Bryce Zabel's MOVIE SMACKDOWN!

Nobel Son (2008) -vs- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

Brothers Up in Arms

The Smackdown.  Since Cain and Abel, brothers have been letting things get out of hand. The conflict is biblical and filmmakers just can't stay away from the chance to tie bad brothers and greed into a messy bow for us.  There's always room for the new. After all, it's been three decades since Michael and Fredo Corleone put the same issues out there in a pair of "Godfather" films three decades ago. Now, writer/director Randall Miller makes his own run in "Nobel Son" with plenty of greed and sibling fireworks. Just last year writer Kelly Masterson reworked those ideas in the highly regarded but under appreciated "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" from director Sidney Lumet. That's our holiday Smackdown!: Deciding which movie tells the better story of battling brothers, and which deserves a lump of coal.

The Challenger. Few people are less deserving of the acclaim just bestowed upon Eli Michaelson. His unbelievable good fortune propels "Nobel Son." Michaelson (Alan Rickman) receives word he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and it turns a simple misanthrope into a monster. Eli's colleagues disliked his aloof, condescending manner; now he's insufferable and they hate him. That pretty much sums up the feelings of Michaelson's forensic psychiatrist wife, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) and their son, Barkley (Bryan Greenberg). To Sarah, Eli is selfish, philandering and boorish. He is dismissive toward Barkley. Eli Michaelson is irresistibly nasty. Matters might have remained at that level until Barkley misses his flight to the award ceremony in Sweden. He's been kidnapped by Thaddeus James, whose genetic link to Eli had been undisclosed until now. James (Shawn Hatosy) wants revenge and Michaelson's Nobel Prize money. A convoluted series of events follows, involving mayhem, the Stockholm Syndrome, double crosses, several Mini Coopers, a detective (Bill Pullman) sweet on Sarah, plus an unstable young woman named City Hall (Eliza Dushku). On the way to resolution, no plot twist is ignored and the story - cowritten by Miller and Jody Savin- even aims for laughs.

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. 

W. (2008) -vs- All The President’s Men (1976)

Presidential State of Mind

The Smackdown. Two wildly unpopular presidents and the mess they leave behind. Thirty-odd years apart but linked by a few common and terribly unfortunate threads. Hubris. Megalomania. Bad advice. Two films make drama of historical incident before the endings have quite played themselves out. It’s a tricky business, this current events filmmaking, walking the quivery line of fiction, hearsay, and reportage. We find ourselves drawn to the fiery spectacle, the political car wrecks at the side of our nation’s highway, hoping for some light and not just heat. The men who brought down President Nixon and his minions versus The Joe-No-More-Sixpacks who brought himself down and the nation and world along with him. Who wins? Not us. Not by a long shot.

The Challenger. Oliver Stone’s “W.” (2008) takes viewers through a picaresque and non-linear tour of Bush's eventful life, an investigation of a spoiled rich kid blessed with everything but moral and intellectual rigor -- his (selective) struggles and triumphs, how he found both his wife and his faith, and the critical days leading up to Bush's real life Dr. Strangelove moment – his fateful decision to invade Iraq.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008) -vs- The Godfather: Part III (1990)

Third One's The Charm(er)

The Smackdown. Sequels rarely top the original. Some are downright soul-scarringly wretched. Most leave the viewer vaguely aware that they've had their pockets picked by a large corporation's greedy stab at recapturing movie magic by revisiting a lucrative well once or twice too often. Then there are the sacred franchises - all those Jedi knights and boy wizards and hobbits and pirates standing tall as lighthouses, inspiring a thousand ill-conceived sequels. Legions of diehard fans can't get enough of these perennial box office champions, marking their calendars for the next installments and collecting tiny plastic effigies, posters, and other placeholders to tide them over in the meanwhile. Merchandising provides another kind of sequel; Disney, the empire built by a shirtless rodent, knows best how to milk a cash cow.

So now, dancing blithely into the theaters comes the third entry in a mega-successful Disney Channel telemovie franchise, this time direct not to video but direct to the even-bigger screen. Worthy of the upgrade or no, the multiplexes will be packed with squealing teenyboppers.

Coppola didn't disappoint with his "Godfather Part II". Hardly. More than a decade later, he sailed once more into the breech, trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, a complicated story in hand and much (but sadly not all) of his creative team intact. Too old for wizards and hobbits, we Godfather groupies waved bon voyage from the shore and waited, fingers crossed, to see if his third trip would prove worthy of the family.

So. It's Gangsters versus Grads. If part two's for the company, is part three the charm?

Paper Moon (1973) -vs- The Sting (1973)

Brother, Can You Spare Some Time?

The Smackdown.  While the world today is transfixed by the impending bailout caused by scammers who put us on a path to economic meltdown, both "Paper Moon" and "The Sting" are about scammers who did their best work after it happened.  Can you say Great Depression?  Can you say Great Depression II: The Sequel?  Anyway, there must have been something in the water out here in Hollywood in 1973 to have triggered two such comedies within six months of each other.  Both films give us characters who believe that the system has already proved itself to be so rigged against the average guy that it's okay to lie, cheat and steal in order to get by.  And they make it look good.  These guys (and that little girl) would have killed on today's Wall Street. We'll give the "Defending Champion" designation to "The Sting" because it performed better at the box office and start the rumble...

The Challenger.  Despite the above picture, "Paper Moon" which is based on Joe David Brown's novel "Addie Pray" was brought to the screen by writer Alvin Sargent and director Peter Bogdanovich in black-and-white.  It's best known because real-life father-daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal star together and she actually won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (youngest to ever win).  It's about a con job where the two of them team up to sell overpriced Bibles to unwitting widows (by claiming their husbands ordered them just before they died).  This is not normally the kind of behavior one cheers on but, the truth is, you do anyway.   Also noteworthy was the high-contrast, extreme depth-of-field cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs, Bogdanovich's long, uninterrupted takes which lets the fast-paced, snappy dialogue shine without resorting to conventional cutting techniques and the exclusive use of actual period tunes from the personal collection of Rudi Fehr heard only when one of the characters is listening to a radio.