Resolution Help From Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As the first day of 2022 comes to a close, now is a good time to stop, take a look back over the past 24 hours, and determine how many of your resolutions have already been broken. Have you broken one or two of them? How about all of them? Or did you forget to make a resolution all together?

Well, don’t worry! Seriously, New Year’s resolutions are the worst! Every new year, people resolve to make changes and it rarely happens. Instead, people almost immediately break their resolutions and then they spend the next 12 months feeling like a failure. The amount of pressure that people put on themselves to try to change their lives for the better, it’s not fair, to be honest. If you’ve already broken your resolution, don’t feel bad about it. As long as your resolution wasn’t to stop doing something terrible and illegal, I forgive you if you’ve already totally failed to keep your promise to yourself. Take some comfort in that.

(My own resolution for 2022 was to be nicer to my friends and stop putting so much pressure on myself. I think that was last year’s resolution as well and we all know how well that went. I think my most successful resolution was from 2004. That was when I resolved to survive any serious car accidents that I got involved with and to go to college and I managed to keep both of those resolutions. BOOM!)

We always hear that change is good but sometimes it isn’t. And here to illustrate that point are John Cleese and Michael Palin from Monty Python’s Flying Circus! Below is one of my favorite sketches from that famous show. Palin is a chartered accountant who wants to be a lion tamer. He has no experience but he does have his own hat! Cleese shows him the error of his ways, including revealing that Palin has long been mistaking anteaters for lions. Who hasn’t made the same mistake?

(I have to admit that my favorite Monty Python moments often involved Palin somehow getting on Cleese’s nerves. Palin’s eagerness to please and his way with a deceptively passive statement was always the perfect foil for Cleese’s slightly more aggressive style of comedy. Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve read on numerous occasions that Cleese’s main motivation for getting involved with what would become Monty Python was so he could work with Michael Palin.)

My favorite line from this particular vignette: “Yes, yes, yes, I do follow, Mr Anchovy, but you see the snag is… if I now call Mr Chipperfield and say to him, ‘look here, I’ve got a forty-five-year-old chartered accountant with me who wants to become a lion tamer’, his first question is not going to be ‘does he have his own hat?'”

Think of this whenever you fear that you’re not living up to your resolutions! After all, sometimes there’s more to changing one’s life than merely having the right hat (though, I imagine it does help).

Lisa Marie’s Week In Television — 12/26/21 — 1/1/22

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy 2022! I spent most of this holiday week visiting my sister Megan and her family. That’s been a bit of a Bowman holiday tradition since 2008. We watched a lot of TV. We both love Saved By The Bell and California Dreams so that shouldn’t be too much of surprise. Anyway, there’s much to share this week so let’s get right into what I watched during the final week of 2021!

The Bold and the Beautiful (Weekday afternoons, CBS)

This used to be my show! Of course, it’s been a while since I’ve regularly watched The Bold and the Beautiful but, on Wednesday, I decided to tune in just to see what was happening. People were discussing their relationships and talking about fashion while getting ready for New Year’s. Brooke is still on the show. I might start setting the DVR in 2022.

The Brady Bunch (Sunday Morning, MeTV)

I watched two episodes. First, Greg wanted to drop out of high school to pursue a career as a major league pitcher. He was talked out of it. Is there nothing that the Brady kids weren’t good at? What an annoying family! This was followed by an episode in which Marcia promised she could get Davy Jones to play her high school dance and somehow, she pulled it off because everything always worked out for Marcia. Jan, on the other hand….

California Dreams (DVD)

Megan and I watched a few episodes of this classic 90s NBC sitcom on Friday morning. It’s kind of our New Year’s tradition. We both agreed that Lorena and I have a lot in common. We also watched Tony perform that “Next big thing” song of his. He’s so funky!

Dance Moms (Wednesday, LRW)

LRW did a Dance Moms marathon on Wednesday. I watched a few episodes that morning and it made me realize how much I miss this show. It also brought back a lot of memories for me personally, though my mom was never as crazy as the moms on this show. I wonder if Maddie ever returns Abby’s calls.

Since the show aired on LRW, I got to see all those old “real women” commercials that Lifetime used to air, like the one with the woman talking about the time she scolded her mom for saying she needed a man to explain something to her. “You know, that was her generation, ha ha ha.” All I know is that you just made fun of your mother on national television.

Days of Our Lives (Weekday Afternoons, NBC)

It’s been a while since I’ve watched any of the daytime dramas but my sister Megan informed me that a character on Days of Our Lives had been possessed by the devil since September so, on Tuesday, I decided to watch to see what that was like. From what I saw of it, it looked like a lot of fun. With Marlena tied to her bed and speaking in a gravelly demon voice, everyone was getting ready for the exorcism. “We’re not dealing with your mom,” one character explain, “We’re dealing with …. it.” “You shut your mouth or you’re going to get a face full of holy water!” someone else declared. A priest entered the bedroom and Marlena’s daughter said, “You’re a priest again?” Meanwhile, Patch dressed up as Santa Claus, which was charming in its own weird way. Fortunately, everything worked out in the end. These are indeed the days of our lives.

Dexter: New Blood (Showtime, Sunday Night)

I wrote about the latest episode of Dexter here!

Football Game: Bills vs. Patriots (Sunday Afternoon, CBS)

I watched this on Sunday morning with my sisters. I have to admit that I didn’t pay much attention but I do remember that everyone wanted the Bills to win so I felt obligated to cheer for the Patriots. I don’t remember who actually won, though. Football games are really, really long.

Football Game: Cowboys vs. Football Team (Sunday Night, NBC)

I watched this game with my sister Megan and her husband, John. They got really excited whenever the Cowboys scored. I felt bad for Football Team. I figure that it has to suck to be a member of Football Team because everyone they meet is probably like, “Who do you play for?” and when the player says, “Football team,” everyone probably replies, “I know, but which one?” What I’m saying here is that these guys need a real name if they’re going to succeed. For example, the Cowboys pretty much destroyed Football Team on Sunday. I thought the Cowboys were seriously going to score a 100 points before the game ended. Poor generic Football Team.

General Hospital (Weekday Afternoons, ABC)

I watched an episode on Wednesday. Too much talk, not enough hospital.

Hang Time (YouTube)

Hang Time was basically Saved By The Bell except it centered around a high school basketball team in Indiana. It aired from 1995 to 2000 on NBC and it was never that good but it lives on because every episode has been uploaded to YouTube. NBC is pretty aggressive about taking down unauthorized SBTB uploads but they don’t seem to care much about Hang Time.

Anyway, early Wednesday morning, I forced Megan to watch an episode because I wanted her to hear one line that always amused me. The episode opened, as they often did, with a basketball game. However, for this game, the main characters (including a very young Anthony Anderson) were forced to spend the entire game on the bench while the backup players hit the court and …. uhm, lost. In fact, they lost bad. It turned out the main characters were being punished for getting fake IDs and driving drunk.

About 15 minutes into the episode, one of the backup players is injured but when he limps over to the baseline or the sideline or whatever they call it in basketball, he yells at the coach that he wants to keep playing because, unlike some people, “I CARE ABOUT THE TEAM!” And then coach sends him back into the game despite the fact that the he can barely walk! For some reason, that’s always made me laugh. The coach taught his players a lesson by forcing someone who did nothing wrong to play injured. What a guy!

The Love Boat (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

The Love Boat and another ship traveled to Alaska, where the captains competed to see who was the best. Apparently, it was a promotional gimmick but the competition turned personal when the son of the rival captain decided that he would rather work on the super mellow Love Boat as opposed to his father’s boat. Anyway, it was silly but Alaska looked lovely. Plus, Sonny Bono was on the episode as some sort of hyper corporate guy.

The Office (Weekdays, Comedy Central)

Comedy Central did an Office marathon this week. On Monday, I watched a few episodes from season 2. They kept me happy as I wrote 2,300 words on Monster, one of the most depressing movies ever made. (Look for that review on Monday!) Then, on Tuesday, I watched a few episodes from season 3 while I was writing another 2,000 words about the making of The Godfather Part III. (Look for that post on Monday as well!)

By the time Wednesday rolled around, Comedy Central had started on season 5, which is when the show started to get uneven and, not coincidentally, Ed Helms’s role started to get larger. However, there were still some classic episodes during season 5, like the Golden Ticket episode and The Michael Scott Paper Company arc. Those also just happened to be the episodes that I watched.

By Thursday, we were into season six and …. eh. Season six is when Jim and Pam started to get a bit insufferable in their smugness and there was that whole weird thing where Jim was briefly co-manager. Megan and I watched the Gossip episode and The Meeting episode and we both agreed it was actually kind of rude of Jim to go behind Michael’s back with his whole co-manager idea. We then did a little shopping. When we came back, we caught my two favorite episodes of that season — Scott’s Tots and The Shareholder’s Meeting.

Hey there, Mr. Scott, whatcha going to do? Whatcha going to do? Make our dreams come true!

Parking Wars (Weekday Mornings, A&E)

On Thursday morning, I forced Megan to watch an episode of Parking Wars with me, just so she could understand what I’m always complaining about. For 30 minutes, as we watched the action in Detroit and Philadelphia, I said, “See? This is totally how fascism comes to be accepted!” Megan said she agreed with me, though I think she may have just been saying that …. which is fine! Just as long everyone agrees.

Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (Fuse, Monday Morning)

Sabrina felt that all of her academic accomplishments were being taken for granted so she cast a spell which caused everyone to go crazy over every little thing she did. Needless to say, an important lesson about humility was learned.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the only show about Sabrina, The Teenage Witch that matters. Talking Salem for the win!

Saved By The Bell: The Junior High Years (a.k.a. Good Morning Miss Bliss) (Netflix)

At December 26th, at midnight, my sister Megan and I sat down and watched six episodes of Saved By The Bell. Well, we didn’t actually just spend 2 and a half hours watching them. We were talking and cleaning and laughing and doing other things. But still, we had the show on and we did occasionally pause long enough in all of our other activities to see what was going on.

The episodes that we watched were from the infamous Junior High years. That was when the show aired on the Disney Channel and it was set in Indiana and Slater, Kelly, and Jessie were not on the show. Instead, the show centered around Miss Bliss (Hayley Mills), a British widow who somehow ended up teaching social studies at a junior high in Indiana. At the time, the show was called Good Morning, Miss Bliss. Good Morning, Miss Bliss was canceled after 13 episodes but was then relaunched on NBC, with Zack, Screech, Lisa, and Mr. Belding all somehow relocating to California. The Miss Bliss episodes could probably be written off as non-canon, if not for the fact that many of them were re-aired as episodes of Saved By The Bell, with special introductions in which Zack would say, “This is from when we were in junior high.” It didn’t make any sense but Saved By The Bell just didn’t care.

Anyway, the first episode of Good Morning, Miss Bliss featured Zack lying to a girl about the fact that he was only in the 8th Grade. The girl was played by a very young Carla Gugino, who went on to do much better things with her career. Anyway, Zack learned an important lesson about lying but apparently not important enough to inspire Zack to actually be honest in any future episodes.

The 2nd episode that we watched featured a love letter that kept getting read by the wrong people. Mr. Belding thought Miss Bliss was in love with him. Miss Bliss thought Belding loved her. Lisa thought …. ugh, I’m getting a headache just thinking about it. The most interesting thing about this episode is that the whole stupid plot was later reused in one of the Tori episodes of regular Saved By The Bell.

The third episode that we watched was one of my favorites of the Miss Bliss episodes. Miss Bliss teaches her students about the stock market by investing some of her own money in a stock of their choosing. However, Zack desperately needs money so he invests the money in potatoes. Miss Bliss is furious when she finds out and yells at everyone, which was fun because Miss Bliss was always a bit too perfect to be believed so it was nice to see that, deep down, she was a neurotic mess. Fortunately, she forgave everyone by the end of the episode.

Episode #4 features Zack’s friend Nikki refusing to dissect a frog. Miss Bliss took Nikki’s side but was still upset when Nikki stole all of the frogs. Meanwhile, Mr. Belding was panicking because he thought another school was trying to recruit Miss Bliss so he let Miss Bliss have anything that she wanted. However, Mr. Belding soon realized he was mistaken and promptly took everything back. TAKE THAT, MISS BLISS!

Episode #5 left Megan and I totally confused. Zack was upset because Miss Bliss was dating his father. The divorce of the Morrises had been hard on Zack and, as a result, Zack was totally acting out. What’s weird is that Zack’s parents were NOT divorced in the high school episodes of Saved By The Bell. It’s almost as if the writers just didn’t care.

Finally, Episode #6 featured Screech getting targeted by the school bully. However, it turned out that the bully was just upset because he was illiterate. That would have upset me too. Having learned a valuable lesson about bullying, Megan and I decided we had watched enough Saved By The Bell for that morning.

On Monday morning, we watched the remaining 7 Miss Bliss episodes. Again, we didn’t just watch. We talked and laughed and made plans while the show played in the background. To be honest, we probably paid even less attention on Monday than we did on Sunday. By this point, we’ve both got every episode of this stupid show memorized so it’s not like we really had to focus to know what was going on.

Episode #7 was a school dance episode. I guess, technically, it was the first ever SBTB dance episode. Mr. Belding was worried about a fight breaking out at the dance. A first actually did break out at the dance between Zack and his loser friend, Mickey. Mickey liked a girl but she liked Zack. Fortunately, Miss Bliss was there to save the day.

In Episode #8, Zack got out of taking a midterm by releasing Screech’s pet rats in the school. Megan and I found the idea of a school closing down because of rats to be hilarious. Seriously, I’ve seen rodents running around college campuses, ducking from classroom to classroom. Anyway, due to Zack’s selfishness, it appeared that Miss Bliss would miss out on her chance to be named Teacher of the Year. Fortunately, everyone teamed up to help her because, of course, the entire school revolved around keeping her happy.

In Episode #9, Zack and his other other loser friend, Nikki, teamed up for a class project but Zack expected her to do all the work. (Boooo!) It led to a rift in their friendship but Zack fixed it all by apologizing in front of the entire class. Megan and I both agreed that was probably an awkward experience for all the other students who were forced to sit through it.

Episode #10 found the junior high in the midst of a prank war. Who pranked Miss Bliss and ruined her ugly sweater!? Everyone thought it was Screech and the class held a mock trial as opposed to just burning him at the stake. Screech was acquitted and it turned out that he was actually framed by Miss Bliss, who wanted to teach the class about the jury system. Neither Megan nor I cared much for this episode and we agreed that it was proof that Miss Bliss was a terrible teacher who didn’t really consider what being forced through a mock trial could do to a young student’s psyche.

Episode #11 was the silliest episode of all. It turned out that Miss Bliss’s former student, Colleen Morton, was now a pop star named …. STEVIE! Zack made a bet with everyone that he could get a kiss from Stevie. He did get a kiss, but it was from Colleen. It was only later that Zack figured out that Colleen and Stevie were one in the same! Zack lost the bet, even though he was being honest about having been kissed by her. So, I guess the lesson here is that Saved By The Bell took place in a post-truth world.

Episode #12 featured Zack pledging to some sort of weird ninth grade fraternity. The frat demanded that Zack mistreat all of his friends and then, after Zack had lost everyone’s friendship, they revealed they were just playing a joke on him. For some weird reason, Miss Bliss was the principal while Mr. Belding taught home room. At first, everyone thought that Miss Bliss was both the perfect principal and the perfect teacher but then it turned out that Miss Bliss didn’t actually bother to get permission from the school board for any of the “good” things that she did and all of her solutions backfired. TAKE THAT, MISS BLISS!

Finally, we ended things with the 13th and final episode of the Miss Bliss years. Miss Bliss’s mentor showed up at the school and helped to teach her class. His unorthodox methods were frowned upon by Mr. Belding. Personally, I think Belding had a point but whatever. The important thing is that Megan and I survived all 13 episodes.

Silk Stalkings (Tubi)

I decided to binge all 8 seasons of the stylish 90s crime show, Silk Stalkings. This show also airs on one of the retro channels, ZLiving. It was a stylish show about rich people doing bad things, often while undressed. The first few seasons starred Rob Estes and Mitzi Kapture as Chris and Rita, two detectives who worked together to solve crimes and who generated endless amounts of sexual tension.

My sister Megan and I watched the pilot on Monday. Chris and Rita investigated the murder of a model. Not surprisingly, the pilot was mostly about introducing Chris and Rita and establishing that they were attractive people who would be worth watching. The pilot did a good job of just that. Estes and Kapture had obvious chemistry from the start. Even overly cutesy things — like calling each other “Sam” — were charming when they did it. A good deal of time was devoted to Rita recovering from an aneurism, with gave the audiences a chance to see just how much Chris cared about his partner. It was sweet, even if I have to agree with Rita that Chris was being a bit overprotective. After the pilot, Megan and I watched two more episodes. Chris and Rita investigate an old rich man who was shooting snuff films in his private sex dungeon and Rita came to terms with the tragic details of her father’s death. And then, a rich car salesman was found floating in the ocean. Fortunately, Chris and Rita were able to bring his very attractive killers to justice!

On Tuesday, we watched an episode in which Chris and Rita solved the murder of a wealthy (naturally) man who was killed on a golf course by an assailant who wielding a meat hook! AGCK! It was a grisly case but the important thing is that everyone involved was attractive. Rita got shot towards the end of the episode. She survived but Megan and I were still like, “Awwwwww!” when Chris got all worried about it. This was followed by a fun episode in which Chris and Rita investigated the murder of a Congressman. You might be surprised to learn that investigating the death of a politician involves talking to a lot of half-naked people. Chris and Rita (especially Chris) were up for the job! This episode also featured a cute little subplot where Chris tried to help Rita deal with her insomnia. Rita had a big poster that simply read, “ART!” in her bedroom.

The first episode that we watched on Wednesday featured Chris and Rita investigating the murder of a half-naked,rich woman. This led to a scene in which they arrested a naked man who, standing in his hot tub, announced that “I heard you would need a semen sample. I was just getting warmed up for you.” Meanwhile, Chris reconnected with an ex-girlfriend who was now working as a stripper. Reconnecting, in this case, meant spending a lot of time at the beach. It was a fun episode. The second episode found Chris and Rita investigating the murder of a sleazy tabloid publisher. Of course, if this show had been made today, he would have just owned a clickbait factory and his death would have been live-streamed. Chis was also upset that Rita had a date with a guy that she barely knew. The date, of course, led to wild limo sex because seriously, what else are you going to do in a limo?

We got things started on Thursday with an episode about a decadent socialite who was drowned in her own pool. Chris and Rita eventually discovered that the killer was a psycho named James who, ironically enough, also ended up dying in a pool. Of course, James killed himself by jumping into the water while holding a sander. We then watched an episode featuring Chris and Rita investigating a murder that had been committed by a bunch of frat boys. Megan and I both agreed that frat boys were the worst!

The Steve Wilkos Show (Weekday Morning, Channel 33)

Hey, Steve Wilkos! Giving lie detector tests and changing lives! Good for you, Steve! I watched your show on Wednesday morning because I was waking up and getting ready for my day and I was basically too busy to change the channel! Get the Hell off my stage!

The Tribe (Pluto TV)

The Tribe is a British/New Zealand co-production that ran for five seasons in the last 90s and the early aughts. It takes place in a future in which all of the adults have been killed by a mysterious virus, leaving behind only children and teenagers who have all formed “tribes,” and who are having to grow up in a world ruled by fear and anarchy. A friend of mine has been recommending this show to me for a while. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to finally check it out!

And that’s what I did. On Saturday morning, around 2 a.m., I watched the first episode on Pluto. It was pretty good. It quickly set up the premise and introduced the characters. Actually, it did quite a bit in just 25 minutes. After meeting in an abandoned city, the main tribe took refuge in a mall. Meanwhile, on the outside, a group of teenagers drove around in a cop car, the siren wailing ominously. It was was an intriguing opening and, after watching the first episode, I decided that The Tribe would be one of the shows that I would binge over the course of 2022.

The Twilight Zone (Saturday and Sunday, SyFy)

I got a few episodes of SyFy’s annual Twilight Zone marathon. On Saturday, I saw Burgess Meredith break his glasses. I saw the one with the hitch-hiker who kept saying, “Going my way?” And I saw one of my absolute favorite episodes, The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. On Sunday, the highlight included Twenty-Two (“Room for one more!”), Peter Falk playing Castro in The Mirror, The Hunt (in which a man realizes that only Hell would refuse to allow dogs), The Bard (in which Shakespeare met Burt Reynolds), and The Changing of the Guard with the great Donald Pleasence!

The Young and the Restless (Weekday mornings, CBS)

Because I had so much fun with Days of Our Lives on Tuesday, I decided to watch The Young and The Restless on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the episode of Y&R that I saw was a bit dry, with a lot of scenes of people standing around and talking about a lawsuit. It was kind of boring but at least everyone looked good!

AMV of the Day: 3 (Winx Club)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A new year calls for a new AMV of the Day. To make it even better, the music is from Britney!

Anime: Winx Club

Song: 3 (Britney Spears)

Creator: Jessie Disturbia

(As always, please consider subscribing to this creator’s YouTube channel!)

Past AMVs of the Day

A Blast From The Past: Better Use Of Leisure Time

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, it’s a new year.

That means that it’s time to start thinking about what you want to make of yourself this year. What are you going to do? What are you going to accomplish? How are you going to make yourself proud of who you’ve become?

There’s a lot of movies coming out. Maybe you’ll go to them. Or maybe you’ll be the person who spends all of their time on twitter, tweeting about how scared you are of going back to the theaters. Both options come with their risks and their rewards.

There’s a celebrity edition of Big Brother airing in February. Maybe you’ll watch it. Maybe you’ll blog about it, because you like getting paid more than your dislike the show. Or maybe you’ll spend all of your time on twitter, talking about how much you hate reality TV.

2022 is an election year. Maybe you’ll run for office. Maybe you’ll volunteer to work for a campaign. Maybe you’ll spend all of your time on twitter, tweeting about how people need to vote for your candidate. Maybe you’ll come up with the hashtag that changes the course of the election! Maybe you’ll hang out in the paring lot of Whataburger, waiting for Beto to toll by.

Or maybe….

Eh.

You’re not going to do anything.

Let’s be honest, most of us are very lazy and we have absolutely no idea how lucky we are compared to people who lived just a few decades ago. We take a lot of things for granted and we waste a lot of time doing nothing, precisely because we can do just about anything that we want.

(Of course, in my case, I’m have ADHD. I spend a lot of time doing things but usually, I end up trying to do them all at once. Reading a book and watching a TV at the same time is not difficult but when you also try to vacuum the living room while doing those other two things, it starts to get a little bit more difficult. Still, my super power is ADHD and I’m thankful.)

Well, fear not! A short film from Coronet Films has traveled all the way from 1950 to encourage you to make better use of your leisure time! Why …. that’s even the name of the film! Better Use of Your Leisure Time follows a good-for-nothing, spoiled teenager named Ken as he learns why spending all of your time moping is perhaps the worst thing that you can do. With the help of a judgmental narrator and the ability to see alternative universes, Ken learns an important lesson. There’s no hope with mope! Ken discovers that some people actually have hobbies and spend their free time creating and learning and being a decent citizen. It’s an important lesson and hopefully, it’s one that Ken will remember the next time that someone tells him that moping is no big deal.

Anyway, as far as Coronet Educational Films go, this one isn’t bad. Ken is a bit of a loser but that’s to be expected of these type of films. It’s very much a product of its era and, if nothing else, it stands as evidence that people wasted time even before the internet existed. TAKE THAT, LUDDITES!

Watch, enjoy, and learn. LEARN, GOSH DARN IT!

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Irishman (dir by Martin Scorsese)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Released by Netflix in 2019 and clocking in at close to 4 hours, the Martin Scorsese-directed Best Picture nominee, The Irishman, is a film about many different things.

At its simplest, it’s a film about a very old man named Frank Shearan (played by Robert De Niro). Frank is an Irish-American from Philadelphia. Frank is a veteran of World War II and a former truck driver who was briefly a fairly important figure in the Teamsters union. He did a few years in prison. At the start of the film, though, he’s just another elderly man living in a retirement community. All of his friends are dead. His wife passed away years ago. His children never comes to visit. In fact, the only people interested in talking to Frank are the FBI but Frank doesn’t have much to say to them. That’s not to say that Frank isn’t talkative. For the first time in his life, he wants to talk to people but there’s no one left to talk to. The only people who listen are those who are required to do so. A nurse politely nods along as as he tells her about his old friend Jimmy Hoffa. (She’s never heard of him.) A priest listens to the story of Frank’s life and offers him absolution. At times, Frank looks straight at Scorsese’s camera and appears to be talking straight to the audience. Frank has a lot of interesting stories but who knows how truthful he’s being or if his memory can be trusted.

The Irishman, though, is not just the story of Frank. It is also a secret history of America during the latter half of the 20th Century. Frank may look old and harmless in that nursing home but, to hear him tell it, he was once acquainted with some of the most powerful men in America. He went from executing Italian POWs during World War II to executing hits for the Mafia in post-war America. Along the way, he became close to crime bosses like Skinny Razor (Bobby Cannavale), Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel) and Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), men who may not have been household names but who still wielded a lot of power. These are men who, Frank flatly states, fixed the presidential election of 1960 and who later quite possibly killed the man they had elected president. Frank also became a close associate of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the labor leader who was reputed to have mob connections and who disappeared in 1975.

The Irishman is also a tribute to the modern gangster film, featuring role for nearly every living actor associated with the genre. De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Keitel, Bobby Cannavale, Domenick Lombardozzi, Gary Basaraba, they’ve all played their share of gangsters in films and television show that were both good and bad. Having them all appear in one film together serves to remind the viewer of just how much of America’s popular entertainment has revolved around stories of organized crime. Even as the old school Mafia has declined as a real-world power, it’s become a permanent part of pop culture. Everyone loves a gangster, except for the people who actually have to deal with them on a daily basis.

Not surprisingly, considering the stars and the director, it’s a film full of smart, detailed performances. When the film was originally released, Pacino and Pesci got the lion’s share of the praise and they certainly deserved it. Pacino gets the best lines and brings some unexpected wit to his performance as Jimmy Hoffa. Pesci, meanwhile, finally gets to play a gangster who is not psychotic and shows that he can be just as compelling when he’s not raising his voice as when he is. Still, some of my favorite performances came from actors who one wouldn’t necessarily associate with a Scorsese gangster film. I liked the nervous humor that Ray Romano brought to the role of a corrupt union lawyer. I liked the seething resentment that Stephen Graham brought to the role of Jimmy Hoffa’s main rival in the union. (The scene where Graham and Pacino argue over who is more owed an apology for all of their past disagreements is both funny and, due to the people involved, somewhat frightening.) Jesse Plemons is poignantly dumb in his brief role as Hoffa’s stepson. Louis Cancelmi doesn’t get a lot of screen time but he steals every scene in which he appears as a paranoid hitman. (Cancelmi plays a character named Sally Bugs, proving that not everyone in the Mafia gets a cool nickname.)

And then there’s Anna Paquin, who provides the film with its moral center. When the film was first released, many Twitter critics complained that Paquin, who played Frank’s daughter Peggy, only a had a handful of lines. It was one of the stupidest controversies of 2019, which is saying something when you consider how much time Film Twitter devotes to generating stupid controversies. Peggy doesn’t say much because she’s decided that she doesn’t want to be a part of her father’s life. From the moment that she first sees Frank beating up a store owner, Peggy knows that her father and his associates are violent men. She not only fears them but she resents the damage that Frank does to not only her family but to the families as other as well. The only one of her father’s associates who she likes is Jimmy Hoffa, because Hoffa cares about helping others. When Hoffa disappears, Peggy makes a decision to disappear from Frank’s life and Paquin’s withering stare says more than any lengthy monologue could. Peggy doesn’t say much because she knows that her words would be wasted on a man who she knows is a liar. The scene where she silently walks away from her now elderly father tells us everything we need to know about the emotional consequences of the life that Frank has chosen to live. Regardless of how many lines she did or didn’t have, Paquin gave one of the best performances of 2019.

Famously (or, depending on which critics you read, infamously), de-aging technology was used so that De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, and Keitel could play both the younger and the older version of their characters. At first, it can be a bit jarring. The de-aging works fine with Pesci and Keitel, both of whom are already supposed to be middle-aged when they first meet Frank. (Admittedly, Keitel only has a few minutes of screen time.) With De Niro and Pacino, it’s a bit less successful. Even when they’re playing younger versions of themselves, De Niro and Pacino still move and stand like old men. Fortunately, in the case of Pacino, his natural movie star charisma wins out over his obvious age. In the end, we believe that he’s Hoffa because we want to believe that all of our important historical figures were as interesting and entertaining as Al Pacino is in The Irishman.

And yet, ultimately, even the awkward de-aging works to the film’s advantage because it reminds us that we’re not necessarily seeing what happened. Instead, we’re seeing what Frank says happened. We’re seeing his memories, or at least what he claims to remember. It makes sense that, when Frank thinks about himself as a young truck driver in 1956, he would picture himself not as he was but instead as just a slightly less weathered version of who he would eventually become. Throughout the film, there are hints that Frank’s memory should not be trusted. Some of his stories are incredibly detailed while others — like when he transports weapons for the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs — are a bit more vaguely presented. Is Frank lying or is he misremembering or are we just expecting too much detail from a man who is now essentially waiting to die? The film leaves that up for us to determine.

The Irishman is Scorsese at his most reflective. Compared to Goodfellas and Casino, The Irishman is certainly one of Scorsese’s less “flashy” films. But, on repeat viewings, it becomes cleat that The Irishman is the perfect conclusion to the gangster trilogy that began with Goodfellas and continued with Casino. All three of these films deal with someone who rises up the ranks in the mob while remaining, as a result of their ethnicity, an outsider. (Henry Hill and Frank Shearan are both Irish. Ace Rothstein was Jewish.) All three of them are briefly on top of the world and all three of them are left wondering how they’re going to continue their lives after their days at the top are over. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill makes no secret of his disgust at having to live in the bland anonymity of the suburbs. In Casino, Ace Rothstein ends the film with a mournful acceptance the fact that he will never return to his beloved Vegas. (“And that’s that.”) In The Irishman, Frank finally realizes that he has comes to the end of it all, alone and with nothing but death in his future. All three of them made their decisions and, in the end, all three of them are left to deal with the consequences. The trilogy goes from Henry’s anger to Ace’s depression to Frank’s acceptance.

It may seem strange to describe a film like The Irishman as being underrated, seeing as how it was nominated for 10 Oscars and got a Criterion release in record time. And yet, when the film first came out, there was a vague sense of disappointment to found in even some of the positive reviews. It was a Scorsese film that was so eagerly awaited and arrived with so much hype that there was no way it could live up to some of the expectations that had been set for it. (And, of course, there’s also a whole set of people who were predestined to dislike the film precisely because it was a Scorsese film and it was so anticipated.) It’s a long film and, while Netflix should be praised for allowing Scorsese the freedom to make his epic, it’s also not a film that should be viewed in bits and pieces on a tiny screen. The Irishman is a film that should be watched in one sitting and it’s definitely a film that most viewers should watch more than once. It takes more than one viewing to truly grasp the the world that Scorsese has recreated.

The Irishman was nominated for Best Picture. It lost to a worthy competitor, Parasite. Still, regardless of who took him the Oscars, The Irishman is a film that will live forever.

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Penitentiary (dir by Jamaa Fanaka)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1979 prison/blaxploitation film Penitentiary, everyone gets a nickname.

For instance, the main character, played by Leon Isaac Kennedy, may be named Martel Gordone but everyone calls him “Too Sweet,” because he’s addicted to Mr. Goodbar candy bars. Just because Gordone has been sent to prison for a murder that he didn’t actually commit, that’s not going to stop him from going out of his way to eat all the candy that he can. Fortunately, all that candy has not effected his ability to throw a punch or win a fight because this prison is obsessed with boxing.

Too Sweet’s first cellmate is known as Half-Dead (Badja Dola). Half-Dead got his name because he’s already dead on the inside. At least, that’s what I assume the nickname means. It could also mean that, if you find yourself sharing a cell with him, you’re already as good as dead. Half-Dead is violent and sadistic and when he feels that Too Sweet isn’t showing him enough respect, Half-Dead attacks. After an extremely long and grueling fight (one that is made all the more intense by the fact that it’s taking place in a cramped cell), Too Sweet succeeded in kicking Half-Dead’s ass.

Seldom Seen (Floyd Chetman) is Too Sweet’s second cellmate. Seldom Seen is …. well, he’s seldom seen. He has spent 50 of his 65 years in prison. Seldom avoids all of the prison drama and instead, he spends his time in his cell, reading books while sitting in front of a poster of Malcolm X. Seldom Seen, it turns out, used to be a boxer and, when Too Sweet decides to enter the prison boxing tournament, Seldom Seen not only serves as his trainer but also as his mentor.

Jesse “The Bull” Amos (Donovan Womack) is also entering the boxing tournament. Jesse is know as the Bull because he’s big, he’s tough, and he never stops coming after his opponents. He becomes angry when Too Sweet encourage the Bull’s cellmate, “Genie” (Thommy Pollard), to stand up for himself and to not let any man treat him as being “property.” The Bull wants revenge.

Of course, there’s more to the prison boxing tournament than just getting revenge. Win a fight and the warden will allow you an entire week of conjugal visits. Win the tournament and you’ll get early parole and …. wait, a minute, what? I’m all for emptying the prisons and giving people second chances but I’m pretty sure that’s not how parole works. Oh well, it’s a movie, right?

Penitentiary was directed by Jamaa Fanaka, who also directed the very first film that I ever reviewed for this site, Welcome Home Brother Charles. Like Brother Charles, Penitentiary is a film that is obsessed with the idea of being a prisoner of not just the legal system but also of society as a whole. Too Sweet doesn’t just learn how to box. He also learns, from Seldom Seen, that the key to being the “freest man in the world” is to learn how to control your desires and to exercise the self-discipline necessary to make something of yourself. Penitentiary never quite reaches the lunatic heights of Welcome Home Brother Charles, of course. Penitentiary is a far more straight-forward film. Welcome Home Brother Charles featured the title character using his penis to strangle his enemies. In Penitentiary, Too Sweet is content to just beat them up in the boxing ring.

Penitentiary gets off to a strong start. Leon Isaac Kennedy gives a likable performance as Too Sweet and the initial fight between Too Sweet and Half-Dead is handled well. Surprisingly enough, it’s during the boxing scenes that the film starts to run out of energy. The boxing matches go on forever and Fanaka gets bogged down with repetitive scenes of prisoners ducking into a prison restroom to get it on while the guards are distracted by the fight. The film’s narrative momentum stalls out long before the inevitable match between Too Sweet and the Bull. For all the build-up, the final fight turns out to be oddly anti-climatic.

Penitentiary has some strong moments but it doesn’t really come together as a whole. Still, it did well-enough at the box office that Fanaka would go on to direct two increasingly surreal sequels.

Miniseries Review: Mario Puzo’s The Last Don (dir by Graeme Clifford)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First broadcast over three nights in 1997, The Last Don tells the story of a powerful and respected Mafia family. They control politicians across the country and they own casinos in Vegas and their power even extends all the way to Hollywood. Despite having many enemies, the family has thrived due to the leadership of a wise but ruthless Don. This Don remembers the old ways and imparts lessons about honor to the members of his own family. Never let anyone know what you’re thinking. Never side against the family. If someone like you were to make enemies, they would become the Don’s enemies and then they would fear you …. you know, stuff like that.

However, times are changing and America is changing with it. The underworld is no longer run by men of honor. On top that, the Don is aging and in ill-health. Who will succeed him? One possible successor is respected by all but he’s stayed out of the dirtier aspects of the family’s business and, in fact, he seems to have no desire to be a feared man. Another possible successor is ruthless and has a terrible temper. He sometimes speaks out of turn, because the Don has a sentimental weakness for his children. This possible successor’s anger is feared but perhaps fear is the future of the organized crime in America. The old ways are changing but one thing remains the same. The Don believes in America and he believes in family and….

Wait.

Okay, is it just me or does this all sound just a little bit familiar?

If it does, that’s probably because The Last Don is based on a novel by The Godfather‘s Mario Puzo. Though the family may be called The Clerichuzios and the action may have been moved fro the 40s and the 50s to the 60s, 70s, and 80, the story is still the same basic one that was told in The Godfather. Don Clerichuzio (Danny Aiello) is an honorable man whose time is coming to an end. His grandnephew, Cross (Jason Gedrick), is the possible successor who isn’t crazy. His grandson, Dante (Rory Cochrane), is the possible successor who is violent and doesn’t know how to negotiate. Don Clerichuzio’s dream is for the family to become completely legitimate but good luck with that when the film business and the political world are just as corrupt as the Mafia. I supposed one could argue that The Last Don is narrated by Don Clerichuzio while The Godfather has no narration at all but, seriously, once you have to add a voice-over to explain what’s going on, you have pretty much already last the war.

And yes, I did mention the film business. When Francis Ford Coppola first read The Godfather, he famously hated the Hollywood sections of the book and, with the exception of Tom Hagen’s visit to Jack Woltz (and Woltz’s subsequent discovery of a horse’s head in his bed the next morning), Coppola refused to include them in the movie. The second half of The Last Don, however, goes full Hollywood and, more or less, proves Coppola’s point. Cross’s sister, Claudia (Michelle Burke, who also co-starred with Cochrane in Dazed and Confused), gets a job as an agent and one of her clients is the world’s most famous actress, the ludicrously named Athena Aquataine (Daryl Hannah). When Athena has trouble with her crazy ex-husband (Chris Meloni, bringing a spark of genuine danger to the production), Cross helps her out, falls in love, and gets involved in the production of her next film. This brings him into conflict with a studio exec named Bobby Bantz (Robert Wuhl). Unfortunately, all of the Hollywood stuff is pretty dull. One gets the feeling that Puzo was perhaps settling some old scores with the character of Bobby but Robert Wuhl is one of those goofy actors who belongs nowhere near a Mafia drama. And don’t even get me started on country singer k.d. lang, who is bizarrely cast as a film director.

(Add to that, how can anyone take a character named Athena Aquataine seriously? I never miss an Athena Aquataine movie!))

The Hollywood stuff distracts from the Mafia stuff, which is unfortunate because the Mafia stuff is at least occasionally interesting and it’s certainly better-acted than the Hollywood scenes. Joe Mantegna plays Pippi, who is Cross’s father and who, years earlier, killed Dante’s father. (Mantegna’s always good but it’s a struggle to take any character named Pippi seriously.) Kirstie Alley plays Rose Marie, who is Dante’s mentally unstable mother and the Don’s only daughter. Aiello, Mantegna, and Alley all give good performances, as do Burt Young and Seymour Cassel in the roles of family associates. As for the “younger generation” of Clerichuzios, Gedrick is a bit dull but then again, Cross isn’t a very interesting character. The slightly-built Cochrane is miscast as Dante but ultimately, that miscasting kind of works in that it reminds us that, due to his father being the scion of a rival family, Dante is destined to always be viewed as being an outsider.

As I said earlier, The Last Don was originally broadcast over three nights. I watched the whole thing — all five hours of it — in one sitting and, yes, it was a bit of an endurance test. It’s not just that it’s long but also that it keeps getting bogged down in all of the Hollywood stuff. You don’t watch a film like this because you want to spend five hours watching Robert Wuhl mug for the camera. You watch a film like this for the Mafia action and, for a film called The Last Don, there really wasn’t enough Mafia action. It has its moments but it never feels as authentic as The Godfather, Casino, Goodfellas, The Irishman, The Sopranos or any of the other classic films and shows about the Mafia.. The Last Don needed to be extremely Italian but instead, it was only slightly Italian. Robert Evans famously said that Coppola was selected to direct The Godfather because Coppola would make audiences “smell the pasta.” There’s very little pasta in The Last Don.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972, directed by John Huston)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

During the lawless day of the old west, a drifter named Roy Bean (Paul Newman) wanders into the desolate town of Vinegaroon, Texas. When he enters the local saloon, he meets the vagrants who run the town. They beat him, they rob him, and they tie him to the back of his horse and leave him to die.

Bean, however, does not die. Instead, he’s nursed back to health by a beautiful young woman named Maria Elena (Victoria Principal). Carrying a gun, Bean reenters the saloon and promptly kills nearly everyone who previously attacked him. (“I’m not done killing you yet!” Bean yells at one fleeing woman.) Bean sits down in front of the saloon and waits for justice. Instead, he’s visited by a lecherous traveling preacher (Anthony Perkins), who buries the dead and gives Bean absolution. Bean declares that he is now the “law of the West Pecos.” As the preacher leaves, he looks at the audience and says that he never visited Bean again and later died of dysentery in Mexico. He hasn’t seen Bean since dying so the preacher is sure that, wherever Bean went, it wasn’t Heaven.

Judge Roy Bean dispenses rough and hard justice from his saloon and renames the town Langtry, after the actress Lillie Langtry. Bean has never met Langtry or even seen her perform but he writes to her regularly and pictures of her decorate the walls of his saloon. Bean hires outlaws to serve as his town marshals and sentences prostitutes to remain in town and marry the citizens. Lawbreakers are left hanging outside of the saloon. Bean enters into a common law marriage with Maria and, for a while, they even own a bear, who drinks beer and helps Bean maintain order in the court. Bean may be crazy but his methods clean up the town and Langtry starts to grow. As Langtry becomes more civilized and an attorney named Arthur Gass (Roddy McDowall) grows more powerful, it starts to become apparent that there may no longer be a place for a man like Judge Roy Bean.

The real-life Judge Roy Bean did hold court in a saloon and he did name the town after Lilly Langtry. It’s debatable whether or not he was really a hanging judge. Because he didn’t have a jail, the maximum punishment that he could hand out was a fine and usually that fine was the same amount of however much money the accused had on him at the time of his arrest. Because of his eccentricities and his reputation for being the “only law west of the Pecos,” Roy Bean became a legendary figure. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean acknowledges from the start that it’s not a historically accurate, with a title card that reads, “Maybe this isn’t the way it was… it’s the way it should have been.”

Based on a script by John Milius and directed by Hollywood veteran John Huston, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is one of the strangest westerns to ever be released by a major studio. Featuring multiple narrators who occasionally speak directly to the camera, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is an episodic mix of low comedy, graphic violence, and syrupy romance. (The film’s sole Oscar nomination was for the song that played over scenes of Bean and Maria going on a romantic picnic with their pet bear.) Familiar faces show up in small roles. Along with Perkins and McDowall, Tab Hunter, Ned Beatty, Jacqueline Bissett, Ava Gardner, and Anthony Zerbe all play supporting roles. Even a heavily made-up Stacy Keach makes an appearance as an albino outlaw named Bad Bob.

Jacqueline Bisset in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Milius has gone on the record as calling The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean a “Beverly Hills western” and he has a point. He envisioned the script as starring Warren Oates as a less likable and much more morally ambiguous version of Judge Roy Bean and he was not happy that his original ending was replaced by a more showy pyrotechnic spectacle. Milius envisioned the film as a low-budget spaghetti western but Huston instead made a Hollywood epic, complete with celebrity cameos and a theme song from Maurice Jarre and Marilyn Bergman. Milius said that his experience with The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is what led to him deciding to direct his own films.

Again, Milius has a point but John Huston’s version of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean has its strengths as well. Though he may not be the madman that Milius originally envisioned, Paul Newman gives a good, grizzled performance as Roy Bean and the role served as a precursor for the type of aging but determined characters that Newman would specialize in during the final phase of his career. Due to its episodic structure, the film is uneven but it works more often than it doesn’t. The chaotic early scenes reflect a time when the west was actually wild while the later scenes are more cohesive, as society moves into Langtry and threatens to make formerly indispensable men like Roy Ban obsolete. Even the cameo performances fit in well with the film’s overall scheme, with Anthony Perkins standing out as the odd preacher. Finally, the young Victoria Principal is perfectly cast as the only woman that Roy Bean loved as much as Lily Langtry.

Though it’s impossible not to wonder what Warren Oates would have done with the title role, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a good end-of-the-west western.

What Could Have Been: The Godfather, Part II

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Years ago, I wrote a post called What Could Have Been: The Godfather, in which I discussed all of the actors and the directors who were considered for The Godfather.

It remains one of the most widely viewed posts that we’ve ever had on this site. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise. People love The Godfather and they love playing What If? Would The Godfather still have been a classic if it had been directed by Otto Preminger with George C. Scott, Michael Parks, Burt Reynolds, and Robert Vaughn in the lead roles? Hmmm …. probably not. But, in theory, it could have happened. All of them were considered at one point or another.

However, in the end, it was Francis Ford Coppola who directed The Godfather and it was Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Cann, and Robert Duvall who brought the Corleone family to life. The Godfather, as everyone knows, was a huge hit and it went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of the year. As the film ended with the future of the Corleone family still up in the air, there was obviously room for a sequel.

When Paramount Pictures first approached Coppola about writing and directing a sequel, he turned them down. He said he was done with The Godfather and didn’t see any way that he could improve on the story. It’s debatable whether or not Coppola truly felt like this or if he was just holding out for more money. It is known that Coppola did suggest to Paramount a possible director for Part II and that director’s name was Martin Scorsese.

What would Martin Scorsese’s The Godfather Part II have looked like? It’s an intriguing thought. At the time, Scorsese was best-known for Mean Streets and it’s probable that Scorsese’s film would have been a bit messier and grittier than Coppola’s version. If Coppola made films about the upper echelons of the Mafia, Scorsese’s interest would probably have been with the soldiers carrying out Michael’s orders. While Scorsese has certainly proven that he can handle a huge productions today, he was considerably younger and much more inexperienced in the early 70s. To be honest, it’s easy to imagine Scorsese’s Godfather Part II being critically and commercially rejected because it would have been so different from Coppola’s. A failure of that magnitude would have set back Scorsese’s career and perhaps even led to him returning to Roger Corman’s production company. As such, it’s for probably for the best that Coppola did eventually agree to shoot the sequel, on the condition that Coppola be given creative control and Paramount exec Robert Evans not be allowed on the set. While Coppola was busy with Godfather Part II, Scorsese was proving his versatility with Alice Doesn’t Live Her Anymore.

After Coppola was signed to direct, the next best question was whether or not Marlon Brando would return to play the role of Vito Corleone. The film’s flashback structure would ensure that Vito would remain an important character, despite his death in the first film. Coppola reportedly considered offering Brando the chance to play the younger version of Vito but he changed his mind after he saw Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Still, it was felt that Brando might be willing to show up in a cameo during the film’s final flashback, in which Michael tells his family that he’s enlisted in the army. Frustrated by Brando’s refusal to commit to doing the cameo, Coppola told him to show up on the day of shooting if he wanted to do the film. When Brando didn’t show, the Don’s lines were instead rewritten and given to Tom Hagen. It’s hard not to feel that this worked to the film’s advantage. A last-minute appearance by Brando would have thrown off the film’s delicate balance and probably would have devalued De Niro’s own performance as the younger version of the character.

Brando wasn’t the only member of the original cast who was hesitant about returning. Al Pacino held out for more money, which makes sense since he was literally the only cast member who could not, in some way, be replaced. Richard Castellano, who played Clemenza in the first film, however learned that he that hard way that he was not quite as indispensable as Al Pacino. In Part II, Clemenza was originally meant to have a large role in both the flashbacks and the present-day scenes. However, when Castellano demanded more money and the right to rewrite his own lines, the older Clemenza was written out the film and replaced by the character of Frankie Petangeli (played by Michael V. Gazzo).

It’s impossible to find fault with Gazzo’s performance but it’s still hard not to regret that Castellano didn’t return. Imagine how even more poignant the film’s final moments would have been if it had been the previously loyal Clemenza who nearly betrayed Michael as opposed to Frankie? Indeed, even after the part was rewritten, many of Frankie’s lines deliberately harken back to things that Clemenza said and did during the first film. Because Clemenza is a very prominent character during the film’s flashbacks, his absence in the “modern” scenes is all the more obvious.

When the role of Young Clemenza was cast, it was still believed that Richard Castellano would be appearing in that film. One of the main reasons that Bruno Kirby was selected for the role of Young Clemenza was because Kirby had previously played Castellano’s son in a television show. Also considered for the role was Joe Pesci, who was working as a singer and a comedian at the time. (His partner in his comedy act was Frank Vincnet.) If Pesci had been cast, he would not only have made his film debut in The Godfather Part II but the film also would have been his first pairing with Robert De Niro. (Interestingly enough, Frank Sivero — who played Pesci and De Niro’s henchman, Frankie Carbone, in Goodfellas, also had a small role in Godfather Part II, playing Vito’s friend, Genco.)

As for the film’s other new major character, there were several interesting names mentioned for the role of gangster Hyman Roth. Director Sam Fuller read for the role and Coppola also considered Elia Kazan. Perhaps the most intriguing name mentioned as a possible Roth was that of James Cagney. (Cagney, however, made it clear that he was content to remain retired.) In the end, the role was offered to Al Pacino’s former acting teacher, Lee Strasberg. Like Gazzo, Strasberg made his film debut in The Godfather Part II and, like Gazzo, he received his only Oscar nomination as a result.

The legendary character actor Timothy Carey (who was courted to play Luca Brasi in the first film) met with Coppola to discuss playing Don Fanucci, the gangster who is assassinated by Vito. A favorite of Stanley Kubrick’s, Carey reportedly lost the role when he pulled out a gun in the middle of the meeting.

Originally, the film was supposed to end in the mid-60s, with a now teenage Anthony Corleone telling Michael that he wanted nothing to do with him because he knew that Michael had Fredo murdered. (That famous scene of Michael bowing his head was originally supposed to be in response to Anthony walking out on him as opposed to the sound of Fredo being shot.) Cast in the role of teenage Anthony was actor Robby Benson so perhaps it’s for the best that the scene was ultimately not included in the film.

Some of the smaller roles in Part II were played by actors who were considered for larger roles in the first film. The young Tessio was played by John Aprea, who was also considered for the role of Michael. Peter Donat, who played the lead Senate counsel in Part II, was considered for the role of Tom Hagen. The rather tall Carmine Caridi, who played Camine Rosato in Part II, was originally cast as Sonny until it was discovered that he towered over everyone else in the cast. And, of course, Robert De Niro famously read for the role of Sonny and was cast in the small role of Paule Gatto before he left The Godfather to replace Al Pacino in The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. (Of course, the whole reason that Pacino left The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight was so he could play the role of Michael in The Godfather. In the end, it all worked out for the best.)

Finally, former teen idol Troy Donahue played Connie Corleone’s second husband, Merle Johnson. Merle Johnson was Troy Donahue’s real name.

Personally, I think The Godfather Part II is one of the few films that can be described as perfect. Still, it’s always fun to play what if.

Icarus File No. 6: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (dir by Terry Gilliam)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For many years, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was a film best known for not having been made.

In the past, we’ve used the Icarus Files as a way to write about filmmakers who flew too close to the sun of their own ambition and who plunged down to the sea as a result. However, in the case of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the sun is not director Terry Gilliam’s ambition. Instead, the sun is a combination of shady financiers, natural disasters, and film industry silliness that seemed to all conspire to keep Gilliam from making his film. And yet, unlike the real Icarus, Gilliam insisted on continuing to fly, regardless of how many times he crashed into the ocean.

Terry Gilliam first started to talk about adapting Migel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote into a film in the late 80s. The tale of a Spanish nobleman who becomes convinced that he’s fighting giants when he’s actually only jousting with windmills, Don Quixote sounded like an obvious project for Gilliam. Gilliam’s films have always dealt with the power and importance of imagination. However, it’s often forgotten that Gilliam’s protagonists are often both saved and eventually destroyed by fantasy. (One need only think about the end of Time Bandits, in which the young main character goes on the journey of a lifetime but then watches as his parents blow up in front of him.) It’s easy to forget that Don Quixote dies at the end of Cervantes’s tale, having regained his sanity and having announced that his niece will be disinherited if she marries a man who has ever read a book about chivalry.

From 1990 to 1997, Gilliam started pre-production on his version of Don Quixote several times, just for the production to be canceled. Sometimes, this was due to Gilliam not being able to get the budget that he felt would be necessary to bring his vision to life. Frustrated with the Hollywood studio system, Gilliam wanted to raise the money for and make his movie in Europe but this turned out to lead to a whole new set of financial and regulatory complications.

Filming finally started on the film in 2000, with Jean Rochefort playing a former film actor who thinks that he’s Don Quixote and Johnny Depp playing the director who fills the role of Sancho Panza. Unfortunately, as shown in the poignant documentary Lost in La Mancha, the production seemed to be almost cursed from the start. The footage from the first day of shooting was unusable, due to planes flying overhead. The 2nd day of shooting was ruined by a flash flood that swept away much of the set. Jean Rochefort injured himself and, despite his best efforts to act through the pain, he had to step away from the role. Filming was suspended in 2000 and, for the next 16 years, Gilliam tried to find a way to get the stalled film started up again. Many actors came and went, including Robert Duvall and, most promisingly, John Hurt. Hurt agreed to play the role of Quixote but, just when it seemed that the film was finally going to go into production, Hurt passed away from pancreatic cancer. A few months later, the original Quixote, Jean Rochefort, also passed away. The film went back into limbo.

Finally, in 2016, a producer named Paulo Branco offered to fund the film. Pre-production started up again, this time with Adam Driver in the Sancho Panza role and Michael Palin playing Quixote. However, the project was soon once again stalled, as Branco wanted creative control of the film. When Branco slashed both the budget of the film and Palin’s already reduced salary, Gilliam denounced Branco’s actions. Branco suspended production but, by this point, Gilliam had already hooked up with another set of producers. Jonathan Pryce replaced Michael Palin as Don Quixote and, finally, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was filmed!

Once filming was complete, however, Paulo Branco popped up yet again. Claiming that he owned the rights to the story and not Terry Gilliam, he sued to keep the film from being distributed. The courts ruled in Branco’s favor but Gilliam countered that he hadn’t used one frame of footage that had been shot while Branco was serving as producer and that, while Branco had the rights to his version of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, he did not have the rights to Gilliam’s. While the lawyers argued, Amazon Studios withdrew from an agreement to distribute the film. Once the case was finally settled, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was finally given a haphazard release in a few countries, often in edited form.

And that’s a shame because The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a delight. It’s a film that is both playful and snarky, a celebration of imagination that also serves as a satire of Hollywood narcissism. Adam Driver plays Toby Grummett, a director who returns to a Spanish village to direct an big-budget, epic adaptation of Don Quixote. Ten years earlier, as a student filmmaker, Grummett shot a previous adaptation of Don Quixote in the same village. When he tracks down the old shoemaker (Jonathan Pryce), who starred in his student film, he discovers that the shoemaker thinks that he is Quixote and that he’s become something of a tourist attraction.

And from there, the film follows Don Quixote as he takes Toby on a quest to fight giants and protect the helpless and to live a life of chilvary. Along the way, Toby finds himself getting caught up in Quixote’s elaborate fantasy world. It leads to a lot of comedy but there’s also something rather poignant about the old shoemaker’s attempts to be a hero and Toby rediscovering the love of fantasy and the imagination that he had when he was a film student. And yet, it would be a mistake to assume that this film is simply a light-hearted fantasy. The laughs are tinged with melancholy. The enemies that Quixote and Toby meet are not just imaginary giants. This a film that mixes comedy and tragedy in a way that few other films have the courage to do so.

As is typical with Gilliam’s later films, it bites off a bit more than it can chew but it’s still hard not to get caught up in it. Driver and Pryce are both wonderfully cast and the film’s satire of the film business carries a sting to it. Watching the film, it becomes apparent that Gilliam sees himself as being both Quixote and Toby. The film’s ending seems to be Gilliam’s defiant message that he will always choose to fight the giants.