the bond issue being floated and the dam being built and water being stolen from Los Angeles during a drought. But, on repeated viewings, it makes sense to me now and Towne's screenplay seems to have -- pardon the pun -- watertight logic behind it. The film is moody, scary and compelling, but never affected.

The Scorecard. As you can see from the black-and-white picture above, it would be fair to compare "The Good German" with "Casablanca" but we know how that one would go. Even so, what Soderbergh and Clooney attempted -- basically a frame-by-frame re-shoot of classic '40s filmmaking -- draws attention to itself rather than drawing the audience into its character's problems. You're awfully busy in this film thinking of it as a film tribute instead of a story. There was an awful lot of drama in the days after the fall of the Nazis, and a great film could be made from it, but this one feels drained of most of its blood and life. This is a shame.

In contrast, "Chinatown" also has the feel of a 1940s movie, but it never depends on being a self-conscious manifestation of its genre. It actually is a private-eye film made with no winks or nods to the camera. It's the real deal from Fade In to Fade Out. Mostly, though, you care so much about J.J. Gittes and his simple quest to learn the truth. That's what sticks with you.

And, this may be petty, but the bandage on Nicholson's nose is creepy. The bandage on Clooney's ear is almost comical.

Admittedly, you've got a pretty clear idea who the winner is here. Do you want to know why?

Next (2007) -vs- Harold and Maude (1971) -vs- Charade (1963) -vs- To Have and Have Not (1944)

Review by Jay Amicarella

The Smackdown. There are four corners in a ring (usually) and we need all of them to fit this Smackdown inside. When I first caught a preview for "Next," I saw Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel were set to star.  I thought, "Oh, they'll make a good pair. I wonder who Biel plays, his daughter?" Imagine my dismay when I learned Moore's role was another throwaway, as it was in "Children of Men," and Jessica Biel was Cage's love interest!  My reaction, I believe, was akin to Biel's many teenage girl fans, who began following her as the Reverend Camden's oldest daughter in the hit TV show "7th Heaven." That would be "EEEeeewwww!!"  Clearly, they're too young to remember how Hollywood used to routinely pair an aging male lead with star power to a young female with equal draw, regardless of credibility or good taste. Enough of these contrived romances resulted in the Yuk! Factor, which  is the audience's reaction when the surrogate Father-Daughter symbols were forced to kiss. Feminism in the 70s put a stop to that, more or less, but now with Cage, Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and even Denzel Washington entering their own Emeritus Years, we may see a revival of the queasy May-December phenomenon. Rather than focus on the failures, let's put three films in the ring that made it work and see which one did so with the greatest style and believability. These several notable films made the age-difference thing work, either because the plot was well-written enough for us to believe in the romance, or the stars themselves sold it on their sheer exuberance and likeability, forcing us to root for The Geezer and The Teaser. But most of the time (Rest in Peace, Anna Nicole and Hubby), it has been sheer Yuk! Factor.

"Please don't bring up the whole, 'When I graduated from high school, your mother was pregnant' thing again."

The Challenger. If you want to know what the film's actually about, you can read fellow Smackdown critic Mark Sanchez's review. For my purposes here, it's pretty clear that 2007's age-gap romance "Next" certainly is a contender for the highest Yuk! Factor. It's evident early on that Biel was cynically chosen for her recent "Most Sexiest" title in mags like "Maxim" rather than for her acting chops or suitability for the role. She and the venerable Nicolas Cage share NO on-screen chemistry whatsoever which makes the generation gap even more awkward than it had to be. That's a shame because Jessica Biel has paid her dues and learned her craft only to be exploited for her sexuality. Still, if you think it bothers you to watch Cage and Biel go mouth-to-mouth, imagine how Justin Timberlake must feel while he's sitting in a lonely hotel room on tour.

"Oh, Harold, you make me feel sixty-eight again!"

A True Champion.  Director Hal Ashby's definitive black comedy, the 1971 cult classic "Harold and Maude," may just have defined the post-Viet Nam, Watergate Era of American Cinema. In this film, the entire plot hinges on how much you believe in, and applaud, (or Yuk!), the oddest of Odd Couple romances, between young, rich, suicidal, nearly silent Harold Chasen, perfectly played by Bud Cort, and Maude, a voluble, life-loving, experience-embracing, 79-year-old Holocaust survivor. The incomparable, irrepressible Ruth Gordon made this role the crown jewel on a glittering, decades-spanning career, and we not only affirm her soul-rescue of Harold, but also are ourselves uplifted by Maude's world-view. Comically, Gordon, then 'only' 75, was playing a character older than her age in real life! Opposing Harold, Maude, and Life, Logic, and Love are a great supporting cast, headed by the hilarious Vivian Pickles as Harold's disapproving mother, Charles Tyner as his war-mongering uncle, and Cyril Cusack, in a great part, as Harold's long-suffering psychologist. A unique Cat Stevens score perfectly complements the action on-screen.

"By the time I'm your age, Mr. Grant, older men will have little blue pills for these situations. But we don't need to take drugs now, do we?"

A True Champion. In 1963, back when America still knew how to make a classic romantic comedy, director Stanley Donen made "Charade" which was really a Hitchcock-esque murder mystery stylishly masquerading as romantic comedy, complete with a Henry Mancini score, usually reserved for a film of froth and fun. And "Charade" is fun, from the witty sexual repartee and evident chemistry of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, to the picturesque locales of Paris, to the black comedy villainy supplied by pros Ned Glass, George Kennedy, James Coburn, and Walter Matthau. There is stolen Nazi money, betrayal, deceit and double-cross served up like whipping cream and cherry on a delicious cinematic sundae. The graying Grant's seduction by the amorous young Hepburn works because of the French location:  Donen expects we will be more accepting in a more cosmopolitan setting, and he is right. This romance wouldn't have worked in a prudish, American backdrop; hence, no Yuk! Factor.

"I'll whistle for Bogart, but not for you, pal."

A True Champion. When Lauren (Betty) Bacall breathed, "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? All you do is put your lips together and blow" at a cynical Humphrey Bogart, cinema history was suddenly remade. Adventure stories had grown up, romantic portrayals matured, and the very way that men and women related to each other onscreen, was changed forever by this single line, and by the sly, knowing smiles exchanged between a balding, aging man with a lisp, and a young, tall, slim, chain-smoking beauty. When the history of American movies is discussed, everybody talks "Casablanca," but it was corny and hokey when set next to misogynist Hemingway's All Man, All Woman love story, 1944's "To Have and Have Not." The setting is Martinique just prior to the United State's entering WW II, but the plot of wartime intrigue is just an excuse to showcase the talents of established mega-star Bogart, the emerging star Bacall, legendary tunesmith Hoagy Carmichael, and maybe the most gifted character-actor of all time, Walter Brennan. The dialogue, as they used to say, "crackles," and over 70 years later, audiences still chuckle and relish in the witty sexual double-entendres tossed off by a peerless cast, under the direction of equally matchless Howard Hawks. Brennan's exchange, "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" with Lauren Bacall ranks up there with Gable's "Walls of Jericho" speech from "It Happened One Night," or any of Joel McCrea's soliloquies from "Sullivan's Travels." The deliberately chosen black-and-white photography is beautiful, and the film itself moves like something from the music-video era, instead of stately 1944. 

The Scorecard. We're not debating each film's merits here, we're talking YUK! Factor -- who had it, and who avoided it? Which Old Coot matched with ingenue provokes the largest involuntary gag reflex? We started with the pairing of Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel in "Next" which seems to exist only to opportunistically cash in on Biel's award-winning Hotness Factor. Even though there's only an 18-year real difference in their ages, the non-connection between the two just reinforces the theory that it is the studio-manufactured aspect of the romance, not the age gap itself, that we object to.

So...o...o different from "Harold and Maude", which boasts an age difference between Gordon and Cort of 52 years yet remains, after all this time, charming, gentle, and life affirming. Watching it, you'll possibly start out Yuk!ing but you'll end up cheering.

Audiences in 1963 who first saw "Charade" were barely aware of the generation gap between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, which numbered 25 years. Hepburn was so charming and beyond her years, and Grant so sophisticated, and the age difference so completely irrelevant to the plot, that any objections to the subsequent romance, on the grounds of age, seemed like sour grapes from an insipid Rube.

The same gap of 25 years separated Humphrey Bogart from the delectable Jewish American Princess, then 19-year-old Lauren Bacall. Her extraordinary confidence, husky voice, and smoldering sexuality not only made the large difference in ages of "To Have and Have Not"'s stars irrelevant, it was, to movie-goers of the time, virtually invisible. Soon after the film's release, when it became public that a real-life romance had erupted between Bogey and Bacall, audiences not only accepted the unlikely liaison, they cheered it, and demanded more screen romance from the same duo. And they were not disappointed, as a classic love affair between two devoted, married people delighted fans of Betty and Bogey for many years, until his untimely death.

Over the years, I've shared dozens of Yuk! Factor films with audiences of all ages themselves. The results are not predictable. Clark Gable, for example, actually spoofed the phenomenom in 1959's "But Not For Me," and viewers then, and ones who now view it in retrospectives, howl. I've asked rabid Audrey Hepburn fans who they would rather see their favorite heroine with -- Cary Grant or George Peppard -- and they pick the suave Grant every time. (What really sells them on "Breakfast at Tiffany's" are the clothes.) No surprise, then, that 2007's "Next" takes top spot in Yuk! Factoring, but not for the obvious reason of turkey- neck fondling nubile flesh. It is clear from theater attendee's reactions that what is objectionable in a Hollywood May-December romance is not the generation gap itself, it is the cold, calculated pairing of two people of the opposite sex, whatever their age, for reasons that are strictly box-office. The message from lovers of film to the producers of same is, "We will believe it, but only if you believe in it, too."

Having tagged the loser then as "Next," let's pick a winner...