Note: this is an edited/updated version of Sunday’s “Input of Note” selection from issue 0033 my MacroParentheticals newsletter. You can sign up here, if so inclined.
Continuing from Wednesday: the first film remains my favorite of the saga; the second is a “perfect film” but I still prefer the first; and, though I’d forgotten much of Part III, now CODA, the re-edit – though only five minutes shorter than the original – felt different, more assured, and marked a fitting conclusion: the power of a defined existential purpose.
My opinion of PART III still holds in its new guise: Sophia Coppola’s performance is, like the film itself, unfairly maligned (I’m not sure anyone could’ve done much with the part – a plot device, at best, thankless from the first ink spilled – and I suspect that complaints about her are little more than a convenient personification of critical disappointment in the film itself); the mirroring variations and riffs on the themes established in Parts I and II are fascinating and tragic though meaningless unless you’re intimately familar with Parts I and II; and, though the Vatican plot is confusing as hell, it’s not a bad film by any metric (the fifth season of THE WIRE being comparable: a lesser season of THE WIRE is still better than 99% of television out there).
Recommended – though only if you carve out the time to rewatch the whole saga: what’s the point in listening to only the final notes of a symphony?