Watched Journal: December 2024
The holidays are the season for epics, when the days are shorter and the run times are longer.
In The Godfather, where Michael Corleone and Kay walk in wintry Manhattan with presents in arm, the classic film about family is a Christmas tradition for many who cozy up on the couch after leftovers to watch the three hour film (and its sequel). I've recently started my own tradition of watching The Irishman around Thanksgiving, another gangster epic, that hits the spot during the holidays. With the sun setting and temperatures dropping, I also found it appropriate to revisit The Good Shepherd, Robert De Niro's magnificent film about the origins of the CIA. I remember it leaving me lukewarm when I saw it at the theater in 2006, but it's aged into a very haunting depiction of America's covert operations.
On Christmas evening I watched Cleopatra, Joseph Mankiewicz's extravagant four hour behemoth from 1963 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. To say the backstory of Cleopatra's troubled production is more interesting than the film itself may have been true some 50 years ago, but today it towers as a colossal artifact of the past, when Hollywood churned out grand epics complete with sweeping musical overtures, intermissions and finales. The Academy Award winning costumes, art direction and cinematography are a testament to the lush, spare no expense details that could never be replicated today.
A new film that recalls the grand pictures of the past in length and scope, The Brutalist, aims to be the modern epic of American cinema. Following the journey of an Hungarian architect who sails towards Ellis Island, gazing up at the Statue of Liberty in wonder, director Brady Corbet evokes the arrival of a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Whether The Brutalist is destined to become part of our traditions remains to be seen.
What I watched in December:
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