In the late ‘90s, the writer Sarah Vowell did a piece for This American Life about rewatching Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. I don’t mean “rewatching” in the “Hey, it’s been years, let’s see how it holds up” sense—Vowell watched The Godfather over and over, on VHS, chipping off bits of the film in every free moment, and some weeks she watched a little bit of it every day, picking up wherever she’d left off last time. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “it took weeks to get through the whole thing. If I had a free hour between earth science lab and my work-study job, I'd sneak home and get through the scene where Sonny Corleone is gunned down at the toll booth, his shirt polka-dotted with bullet holes. Or, if I finished writing a paper analyzing American mediocrity according to Alexis de Tocqueville, I'd reward myself with a few minutes of Michael Corleone doing an excellent job of firing a pistol into a police captain's face.”
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