I watched some movies

classicaljunkie and I celebrated our two-year anniversary last night by watching the first two Godfather films at the Brattle. (We watched The Departed at the Somerville on our official first date.)

I had not seen either film before, if you can believe it. (The junkie has seen both many times, and this outing was at her suggestion.) The experience reminded me of studying Romeo & Juliet for the first time in high school, and being so amazed as how much content was in it, beyond the balcony scene and everybody-dies ending that every resident of Western popular culture knows about. What a pleasure it was to discover what the first movie held, beyond the horse-head scene and the one line everyone can quote. (I'm willing to bet that most people who have not seen The Godfather think that Marlin Brando's is the main character. I certainly did, before yesterday.)

Also, the opening measures of the theme song... for my whole life, hearing this has meant "You are about to watch a parody of some bit of The Godfather, maybe with Bill Clinton instead of Don Corleone or something". So hearing that in a dark theater and trying to convince myself no really it's the real thing this time was interesting.

It also brought to mind Brust's Vlad Taltos novels. I started reading these only last year, and they may be the first book-length gangster stories I've read, odd as that seems. (Trying to think back to see if I'm wrong... I liked Robert Aspirin's "Myth" series when I was a kid, and they have gangstery themes, but they're also very silly.) Anyway, the first books, written less than ten years after The Godfather completely redefined the crime-drama subgenre, clearly borrowed liberally from the films to build the structure of its underworld, never mind that it has elves instead of Italians. (Actually, I guess it would have humans instead of Italians. But anyway.) I learned all my (movie-)gangster lingo from reading these novels, so it was fun to watch them reappear in their original context.

As for Part II, I liked it OK, but it couldn't avoid feeling like a mere epilogue to the neat, perfect story told by the first. As such, the fact that it was significantly longer than the original work just made it feel uncomfortably unbalanced. It reminded me of how I felt after reading "Dune Messiah", except that that's not a very long book.