The Godfather Part II (1974) - What makes a masterpiece?
At half a century (and rest assured, I'm choking - figuratively - as I type that), it's staggering how fresh Coppola's masterwork comes across. I'm relatively certain that I haven't seen it on the big screen the nineties and I haven't watched it all the way through since the early 00s. Seeing it in a crisp restoration for its fiftieth anniversary re-release was at once familiar and revelatory. The first revelation was something more like a corroboration of something Roger Ebert noticed on a DVD release many years ago; how much Nina Rota's score was a huge element in the narrative's execution. Usually, this would be a huge demerit from my perspective, but as Ebert pointed out (if memory serves, and I'm too lazy to go hunting), it's not as though Rota's composition was directing the audience what to feel, but that it reflected the interiority of what the characters were experiencing. No, more often than not, the tone of the soundtrack is mour...