A Movie Weekend

Lousy weather this past weekend caused it to be a Movie Weekend for The Grandstander and Mrs. Grandstander.

Earlier in the month, I set a task for myself of watching all three Godfather movies and that task was completed on Saturday night when we watched "The Godfather - Part III." This movie usually takes a critical pounding, due mainly to the fact that it is compared to its two previous incarnations, and let's face it, what wouldn't suffer in comparison to "The Godfather" and "The Godfather - Part II"? However, if you look at this movie on its own, it's not a bad one. The acting certainly isn't up to the standards of the first two, thanks in large part to Sofia Coppola's awful performance as Michael's daughter, and I think that Al Pacino resorted to scenery chewing in large part, rather than the nuanced acting performances he delivered in the first two movies.

Still, a pretty good movie.

For Loyal Reader Big Poppy, a few items of note:

"Lucy Mancini" appears once again as the mother of Vincent (Andy Garcia), the illegitimate son of Sonny Corleone. As noted in earlier blog posts, Lucy was a major character in the novel, but a throwaway in the first movie (she did not bear a son to Santino in the novel). She did not appear in Part II. An actress named Jeannie Linero played her in both the original and in Part III.

Also, appearing in Part III was Calo, one of Micheal's bodyguards while he was in exile in Sicily. Calo remains loyal to Micheal by killing the treacherous Don Luchesi (not sure if he was related to Frank) in Part III. The same actor, Franco Citti, played Calo in the two movies.

Finally, the wheelchair bound Don Tomasino in Sicily appears in Part III. This character was in all three films, and he was played by a different actor in each of the three movies.

I hope that these facts can be of use to Big Poppy at the next meeting of the Philadelphia Commission at Dante & Luigi's.

Thanks to http://www.imdb.com/ for being the source of this research!

We also rented and watched "Crazy Heart" to see Jeff Bridges Oscar winning performance, as well as the Amelia Earhart biopic with Hilary Swank. We liked both movies. I even went to iTunes to download the Crazy Heart soundtrack.

Finally, we went to the theater to see the Disney documentary, "Oceans," which we also enjoyed.

Whew! Think we are movied out for the time being.