Yeah, I definitely get the human element, but I think that's actually ground down by the tropes of the genre that I touched on. Like I said with the Sopranos, I don't know how anyone (who isn't a meat-headed Italian American) can identify at all with any of the characters other than Tony. Like Paulie, et al just make me think of this:
Also, the only way I can synchronize the praise for Godfather II is on the same basis as the critical praise for Breaking Bad Season 5: critics getting up their own asses because of the critical notoriety of earlier work and not realizing the drop off in being ham-handed and telegraphing. I don't think Godfather Pt. II is nearly the drop-off that S5 was from S4, but it smacks of the same pretentious phenomenon.
I like American Gangster more than all of those, again, because it was more human to me and less caricature-like. I also liked Mean Streets (Scorcese's first mob film), Road to Perdition, Pulp Fiction, Eastern Promises, and the original Godfather. I've never seen A Bronx Tale.
Those "mexican" ones - are they Spanish-language films I'm guessing?
I really don't remember Casino. Departed is easily the most overrated film that I've ever seen. Holy hell, what a pile of garbage. I really gave it a hefty handicap because I wanted to like it, on account of it being a mob film that I knew wouldn't be dowsed with Italian American stuff, but that had to be the most sterile, insincere, unmoving, and poorly acted "good" movies I've ever seen.
