Last week I bought the newly released "Coppola Restoration" box set of The Godfather and its sequels. A purchase well worth the money for anybody who doesn't own those movies already (which was me before last week).
I was watching Part II tonight, and thinking about how much I love watching Robert De Niro do anything, even just stick his hands in his pockets and stare into space, and I eventually landed on his Wikipedia page, and I realized that his career is a neat little oversimplified microcosm of Hollywood filmmaking over the past 35 years.
And if you want to illustrate the difference between the "film school brat" era of the late 70s and the "sequels, remakes, and formulas" era of the past ten years or so, De Niro's filmography charts it perfectly: The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull then, Analyze This (and Analyze That), Meet the Parents (and Meet the Fockers), Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Shark Tale now.
This isn't meant as a criticism of De Niro (if you asked me who my favorite actor of all time was, it would be De Niro in a walk, issues raised by yesterday's entry aside), and it isn't meant to say that there were no awful and overly familiar movies back then, or that there are no sweeping, method-acted epics now (or that there are no film school brat types now). It's just a funny thought I had.
No comments:
Post a Comment