Pink, Michael Bublé and Ciara’s Kids Adorably Steal the Show at ‘The Disney Holiday Singalong’ - Entertainment Tonight

New cut of Godfather Part 3 salvages Francis Ford Coppola’s film - Polygon

No filmmaker has made better use of the Director’s Cut format than Francis Ford Coppola. Rather than defang and truncate the first two Godfather films for network television in the 1970s, Coppola restructured them as one chronological saga – running seven hours and featuring loads of new footage – that allowed viewers a more straightforward perspective on the Corleone family tragedy. In 2001, Coppola unveiled Apocalypse Now Redux, a massive, meticulously restored expansion of his Vietnam masterpiece that some critics felt eclipsed the already-worshipped theatrical release. And just last year, the filmmaker returned to the catastrophic failure of The Cotton Club for a reworking that, if nothing else, gave the sluggish gangster flick some much-needed musical oomph.

So when Paramount announced earlier this year that Coppola had reworked 1990’s The Godfather Part III as The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, there was reason to hope, based on previous successes, that the director had at last solved some of the trilogy capper’s nagging flaws. But what, realistically, could be done to enhance Sofia Coppola’s awkward performance as Michael’s daughter Mary, or fill the void left by Robert Duvall when he turned down Paramount’s paltry offer to reprise his key role as Corleone family consigliere, Tom Hagen? Coppola may be the maestro of the Director’s Cut, but to fully address these shortcomings he’d have to weave some kind of editorial sorcery that does not yet exist.

Image: Paramount Pictures

What Coppola accomplishes is less a magic act than an elegant threading of a needle. As he states in his introduction to the inelegantly titled The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the final installment was envisioned as an epilogue to the epic narrative of the first two movies. Indeed, that onerous title was the preferred moniker of both Coppola and The Godfather author Mario Puzo, who partnered with the director on the screenplays for all three films. Paramount understandably balked at the notion of treating the first Godfather movie in 16 years as, in Coppola’s words, a “summation” instead of an event, but by releasing it as “The Godfather Part III” (on Christmas Day, no less), they were priming audiences and critics for a grand finale the filmmaker had no interest in delivering; ergo, much of the initial criticism of the movie, which was rushed through production to meet that prestigious release date, hammered the film for a slow-to-develop plot that felt like a retread of its immaculate predecessors. The narrative familiarity wasn’t viewed as intentional, but rather as a sign of creative bankruptcy.

Coppola’s revision, which runs a shorter 157 minutes, resets expectations immediately by placing its subtitle not only in quotations, but separate from the classic Godfather marionette logo (a first for the series). The opening images of the flooded Corleone compound in Lake Tahoe have been replaced with a low-angle exterior shot of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, an architectural, midtown antiquity dwarfed by its neighboring skyscrapers – which is jarring given that the original The Godfather Part III kicks off in Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral downtown in Little Italy. What’s going on here? Coppola cuts directly to Michael’s meeting with Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly), the overwhelmed, chain-smoking head of the Vatican Bank who desperately sells off the Vatican’s controlling shares in real estate conglomerate Internazionale Immobiliare to the Corleone family. Previously, this scene landed after the Vatican-sponsored ceremony and party feting Michael for his charitable works. By repositioning the Gilday scene, Coppola makes the stakes startlingly clear: Michael is leveraging the Catholic Church’s debt to legitimize the Corleone family business and, not for nothing, become one of the wealthiest men in the world. As the deal is all but consummated, Gilday sheepishly laments, “It seems in today’s world, the power to absolve debt is greater than the power to forgive.” To which Michael retorts, “Never underestimate the power of forgiveness.”

Forgiveness. This is the dramatic business Coppola and Puzo have chosen for Michael in this “coda,” and the film’s busy plotting finally serves a unified theme. Ever since he volunteered to assassinate Sollozzo and McCluskey, Michael has treated life as a chessboard; he sacrificed his own brother to checkmate Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), and accepted the abhorrence of his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton), as collateral damage. According to Peter Biskind’s The Godfather Companion, Coppola referred to the final shot of The Godfather Part II, wherein Michael sits in silence outside the Tahoe compound, as “the Hitler scene”. He’s not only settled all family debts; he’s severed himself from any semblance of a loving family. He is devoid of humanity. Twenty years later, as Michael enters the final act of his life, he desires expiation. For a man who has done so much evil, this seems an impossible ask. But viewers retain vivid memories of the man who once said, “That’s my family, Kay; it’s not me.” He had other plans. Could there possibly be a path to redemption for this self-made monster?

Image: Parmaount Pictures

From Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Arthur Miller, the answer has always been an emphatic “No.” But like all great tragedians, Coppola coaxes his audience into believing there exists a catharsis that could cleanse Michael of his sins and restore the family he brushed aside. The passage of time does a lot of work in the film, and raises many questions: If the Corleone family is successful enough to buy a controlling share in the real estate company Immobiliare, what were they up to in the 1960s — i.e. the decade that sparked America’s fascination with the mafia (and inspired a bestselling book titled The Godfather)? What kind of heat came down on the organization after the assassination of JFK? Did they really avoid the lucrative drug trade that flourished throughout the Vietnam War and beyond?

The Michael of The Godfather, Coda has compartmentalized his business misdeeds. He’s oddly jocular. The Immobiliare deal is complete, pending the formality of the Pope’s approval. He’s a generation removed from his father’s Little Italy territory — now run by the John Gotti-esque Joey Zasa — and he has a savvy publicist (Don Novello) to handle all thorny press inquiries. He is virtually untouchable.

The business may be settled, but for Michael, a man of ultimate conquest, the personal must be confronted. This pursuit was clouded in the film’s previous incarnations, but, by leading with that Gilday scene (instead of the ceremony at the church, which has been excised entirely), it’s the solitary narrative thrust of The Godfather, Coda. Michael isn’t joking about “the power of forgiveness”. He believes atonement is possible. He believes he can reunite his family. He begrudgingly sanctions Anthony Jr.’s opera career, and entrusts the Corleone Foundation to Mary. Kay wants no part of this, but Michael, in a newfound show of vulnerability, allows her to exit a room on her own rather than shut her out. This constitutes growth on the Don’s behalf. As the action moves to Sicily, Michael pours on the charm. He whisks Kay off on a tour of his family’s home village, and summons the memory of the man she once loved (a man viewers barely glimpsed in the first movie). It almost works. It helps that Michael has hedged his bets. Though he’d be thrilled if Kay remarried him, he’ll settle for her not dreading him anymore. The latter appears to be negotiable.

Image: Paramount Pictures

When the Pope’s health goes south, the Immobiliare deal appears to be renegotiable, which places Michael at an unexpected disadvantage as he nears his goal of respectability. Michael expected the “legitimate” business world to be less ruthless than the criminal underworld, but, as he confesses to Connie, “The higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.” It’s an inversion of the naiveté evinced by Kay in The Godfather when she asserted senators and presidents don’t have men killed. Michael’s in over his head, and when he sees the sharks circling he has no choice but to hit back in an old school fashion. To do so, he must cede control of the family to his nephew Vincent (Andy Garcia), and hope for the best. But even if he succeeds, he now knows “legitimacy” is an illusion.

Those hoping for The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone to be a revelation on the level of Apocalypse Now Redux, or a springboard to a fourth chapter in the saga, will be disappointed. There are no surprises beyond the first 20 minutes of this version, save for the denouement, which denies Michael the release of death he received at the end of the previous cuts. His punishment is a long life (“cent’anni”), the very thing he stole from his enemies and, via one unforgivable act, his brother. Sofia Coppola’s infamous performance is what it is; she does the best with what she’s given, which isn’t very much. And that’s the unfixable element of this film. The pieces are there. Coppola and Puzo plotted it out sensibly. But Mary, whose death is meant to break our heart, never registers as more than a frightened child. In a way, this makes sense: she’s been lied to her entire life, and is romantically fixated on her cousin. This is grist for a psychological drama, and there are moments when The Godfather, Coda takes on the intimate grandeur of Luchino Visconti’s Sicilian family drama, The Leopard.

But this is Michael’s story. Mary is what happens when a father projects a false sense of principle. She is sheltered and, as an adult, helpless – incapable of navigating a world that is cruel beyond conception. In this sense, Coppola has mended the movie. The coda is a perfect summation of his twin masterpieces. It is an American tale. And it is finished.

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone premieres in limited theaters on Dec. 4; the re-cut arrives to Blu-ray and digital rental services on Dec. 8.

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'The Voice' Season 19: What Happened to Ryan Gallagher? - Entertainment Tonight

Helena Bonham Carter says 'The Crown' should stress it is fiction - Page Six

The princess demands a disclaimer.

“The Crown” star Helena Bonham Carter believes Netflix has a “moral responsibility” to warn viewers they are not watching a documentary.

The actress, who portrayed Princess Margaret for two seasons on the royal drama, said on the series official podcast that there was an important distinction between “our version” and the “real version.”

“It is dramatized. I do feel very strongly, because I think we have a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on guys, this is not … it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama.’ So they are two different entities,” said Bonham Carter.

Season 4 of the show has caused an uproar due to the unsympathetic portrayal of the monarchy and in particular Prince Charles — with royal experts worried the reputation of the Windsor family could be damaged.

Helena Bonham CarterLeon Bennett/Getty Images

The comments from the 54-year-old actress emerged after UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden told The Mail on Sunday that he will write to Netflix amid mounting concerns that the royal family’s reputation is being soiled by fictionalized scenes on the show.

“Without this, I fear for a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may have mistaken fact for fictions,” he cautioned.

Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, has also pushed for warnings.

“I think it would help ‘The Crown’ an enormous amount if, at the beginning of each episode, it stated that, ‘This isn’t true but it is based around some real events,'” he told ITV.

“I worry people do think that this is gospel and that’s unfair.”

Prince Charles and Camilla’s official Twitter account’s comment section was shut down after the royal couple received hateful comments in the wake of the latest season of “The Crown.”

The show’s creator, Peter Morgan, has called the series an “act of creative imagination.”

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Covid-19 Test Site Will Reopen At Union Station For Tmrw, L.A. Mayor’s Office Declares; ‘She’s All That’ Remake Shoot Sparked Initial Shut Down In DTLA – Update - Deadline

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Finale Of The Undoing, Filmed On North Fork, Has Fans Abuzz - North Fork, NY Patch

EAST MARION, NY —Forget the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the pandemic, a looming storm and political tensions — the one topic that had social media buzzing Sunday night was the series finale to HBO's "The Undoing," starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.

Without giving away any spoilers, the ending brought viewers on a suspenseful roller coaster of emotions fueled by powerhouse performances by Kidman and Grant — in acting turns many deemed Emmy worthy —as audiences finally learned, after weeks of twists and turns, who killed Elena Alves.

And the answer had the internet on fire.

"'The Undoing': Check you out, Hugh Grant. Wow!" Bonnie Grice wrote on Facebook.

"I'm undone!" wrote Eileen Kapell, also on Facebook.

"Best whodunit show all year," Drew Scott added.

Another woman wrote that she went through her house removing anything that looked remotely like a hammer.

Indeed, the series finale's shocking ending hinged on one very important piece of evidence: A sculpting hammer found in the fire pit of the summer home belonging to Kidman's character's father, played by Donald Sutherland.

Those riveted by the HBO series "The Undoing" found scenes filmed at that very beach house and on the rock-strewn waterfront familiar: The series was shot in 2019 on the North Fork, with the Long Island Sound providing a haunting backdrop for the suspenseful drama.

The beach house where Nicole Kidman's character retreats with her son after learning the shocking news that her husband has been unfaithful and is a suspect in a woman's murder is located on Rocky Point Road in East Marion.

The limited series airs on HBO and is available to stream on HBO Max.

"The Undoing," according to a post on HBO.com, features Kidman and Hugh Grant and marks a reunion between Kidman and "Big Little Lies" creator David E. Kelley. The series is directed by Susanne Bier."The Undoing" is based on the book "You Should Have Known" by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

Also featured in the cast are Sutherland, Edgar Ramirez, Lily Rabe, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Matilda DeAngelis and Noma Dumezweni.

Just give Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant all the awards right now!!! What a show and what a finale #TheUndoing pic.twitter.com/hFy2ayyyL1
— carol (@carolfaniston) November 30, 2020

The series, which debuted on Oct. 25, focuses on a successful therapist, Grace Sachs, played by Kidman.

"The limited series follows Grace (Kidman) and Jonathan Fraser (Grant), who are living the only lives they ever wanted for themselves," a news release from HBO said. "Overnight, a chasm opens in their lives: a violent death and a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and her family."

"David has created another propulsive series with a fascinating, complicated female role at its center," Kidman said in the HBO post.

The Undoing Finale: Fans React to the Jaw-Dropping Conclusion of Nicole Kidman Thriller https://t.co/xXWUG4tqdy
— People (@people) November 30, 2020

According to Variety, the home, which dates back to 1896, was originally a life-saving station and sports a massive tower.

East Marion, according to the Southold Town website, was "for over 50 years, headquarters of a life-saving station which rescued countless people who otherwise would have been lost when their ships were wrecked off the sound shore. The United States Coast Guard was in charge of the station during World War II."

Kidman has filmed on the North Fork in the past: In 2007, she delighted fans who waited for hours for a glimpse as she filmed a scene at the Long Island Rail Road station in Greenport for "Margot at the Wedding."

What did you think of the final episode of "The Undoing"? Tell us in the comments section.

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‘Fargo’ Showrunner Noah Hawley Reveals What Happens Between Season 4 Finale and the Beginning of Season 2 - Variety

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Storia Americana,” the fourth season finale of “Fargo.”

The Season 4 finale of “Fargo,” which aired Sunday night, was the second of two episodes that were — thanks to the coronavirus pandemic — short four months after the eight preceding episodes were forced to wrap. “Storia Americana” brought to an end the tale of two warring 1950 Kansas City crime families led on one side by Chris Rock’s calculating Loy Cannon and on the other by Jason Schwartzman’s erratic Josto Fadda. Both men, for all their stylistic differences, wind up equally dead in the end. Still living are Loy’s son Satchel (Rodney L. Jones III) — who, it appears, will grow up to be Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine), the scene-stealing gangster of “Fargo” Season 2 — and Ethelrida Pearl Smutney (E’myri Crutchfield), a young girl whose family is ensnared in the conflict.

Here, “Fargo” showrunner Noah Hawley speaks with Variety about the significance of those two characters, the unique challenges of Season 4 and what the future holds for the anthology series.

It looked like Rodney L. Jones III, who plays Satchel, grew taller during the break in production. Was it something you noticed? It feels like the story benefits from it.

Well, yes, I noticed. Even though we don’t say that time has passed between Episode 8, the black and white episode, and episode nine, time has clearly passed. It’s no longer winter. But I also felt like that opening montage of the war intimates time passing. But yeah, in July, when it looked like you’re actually going to be able to go back [into production], my first thought was that Rodney might have grown. He’s at that age. So they sent me a picture of him as he looks, and he’s clearly getting older. But I agree that it works. The fact that he left a boy and he came home almost a man is meaningful, cinematically.

In what ways were these two episodes different from what you had originally planned?

They didn’t change substantively in any way. We needed to introduce happy we needed to get to the you know, the tragic ends of Otis and Gaetano and and we needed for Ethelrida to triumph in that ninth hour. And then yeah, in the 10th hour, we had to we had to turn things from bad to good to bad again. But certainly in going through the process of prepping for that additional photography, I went through both scripts and made sure that I was only asking the production to film things that were critical to the episodes.

Under different circumstances, what would you have left on the bone that wasn’t there?

I don’t think there was anything. I had removed, originally, the scenes of Satchel walking home from Episode 9. I thought that was maybe something that we could lose. And FX really argued that we needed it to see Satchel’s journey, to see how he how he becomes Mike Milligan in the end. And I think they were right. It was an abundance of caution on my part to say, “Well, maybe we don’t need that day.” But I don’t really approach things that way. Whatever it is that I cut, which I can’t even remember now, that’s the way it’s meant to be. So I didn’t feel like I missed anything when I watched those hours.

Chris Rock has said that he lost weight and added muscle during the production break. Were there any other changes with the actors that might have raised continuity issues?

There wasn’t a lot, no. Jason Schwartzman was so superstitious that he never shaved the mustache. I think he was pretty adamant that it had to be that mustache, and he didn’t want to shave it and grow another one. I know that that Salvatore [Esposito], who played Gaetano, lost a lot of weight between when when we wrapped and when we came back. But I don’t think you notice.

You’ve said in the past that a big part of this season was telling the origin story of Mike Milligan from Season 2. What, in your mind, happens between Satchel being on the porch and watching his father die and the moment where we meet Mike years later in Season 2?

I feel like when when you are the son of the king and king gets killed, then you are not safe anymore. So my feeling is that that family was not able to stay in that house, that their source of revenue dried up, that they went through some hard times, and that then, ultimately, Satchel did not have a lot of opportunity in his life and had to fall back on the skills he learned from Rabbi. Rabbi said to him, “I don’t want you to be a child soldier like I was.” But on some level, the moment his dad was killed in front of him, he didn’t really have a choice. Then I think he had to change his name, because being a Cannon was not a safe thing to be. So he chose the Milligan name. Then at a certain point, having laundered his identity, he started pulling jobs of some kind and ended up getting in with with the Kansas City mafia, which is ultimately that what Ebal created out of the Fadda family business. So the irony being that he became an employee of the very company that that drove his dad out of business.

The speech that Ebal gives Josto about family business being crazy because families are crazy, is that the seed for the version of the mob that Mike walks into at the end of Season 2 that is functioning almost like a corporate entity?

Yeah, and it’s echoed in Season 2 by Joe Bulo, who at that point is played by Brad Garrett, where he talks to Jean [Smart, who plays Floyd Gerhardt], and he says, “That’s why you can’t have a family business, because one of my guys steps out of line, I break his arm; he speaks out of turn, I cut out his tongue; but what are you gonna do with your sons?” So that is the kind of origin — we see Ebal watching this crazy family psychodrama and formulating this no-family business, hierarchical ideal, and then putting it into into practice.

You’ve talked in the past about “Fargo” coming from your thoughts about what America is, and particularly money in America. It feels like there is something significant notion that is now repeating in the series that a small family business just won’t do. Things have to be bigger in scale and organized and very profit-driven.

Yeah, I mean, it’s not how business used to be. There came a moment, not in the ’50s, but certainly by the ’70s and heading into the greed-is-good ’80s where corporations themselves were not so profit-, shareholder-driven. And then, at some point, they switched what their highest value was, which was generating shareholder value. And at that point, you saw any sense of responsibility to customers or workers go out the window. Any politician will tell you that the backbone of this country is the family business and people are unfortunately losing so many of those family businesses right now. But ultimately, a family business is a humane and human endeavor. And a corporation is neither of those things. In fact, in a corporation, the first thing that you do is create a board of directors and a decision-making hierarchy in which no one person is responsible for any decision — which means that no one person’s morality is driving any decision and it becomes much easier to make decisions that aren’t good for anybody.

In the finale, when Josto and Oraetta are executed, there’s a moment where Jessie Buckley as Oraetta is looking at her warped reflection, and it reminded me of Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Season 1. Is there something to these characters that you keep bringing into the series that seem to represent something primal and almost inhuman?

Yeah, I mean, I think that whether it’s Anton Chigurh in “No Country For Old Men” or Peter Stormare in “Fargo” or the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in “Raising Arizona” — and I would include John Goodman in “Barton Fink” in there — there’s always these characters in Coen Brothers movies where you think this is not a human being, this is the kind of elemental force that has always been blowing through the American wilderness; a kind of demonic force. You might kill this body — or the dybbuk in the opening of “A Serious Man” — but there’s something more than human that’s happening here. I find that a really fascinating idea for this series, and especially this season. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the black and white episode, there were a lot of historical markers, combined with the haunting of of Ethelrida’s family. There’s this sense that this country is [driven] by the events of the past, and we forget them at our at our peril. In Season 3, we had our mystical bowling alley, and the story of the Rabbi Nachman and the mass grave. This is our past, and I think it’s important to include it in our stories.

Throughout the four seasons, there have only been maybe three or four characters who are just good and smart. And Ethelrida is that character in this season. How important was that character to the telling of this season’s story?

In the superstructure of “Fargo,” whatever the story, it’s a morality tale. And it is ultimately, the story, as the movie is, about a kind of pure, good character on the one side, and real evil on the opposite side. So whether it’s Allison Tolman or Carrie Coon or Patrick Wilson, or this season Ethelrida, there are these characters who [are] just decent people. We’re not saying they’re saints, but they’re just inherently decent people. And I think it’s critical. You can’t tell these stories without that decency, that core American decency. And the fear ultimately is not that violence will be done from one character to another, I think, but that that decency itself is in danger. We went for a long period, starting with “The Shield,” where a lot of our heroes on TV were these demon-hunting, anti-heroes who had sacrificed whatever goodness was in them to protect us from the real evil that was out there — these sort-of haunted characters. And it’s so exhausting to invest in those characters versus this decency. It’s riskier, because decent people run the risk of not only being injured, but becoming jaded. And that in and of itself is violence.

It didn’t occur to me until you you listed those characters there, but when you did, it did strike me that they all play white cops. This season, that role is a Black teenage girl. Is that intentional? And whether or not it’s intentional, what does it say about about the story you wanted to tell this season and how it differed from the stories you told before?

It was definitely intentional. Two years ago now, this story was coming together for me, and I knew that I wanted it to be a story about the collision of African Americans moving from the South and the end of Southern European immigrants arriving in America. I knew that the story was therefore going to center around the experience of white people. And so when I thought about that moral pillar in the story, I thought, well, I could make it a cop again. But that is not the experience of those two groups, that cops are primarily forces of good. So I started to work toward this idea of a cop surrogate and this “Rear Window” idea of this biracial girl who sees something through her window that turns her into a cop — the mystery to solve the mystery of this nurse — so that she becomes our moral pillar. And that led me then to structure the season as I did as her history report and to make her the protagonist.

Have you given thought yet to whether you want to do another season?

I said for three years that I was done, and then I wasn’t, so I’m not going to say that. I have started to think about it. I don’t think it would be the next thing I do, but I do think there’s a more contemporary story percolating for me. The danger is always that you’re going to stay at the dance a little too long. So I have to put a lot of it in place in my head and really make sure that it’s worthy of joining these 41 hours. I don’t want to try and make another one unless I think, “Oh, we have to make this one. It’s the best one yet.”

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