There are films one avoids because they are bad, and films one avoids because they are good in a way that feels like a reprimand. The Godfather belongs, for me, to the second category: a masterpiece whose reputation enters the room before the film does, sits in the best chair, and asks why you are still standing.

I have tried to watch it three times.

Each attempt begins with seriousness. I dim the lights. I silence my phone. I make a small private vow to cinema. Then the wedding begins, and very soon I am conscious not of boredom exactly, but of exclusion. Men enter rooms. Men leave rooms. Men speak in low voices about favors, honor, obligation, business, disrespect. Women orbit the ceremony like weather systems. They sing, dance, plead, marry, wait, ask, misunderstand. The men know the rules. The women know the consequences.

I understand, intellectually, that this is the point. The film is not endorsing the closed room. It is building one. It is not forgetting Kay. It is placing her precisely where the family order requires her to be: near enough to witness, too far away to know. That is elegant filmmaking. It is also, after a while, exhausting.

The difficulty is not that The Godfather is slow. Slow is easy. Slow can be sensuous. Slow can be radical. The difficulty is that the movie’s slowness is patriarchal in structure. It asks you to wait outside a door and accept that the real action is happening in the room. It asks you to understand a moral universe through withheld speech, masculine ritual, and the horrible little courtesies by which power disguises itself as manners.

That is brilliant. It is also not my favorite way to spend an evening.

My failure with The Godfather may be generational. I was trained, like many viewers my age, to suspect the canon before entering it. We learned to look for the absent person, the silenced person, the woman at the edge of the frame. Sometimes this is good criticism. Sometimes it becomes a kind of nervous tic. Sometimes one becomes so alert to exclusion that one cannot sit still long enough to see what exclusion is doing as form.

This is the trap Coppola sets, and I keep stepping around it instead of into it.

I can admire the composition. I can admire the faces, the light, the density of the rooms. I can admire Pacino’s Michael, whose blankness is less a lack of feeling than the slow burial of feeling under competence. I can see that the movie is not about crime so much as succession. A son believes he is outside the family tragedy. The tragedy waits for him with his name already written down.

And still, twenty minutes later, I want air.

There is a particular masculine masterpiece that does not merely depict male power; it reproduces the sensation of being asked to care about male power on its own terms. Its defenders will say that is the test. They may be right. They will say the film rewards patience, attention, submission to an older grammar of glances and debts. They may be right again.

But there is a difference between recognizing a door as symbol and wanting to sit in front of it for three hours.

The most famous final image in The Godfather is a door closing on Kay. The men are inside. She is outside. Michael has become what he promised he was not. It is a devastating ending, or so I have been told by people who made it that far with the reverence intact.

For me, the door closes much earlier.

Not because the film has nothing to say. Because it says it in a language I can read but do not love. Because its greatness is cold, architectural, and almost clerical. Because every whisper seems to come from a world that has already decided I am not necessary to its meaning.

That may be my limitation. It may also be the film’s triumph.

Either way, I keep failing to finish it. And each time, somewhere in the brown-gold hush of those rooms, I feel the canon looking over its shoulder and making me an offer I can, apparently, refuse.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876765&forum_id=2,#49957579)

I've gathered for a while that your chatbot knows your voice/idiosyncratic vocabulary and general views but I'm particularly curious about this one

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876765&forum_id=2,#49957594)

it's interesting how horrible chatbots are at writing by default, like 0/10, but with sufficiently FERTILE CONTENT they can come up with some pretty good stuff

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876765&forum_id=2,#49957596)

“

The biggest “house styles” are probably Schizoid Forum Polemic, Hemingway Bastard, AAA Blotter, and Gen X Nuff Said Guy.

“

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876765&forum_id=2,#49957719)