Originally posted by: Oyeve
With the release of the Godfather on BRD I now want to go BR. Should I get a standalone player or a PC player? My PC can do HDMI and I can still use my Denon 3850 for surround sound. I dont care if I cant get the latest digital sound as long as I can get standard DD or DTS. I just want the cheapest BR playback. I dont want a PS3 as many will reccomend because 1. I already have a 360 and a PC for gaming and dont need another game system that I cant stack in my hi-fi shelf and 2. I just want to watch BR movies and im sure I can get something way cheaper than a PS3. Any suggestions?
So what exactly about the Godfather gets you so juiced up over it you now can't wait to go Blu? I can think of a lot of other superior movies out on Blu that would certainly make me want to get it more, and the Godfather would be near the bottom of my list of films available on Blu that I would even buy, anyway.
I have watched the various Godfathers numerous times, and the poor use of cinematography techniques and the lack of editing in certain slow scenes that drag out far too long leaves me scratching my head in pain, every time. The films final length must have left Coppola shaking his head in pain, too. From IMDB:
Francis Ford Coppola turned in an initial director's cut running 126 minutes. Paramount production chief Robert Evans rejected this version and demanded a longer cut with more scenes about the family. The final release version was nearly 50 minutes longer than Coppola's initial cut.
At one point during filming, Paramount production chief Robert Evans felt the film had too little action and considered hiring an action director to finish the job. To satisfy Evans, Francis Ford Coppola and his son Gian-Carlo Coppola developed the scene in which Connie and Carlo have their long fight. As a result, Evans was pleased enough to let Coppola finish the film.
So it had too little action before or after the 50 minutes of drool was added against the directors wishes?
Even Marlon Brando snubbed the Oscars when he won for it, because for one thing he knew it was now a slow, bumbling editorial mess made unnecessarily longer only by studio suit bean counters. And he also knew it was definitely not his best work, since he didn't even bother memorizing or rehearsing his lines for it. From IMDB:
Marlon Brando did not memorize most of his lines and read from cue cards during most of the film.
Refused to accept the award for the reason that the U.S. and especially Hollywood are discriminating Native American people. Brando did not show up at the ceremony, but instead sent a faked Indian woman named Sacheen Littlefeather who later turned out to be Maria Cruz, a less known Californian actress.
Of course, at the time, he had to make up some ridiculous excuse to the media for spurning the Oscars rather than admit he was simply too lazy to memorize or bother to rehearse for the part.
He also felt he was screwed out of proper pay for his part in the picture, due to his own bumbling financial miscalculations when he sold his profit points back to the studio before it was released. After he lost out on the profit points, he then refused to support promotions for the film due to this fact. He must have also thought it wouldn't be a huge hit movie since his starring role was basically just mumbling incoherently with his bull dog mouth appliance while reading his part off cue cards.
And as far as the poor presumed quality of the new Blu release from IMDB:
Although the dark photography of Gordon Willis was eventually copied by many other films, when the developed film came back from the lab, Paramount executives thought the look was a mistake. They ordered a different look but Willis and director Francis Ford Coppola refused.
So if you want a lot of low light Hi Def film grain due to fuzzy and dark colorless cinematography techniques in all of its HD
gory, then you really do need Blu-ray to appreciate this in Hi Def.