BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Coppola gets into Godfather spat with UK’s Johnson.
Filmmaking legend Francis Ford Coppola is not impressed with Boris Johnson’s love for his bloody 1972 gangster classic “The Godfather”.
The Brexit-backing UK prime minister told The Daily Mail newspaper during his successful leadership challenge in July that his favourite piece of filmmaking was the “multiple retribution scene in ‘The Godfather’.”
The comment turned into a social media meme after Johnson expelled 21 of his own MPs — including Winston Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames — from the ruling party for straying from his hardline Brexit stance.
Coppola, who wants Britain to stay in the EU, told London’s Financial News that Brexit looked like it was heading for a disaster more reminiscent of the 1979 war film “Apocalypse Now”.
“The Godfather seems to be the favorite film of modern history’s most brutal figures, including Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadhafi and others,” he told Friday’s edition of the news site by email.
That’s quite an ad hominem smear of Johnson by Coppola, who surely knows the first two Godfather movies are also the favorite films of Barack Obama, according to news articles from the 2008. Curiously, his name is left out of both the above article and an interview Coppola did last month when promoting the recent re-release of Apocalypse Now, when Coppola bristled after the interviewer mentioned the Godfather is Donald Trump’s favorite movie. But hey, Coppola’s drive-by attacks on the two center-right leaders are strictly business, I’m sure.