18 Comments

You can’t rely on the unfilmed screenplay AND dismiss Coppola’s statements. Does the creator’s intention matter or doesn’t it?

Neri’s presence in the scene means he killed her. The question “so why was Neri there” doesn’t just mean “why would Neri the character have a reason to be there,” it means, “what is the reason to put him in the scene.” Putting him in the bathroom washing his hands but NOT meaning to imply that he committed the murder would be incompetent storytelling.

From a Bayesian perspective it’s vastly more likely it was Michael (or his underlings acting on his behalf). Michael is a murderer who employs a bunch of murderers and he has a motive to set Geary up. For it to be Geary, Michael would have to be lucky three times: first that this US Senator is capable of murdering a prostitute, second that he’d do it in Fredo’s casino, and third that the prostitute had no family to mess things up with an investigation. That is both unlikely and narratively unsatisfying.

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Ben, Occam's razor dude. The filmmakers show us Al Neri in the bathroom cleaning up something (a knife?) when Hagen (my spirit animal) motions for him to get out of the way. They clearly knew Geary was a blackout drunk whom they could use if they found him in a compromising position. They did their homework.

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Michael may be descending into evil but not into incompetence. If Nero didn’t kill her, Michael/Tom must have had another idea, such as the fake marker payoff. But how often did those two get portrayed as guys who relied on luck to solve their problems? Michael is portrayed as nearly godlike in his perception and ability to control other mortals. He sees the Cuban revolution coming. He makes terrible decisions but he makes them. He’s not bailed out by lucky coincidences. Just my two cents.

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I cannot believe Dreyfuss has sort of convinced me of this.

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founding

I am dying. This is easily the most entertaining piece of writing I have read in months. It also marks the second time you have been wrong (the other time was your bad advice to the woman whose colleagues kept commenting on her appearance).

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You're an effin' angel. I wasn't optimistic when I started this, but you just earned this month's cash. 👏

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Michael didn’t pay a (large) bribe in the other draft. He doctored up a bunch of receipts to make it look like the senator had been deeply in debt to a casino. The threat was that revealing those fake markers would get him in trouble with the ethics committee or something. So it’s just like the dead hooker: cheap blackmail.

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All right, Ben. Now, who killed Eddie Mars? (In "The Big Sleep" of course.)

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I like it. Why kill the hooker if it’s easier to just do some other kind of frame up? Killing the hooker requires imagining the whole thing as a kind of psychopathic horror show where Michael enjoys killing rather than simply doing expedient but morally bankrupt things.

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I almost didn’t read this because I could really care less about the topic. But I’m happy I did! It was entertaining!

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I never really understood why Scalia thought legislative history was so useless. Until now.

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