Great story Paul, and what a great film to be mesmerised by - the Godfather is one of those films that feels too short, even at nearly 3 hours. For me, it is also 2001.....as I may have mentioned once or twice on the BlackBoard. It wasn't always so, the first time I saw it I was sort of made to watch it by my dad (who, for all his faults, is the guy that really got me into the movies) and seem to remember being a bit bored. But I was probably only 8 or 9, and I suspect that, if I tried to get my nearly 8 year old daughter to watch it with me the reaction would be the same. But it did something that really, truly great movies do....it got into my head and under my skin.....I couldn't shake it off and thought about it more and more and then, inevitably, watched it again....and again....and again. And it fits the Kurosawa quote....although many may disagree with me and say the plot is confused. I don't think it it as.....I actually think it is incredibly simple once you boil it down and what can be more fundamental or universal themewise than the evolution of man? There is literally no end to the debates that can be had around those themes. It is now the film I have watched the most and was very glad when they released the Blu Ray....and hope that the lost footage sometime makes it to a 4k or even 8k remastering in the future. I was lucky to be given a copy of The Stanley Kubrick Files for Christmas and can spend hours just looking at the photos....as I did as a kid in school, where we had one book on Sci-Fi films that had a center-fold of Dave Bowman in his EVA suit. It is also a fantastic example of the maxim "what if....?" I will never, ever not get goosebumps when the star child appears to Also Sprach Zarathustra

Considering I'm the chattiest person I know, it's ironic that the movies that really made me stop and think about film as a thing, and how it was done, were two almost without dialog! "The Red Balloon" is a short film, it played in our theater one Saturday afternoon many moons ago right before the feature, replacing a bunch of cartoons. It's a simple story about a boy who finds an unusual balloon that follows him about one day in Paris. The feature that afternoon was not a kiddie flick, so, it played to an audience of adults - who sat and watched the entire thing, pretty much as entranced as I was. Not sure if it was the paring away of everything but the images, or just the novelty of a short film of any kind being shown, but, I spent quite a bit of the feature thinking about the short! In fact, I can't remember what the feature was! The other film that caught my imagination that same way was "The Bear," again practically nothing but images as a young cub is "adopted" by an older bear and they try to escape the hunters. Both films are fantasies of a sort, both are all about the images, and both stuck with me for years - and they both made me think about structure, the underpinnings of films. Sort of how a haiku makes you think very specifically about words.