The High and the Low - Both have a place in movies

When I work out I generally watch movies on my iPod.  For the past couple of weeks I have watched the complete series of Police Academy and the Godfather.  I watched them in order.  I am pretty sure I may the only person in the world to have watched Police Academy in order.  So what are my conclusions?  Both are entertaining but in different ways.

The Godfather (3 Parts) - from my perspective the trilogy seems to get better with age.  I am not sure that the third volume is equal to the other two.  The first one deal primarily with the rise of Marlon Brando's character and the second with the ascension of Al Pacino.   But the stories are intermixed.   The third movie builds a bit off the first and second but not completely.  Pacino tries to go legit and Andy Garcia ascends as the Godfather.  But the plot is a bit less believable.  It is tied in with DeNiro's son attempting to break away from the family and become an opera singer and ends when DeNiro's daughter is gunned down in front of the theater where he brother has just performed.   The daughter is not the target, Pacino's character is.  The film ends with Michael Correlone (Pacino) dying of old age in a courtyard somewhere in Italy - all of the finish is very operatic.   There is a lot of violence in the movie.  But none seems particularly out of place.   Puzo tried (and succeeded) in writing an entertaining novel.  Cuppola succeeded in bringing it to the screen.

Police Academy was a series of seven films made mostly in the 1980s.  It tells stories of a group that begins with Steve Gutenberg and some others training to become police officers in a metropolitan city.  There is no attempt at anything but slapstick.  In each there is a hard ass character who is the opponent of the wacky police officers.  They continually play tricks on him.   To say that none of these take any level of thought (and that is true) does not imply that they accomplish what they were trying to do.  There are lots of funny bits and some continuing jokes.  Some of the situations are absurd.  But it does not matter.  Unfortunately, as the series progressed the writers lost some of the original spontaneity.  The last couple became formula movies.   At one point I flew across the country with Marion Ramsey who was one of the mainstays in the series, and she said that the movies were fun to make.

These two sets are very different.  But I enjoyed each.  I expect at some point I will revisit the Godfather - there is a lot in the three movies to ponder - both in terms of story line and film.   At the same time, while I will probably see the Police Academy movies again, it is not likely that I will go through them in order.

The iPod I have can hold about 4-5 movies.  So conceivably I could rotate through actors (I like W.C. Fields and Clint Eastwood) or directors (Hitchcock) or variations (I have a good collection of versions of adaptations of Dickens' Christmas Carol).