The Corleones showcase their prosperity and well-connectedness through the wedding, and Connie’s towering cake is the epitome of extravagance and excess. While Connie’s wedding features Sicilian traditions, like her wedding purse and songs sung in Italian, it does not diverge too sharply from a normal (though lavish) American wedding. Unlike his sister Connie’s sumptuous and lighthearted reception, Michael’s marriage to Apollonia is old-fashioned and deeply Sicilian. The two weddings in The Godfather differ from one another greatly.
Yet he renews his commitment to his family in his own way - and the terms of this commitment are signaled by the contrast between the two weddings in the film (Michael’s and Connie’s) and by the development of his character between the two ceremonies. By partaking in an intensely traditional wedding with an equally traditional Italian bride in a town that bears his family’s name, Michael is wedding himself to the Old World of his father’s generation and to the violent path that he had previously rebelled against.
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We need to understand that this movie about a cranky old man with a flying house is also a movie about grief-how much it hurts to lose someone and how, with time and effort, you can eventually learn to keep living in a way that will keep them alive too.Michael’s marriage to Apollonia, halfway through The Godfather, marks a metaphorical marriage to Sicily and the ways of his father. For the movie to work, we need need to understand why he’s so deeply attached to the house he and Ellie spent decades building together, or why he snaps when a construction worker knocks over his mailbox. It’s vital for the success of Up as a whole-because for much of the movie, Carl is a total curmudgeon, and we can only sympathize with him because we love and miss Ellie as much as he does. This opening sequence isn’t just a mini-masterpiece in itself. This montage has a lot of information to convey in very little time, but Up still manages to highlight a comfortable, intimate, apparently unremarkable little moment in the day-to-day life of a happy couple. Carl casually reaches his hand out, and Ellie takes it. The waterworks started with one of the shortest and simplest moments in the whole thing: a brief shot of Carl and Ellie reading books in side-by-side chairs. Watching it again for this article, I made it about a minute. No matter how many times I see Up, it’s not a matter of if this montage will make me cry it’s a matter of when. All of this happens in under a minute of screen time, and God, if you are not reaching for a tissue, Rick Deckard should be hunting you down because you are a replicant. She collapses, and then Carl is kissing her forehead in the hospital, and then he’s at her funeral, and then he’s entering their house, which is now just his house, for the first time in his life. This time, Carl is racing ahead of Ellie-eager to surprise her with tickets for their long-delayed trip to Paradise Falls-and Ellie is lagging behind, struggling to make it up the hill where she used to sprint. Near the end of the montage, we get a shot that’s composed identically to their old picnic: another walk up the hill, many decades later. And as the years pass-conveyed, again beautifully and again wordlessly, by dozens of shots of Ellie lovingly tightening Carl’s various neckties-they’ve suddenly grown old together.
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Of course, life gets in the way, as a series of minor crises drain the fund that would take them to Paradise Falls. (It doesn’t hurt that the whole thing is set to Michael Giacchino’s whimsical Oscar-winning score, which might be enough to make you well up even without the visuals attached.)
This is the beginning of the legendarily tear-jerking Up montage-which compresses the highs and lows of a decades-long marriage into about five minutes of screen time. But after spending much of a day together, Carl only speaks when she leaves, and his single line of dialogue says everything: " Wow."Ī camera flashes, and we’re transported years and years into the future, to Carl and Ellie’s wedding. Ellie talks a mile a minute about her dream of living in South America, about her favorite explorer, about balloons. Up begins with protagonist Carl-then a shy young boy-having an unexpected and life-changing encounter with Ellie, a joyful little girl who eagerly inducts him into a club of two. The whole movie is great, but speaking from experience, the first ten minutes will be more than enough to get the tears flowing. If I ever decide I want to spend an afternoon crying in front of my TV, I’ll queue up Pixar’s Up.