Is Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather the all-time greatest American film ever?

I certainly wouldn’t argue against this notion. I’ve not only revered this 1972, epic-sized gangster drama for over a half-century, but I can quote much of the dialogue by memory. Plus I own three separate Bluray versions as well as The Godfather Saga on DVD so don’t tell me. If asked to sign a document stating that it is, in fact, the all-time greatest, I’d do it.

My own determination is that The Godfather ranks second to John Huston‘s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48), but it’s not worth arguing about.

I must take issue, however, with a Variety headline that quotes Steven Spielberg saying last night that The Godfather “is the greatest American film ever made.”

Again, no argument from this corner but that’s not what Spielberg said. Exact quote: “The Godfather, for me, is the greatest American film ever made.”

The words “for me” are major qualifiers, of course. They emphasize the subjective. They’re an admission that Spielberg is not speaking as some grand authoritative film pope, and that he’s basically just a movie lover shooting from the heart or the hip. This doesn’t devalue his respect and admiration for The Godfather — it just means “this is how I genuinely feel…this is my fully considered judgment in the face of God and my community. But I’m not the Big Kahuna.”

What I’m about to say hit me an hour ago. I was walking down a supermarket aisle when it slapped me down…whoa! And it’s this: among wokeys and progressive POCs, Sinners has become a kind of metaphorical battering ram against Trumpism.

Ever since Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris last November and the rightward shifting of political plates became evident in every corner and precinct, progressives and traditional liberals had been hunkering down…stunned, wind knocked out, state of shock…but now the younger progressives have this anti-white, anti-yokel, “feel that Delta blues joy” Sinners fantasy, and suddenly the fire in the belly has returned. No more fetal-tuck defeatism!

It’s become clear over the last several days that Sinners is something more than just a film…it’s been latched onto, I’m sensing, as a pushback totem…in the space of two weeks it’s become a thing to glom onto and hold high like some kind of cultural banner or community anthem…

For under-40 wokeys and especially younger POCs the anti-white Sinners narrative (evil Irish vampires, white yokel Klan members getting machine-gunned to death, the whole Mississippi Burning thing) has revitalized the argument against Trumpism…Sinners has become a miltant cultural cause…a shove against the Trump cultural turnover that began six months ago, and really kicked in after the January 20th inauguration.

Democrats have been pipsqueaking since Harris lost to Trump last November….gutted, powerless…while that feeling of assertive, progressive power that POCs have been proudly brandishing since the six-year-old 1619 Project, all the institutional DEI initiatives and the great awokening of 2020, not to mention the general progressive program (drag queens in elementary schools, the demonizing of white culture, the LGBTQ movement, the transy men-competing-in-women’s-sports thing, Lily Gladstone‘s 2023 and ’24 identity campaign for Best Actress)…

All of a sudden the woke shit began slowing if not screeching to a halt when Trump won a majority of voters, some of this having been strengthened by support from younger white dudes and a sizable percentage of POCs and Latinos.

Like it or not, the general post-election consensus across the country became widely understood as “we’re sick of this crazy woke DEI transy stuff and so fuck Biden” (and don’t tell me it was just the border and the economy…bullshit!)…

Right after Harris’s loss James Carville went off on Democrats, barking “enough with identity politics shit”…Rahm Emanuel and Gavin Newsom have been saying the same thing, warning that if lefties don’t get off this fucking train Democrats may become a permanent minority party…progressive donor advisor and Obama administration veteran Seth London called last November for “a return to a politics centered on delivering the American dream through a politics by simple concrete action “rather than race and group-based identity politics.”

The ideological “party” was therefore suddenly over for identity fanatics and they knew it, but now Sinners has re-filled their progressive sails. It’s obviously not a 21st Century political film, but it’s certainly a cultural thing. You can feel the lit-up energy behind it. Thank you, Ryan Coogler, for re-lighting our fire! AOC for President in ’28!

@speakyourvoice1st ♬ original sound – Miller4Christ

@sdotrich Ryan, I peeped game. I picked up what you was putting down. When Smoke said Stack don’t watch his back…️️MESSAGE. Cause some of us will get swept up by a clear TOO quick. And too many of us love when they can halfway sing and/or dance. #Sinners #SinnersMovie #RyanCoogler #MichealBJordan ♬ original sound – sdotrich

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Initially posted in 2011: “It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. An atypical thing as I’m usually sullen, but every so often life feels like a sparkling proposition.

“A ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pulled alongside. It had a 4 SALE sign without a number in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.

“I pulled up at a red light, smiled at her and said, ‘How much?’ This sounded like a double-entendre, of course — I should have said ‘what’s the asking?’ Either way she took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, ‘Too much.’

“Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this…the most withering L.A. social putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell…the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had. A 60-40 deal.”

A Facebook gush about Paul McCartney duet-ing with Neil Young, a testament about how wonderful this musical moment was…

The other day Sasha Stone asked for names of the all-time dishiest actresses. The ones who’ve inspired the most tumescent sexual fantasies, etc.

I’ve always had a thing for sleek blondes. The two most painfully unfulfilled relationships of my life, an achey-breaky high-school flirtation and an anguished sexual affair with a married People magazine co-worker, were with blondes. There was another hurting affair with a blonde filmmaker in ’12. So I didn’t hesitate in saying that Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, Dead Heat on a Merry Go-round, Mackenna’s Gold, The Greek Tycoon) was at the top of my list.

Sparv and the young Grace Kelly share the top slot, pretty much. Along with the young Ingrid Berman, Kim Novak in Vertigo and I-don’t-know-who-else. Elke Sommer in The Prize?

Still with us at age 81, Sparv landed only one truly interesting role — the delectable but elusive Carole (Robert Redford‘s Dave Chappellet falls for her but she eventually dumps him) in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69).

In my humble opinion the young Sparv (26 when she made the Ritchie film) had the sparkliest eyes and most beautiful mouth…slightly upturned, tempting, exquisite.

I guess I’ve alays felt a vague kinship with Sparv because she was married in the mid ’60s to Robert Evans, whom I was on friendly terms with in ’94, ’95 and ’96.

Evans’ description in “The Kid Stays in the Picture“: “Her name was Camilla Sparv. The moment she arrived in New York, she was a star model. A tall, leggy blonde, she had a natural patrician quality money can’t buy.”

A recently restored 4K version of Charlie Chaplin‘s The Gold Rush — not the 1942 re-released version (72 minutes w/Chaplin’s narration + occasional sound) but the original 95-minute silent classic — will open the Cannes Classics section in the early evening of Tuesday, 5.13.

I’ll be arriving in Cannes roughly four hours before the screening, but I’m not especially enthused about attending the screening, to be honest. I’ve just re-watched the ’42 version and had seen it once before somewhere. That’ll suffice.

The Gold Rush was shot in late ’24 and early ’25, and premiered on June 26, 1925. Portions were shot in the snow-covered terrain of Truckee, California; the rest was shot on sound stages in Chaplin’s studio on La Brea Ave.

The New Year’s Eve “auld lang syne” scene is my favorite segment.

A kind of Roman Polanski-ish figure in his day, Chaplin had a thing for much younger women. Lita Grey, whom Chaplin began a sexual relationship with when she was 15 (are you reading this, Polanski pitchforkers?), had originally been cast as Georgia. But Grey was was replaced by the 24-year-old Georgia Hale after Grey got pregnant. Chaplin’s marriage to Grey “collapsed” during production of the film, largely because he’d taken up with Hale.

Hale didn’t marry Chaplin, but was on romantic terms with him (bip-bip-bip) in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She became wealthy through real estate investments, and died on 6.17.85.

“[Because] white people don’t have anything to say.”

Imagine if some inane TikToker was to say the same thing about POCs…imagine.

This is one more reason why I’m not on the Sinners train. It’s also a reason why some people voted for Trump. I voted for Harris, of course, but I loathe people like Daisy Dream.

@daisydreamlife Sinners is a movie with SOUL. It was made with intention and heart. It is a story of pain, love, grief, generational trauma, and friendship told through visual art (the costume design, the editing, the cinematography, etc…), music, and writing. I miss leaving a movie theater and feeling like my soul and my humanity merged and like the collective conciusouness expanded. Our world REALLY needs art right now — art with a purpose that opens doors and brings dreams to life. Art is the revolution and the stories that have been ignored need to be pushed into mainstream media now more than ever. #sinners ♬ original sound – Daisy Dream

I’ve been an Allman Brothers guy since the Nixon administration**, but until last night I’d somehow never listened to this one.

The actual sung lyric is “nobody left to run with any more”,

“Everybody wants to know where Jimmy has gone
He left town, I doubt if he’s coming back home
Well, Tony got a job, three kids and a lovely wife
Working in the Commerce Bank for the rest of his life”

…everything fades, weakens, falls away.

** To think that Richard Nixon was once regarded as Beelzebub incarnate. By today’s standards he’s a center-right moderate. Okay, with a paranoid streak.

“Best Allman Brothers Story,” posted on 8.21.19:

David Cronenberg‘s smoothly creepy The Shrouds has just opened theatrically. A great date movie if you have the right kind of girlfriend.

Posted from Cannes on 5.21.24:

David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds is a brainy, silky, sophisticated, deliberately paced, high-toned “horror” film for smart, well-educated people. I loved hanging with it…hanging in it.

Vincent Cassel, in great physical shape and adorned with a great silver be-bop pompadour haircut, is Karsh, a widower who’s devastated by the passing of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger).

As a way of managing his grief he’s invented GraveTech, a cutting-edge technology that enables survivors to keep visual tabs on their loved ones as they rot in their tombs.

I’m serious — that’s really what it’s about. Watching a loved one’s body slowly rot and decay. I was sitting there going “uhm…okay” and then it was “wait…really?”

I didn’t love the complex, slow-moving story but I adored the Cronenberg-ness…the handsome stylings, the discreet nudity, the sex, the flush vibe, the upscale Canadian atmosphere, the shadowy mood, the smart dialogue.

Cassel, Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders…everyone brings their A-level game. That was enough for me.

I sing this with mannish gusto while cruising down the Merritt Parkway, you bet, and as questionable as this may sound, I can sing it as well as Muddy Waters. Really. I also do the “owwoo-yeah!” stuff. Five minutes and 29 seconds of absolute joy. Always leaves me in a great mood. Unlike what you get from Sinners, songs like this are the real thing.

“Waters recorded ‘Mannish Boy’ in Chicago on May 24, 1955. Featuring Jimmy Rogers on guitar and Fred Below on drums.

The second clip, I mean…the one with the Jamaican Jimmy Cliff guy…”I think I can make it now, the pain is gone.” And I’m saying this with a split reaction. If I were locked in a car trunk alongside a highway, the last thing I’d want to be is fucking stoned.