>>211868708
Finished Once Upon a Time in America.
I liked all of Sergio Leone's westerns much more than this one. The cinematography is great as one would expect, the story is solid, production values are great; but the pacing is so indulgently slow that I found it to be genuinely boring. The film is 4 hours long and an hour of indulgently long shots with no dialogue could have easily been edited out of it. My other issue is that I didn't really like any of the characters even though I really like some of the actors in the film (James Woods, Robert Deniro, Joe Pesci) that made it even more of a slog to get through. The characters are all scummy pieces of shit, which is fine; but Leone seems intent on trying to make me sympathize with them and I never did. The framing device of Deniro as an old man looking back on his life is a great idea and works really well. Indeed old man Deniro looking back on his life is a sympathetic character; but the life he's looking back on is the life of an asshole. James Woods character is much more interesting; but Deniro's character hogs the spotlight. I also found the film exceedingly bawdy with all the weirdo sex it throws in there (teenagers fucking, teenage prostitution, fucking a prostitute in the back of a herse, consensually raping a woman who wants it during a robbery, and forcibly raping a woman in the back of a limo while the driver sits up front in an uncomfortably long scene). Its excessive and it gets into the territory of being uncomfortable. It does have a really fantastic plot twist for the ending so I'm glad I didn't give up on the film; but I wish Leone had gotten to the fucking point in under 4 hours.
7 out of 10. Its a weird film, it reminds me of some of Altman's or Tarkovski's movies where I simultaneously liked them while being bored to tears through parts of them. I feel like its a really good 2 and a half hour movie buried inside of a bloated 4 hour slog.
