UPDATES below ...

first, sorry for going on so much about the horse's head scene at the beginning. you can actually skip and watch thes rest

This video has caused quite a stir folks. For those of you wondering what happened with regards a certain channel and I having a back and forth feud over it that got extremely personal ... He and I have conversed, sorted out our differences and are now on much better terms. We also removed our vids about each other. Meanwhile the polarized reactions continue to pile up in the comments. there are plenty who hate my take on the film and plenty who rate the film much more harshly than I do. There are even people commenting that they have always found the film underwhelming but didn't want to say so socially because they felt there was a social stigma about it. Well, I'm happy to reassure them that it's perfectly ok to not think this is one of the best movies ever made, and it's definitely ok to say so to whoever you want, whenever you want

Vid breakdown is as follows (story structure and character motivation issues mostly covered later in the vid), followed by some extra notes being that YT seems to be auto-deleting more than half of my replies to comments (as it usually does).

00:00 Intro / context
03:58 Plot stupidity: Horse's head
10:28 Logistical writing: better examples
15:43 Deleted scene shenanigans
17:16 Death of Sonny
20:43 Restaurant assassination
22:49 Vito survives 5 bullets
23:28 Carlo's death
25:06 Character motivations
27:54 Acting
30:07 Not so original
32:58 Protagonist journey
38:28 Not so subtle
39:23 Lack of humour / satire
41:36 The ego factor
42:49 Coppola's motive
45:04 Reasons for overrating?
47:48 Final thoughts

FAMILY GUY MISINTERPRETATION
A lot of folks have commented the family guy episode was a mockery of those who don't like the film. It was the opposite. Sethe Macpharlane has stated in the episode commnentary he doesn't think much of Godfather. He says The Money Pit and The Burbs are better (obviously totally diff genres). The phrase "The tyranny of Godfather lovers" is used in that commentary. And SM says in a 100 yrs ppl say there was this one guy who stood up to it.

RAGEBAIT / CLICKBAIT ???
Haha. Vid only been up three mins and already a couple of idiots posting that this is Ragebait, even though they couldn't possibly have watched even a tenth of it. As outlined at the start of the video, my own subscriber base voted 74% for me to do expanded videos on movies I consider overrated. Don't believe me? Check the posts section of this channel. The poll is still there.
So-called clickbait videos are labelled as so because they don't deliver on what their title and thumbnail suggest the video content will be. This video does deliver on its title and thumbnail.

OBSSESSION WITH REALISM ???
Some folks have mentioned Scarface ending as being an example of unrealism. Yes, it is, but the difference is that Scarface's second half is a massive satire of gangster ego pathology. All of Tony Montana's unconscious insecurities and his artificial self-image come to the forefront in a manner that's almost like a drug-fuelled nightmare. But Godfather tries so hard to present as realistic and seriously dramatic that it makes the many flaws outlined in this vid stand out like a sore thumb.
Some folks also saying i expect too much realism from movies. Nope. Many of the movies I review and love have blatantly unrealistic elements from Alien to Hellraiser and many more. But those films wear their unrealism on their sleeve.

OPERATIC ROMANTICISM ???
Some folks saying I'm overlooking the operatic ramanticism of the story. I'm well-aware of it and I find it pretentious and, frankly, immature. The film artificially imbues mafia bosses with God-like powers of influence, but the writing doesn't convey that level of supposed intelligence and cunning. It tries to make them seem more regal than they actually are, feeding into an audience power fantasy imo. Goodfellas and Scarface, among other gangster movies, are more honest about this stuff. Those movies are more revealing of the childish insecurities, selfishness and over-bloated egos of the gangster mindset. In fact, with Scarface, despite the hilarious insanity of the second half, Tony Montana shows the kind of aggressive confidence, tactical intelligence and streetwise ability to read people and situations that are essential for a rising gangster to climb the ladder.

Thanks for watching / reading :)

Why kill Carlo by garrotting him? Obviously because it was very personal, he had conspired to have Sonny murdered, and shooting him in the back of the head would be very merciful, whereas garrotting would cause great pain and terror before his death. It's silly to question why people who are willing to kill and commit all sorts of crimes for their own financial gain, would want to take brutal revenge, rather than give a quick, pain-less death when their own family members are murdered.

The catch with that Family Guy scene was that Peter, having no intellectual depth to speak of, was implied not to have understood the film and his comment “it insists upon itself” was meant to sound pseudo-intellectual and silly. This was stated by Seth MacFarlane himself, who thought the phrase sounded silly when his professor said it and confirmed he doesn’t actually feel this way about the film. He was mainly just making fun of that phrase.

You forget this movie was made in 72 and set in 45. A Hollywood producer probably did not have guards everywhere. We live in a very sick society now.

It’s Vito’s Godson - not his son - who he’s trying to get a movie part for. And the story is based on a true story about a prize dog of a producer in 1920s Hollywood. The finding of the animal’s head in the bed MEANS his security was compromised that they could get to him anywhere.

The actor was NOT overacting in the horse head scene.After rehearing the scene with a simulated horse head, the actor was reacting to a REAL horse's severed head. Francis Ford Coppola had acquired it from a dog-food slaughterhouse and placed it there without anyone's prior knowledge.

You thought that Kay believed Michael at the end of the movie?

The part about Kay believing Michael when he said he didn't kill Connie's husband can make sense when earlier she reveals how naive she is when she says politicians don't have people killed

me listening to you ream this movie:

"Look at how they massacred my boy!"

I never once questioned the horse beheading under the covers scene but your furious refusal to accept the logic of it and your demanding of the receipts of the ninja assassins who beheaded the horse and which corner of the library they hid in and which saw blade they used and what time they severed the spinal cord is fucking hilarious

The climax montage of Apocalypse Now suggests that it is possible to cut off a large animal's head in very little time.

In the expanded directors cut we see them bring the horse up to the bedroom (just getting it up the stairs was a farcical 12 minute sequence). Then, once they're in the bedroom with the horse, they figure out how to chop it's head off quietly without waking up the guy. It's played for laughs and was ultimately cut because the tone didn't match the rest of the movie.

Rob Ager insists upon itself.

I might be wrong, but isn't the tension in Michael's story that Vito doesn't want him involved in the business at all?

Is the shooting scene that unrealistic? People get shot and run away all the time in real life instead of just falling over.

The criticism of a guy taking too long to die from a bullet in the head is ridiculous considering people have been shot in the head and not died from it at all.

Johnny Fontaine isn't Vito's son. Godson, yes

The mafia in Italy and the US have a history of leaving severed animal heads on property as a warning to the recipient that the mafia can get to them anywhere. And I don’t think the Corleone family bribed the guards, I think they threatened/intimidated them to get access to the horse. I don’t think it requires too much of a suspension of disbelief for how they got the horse’s head in the bed, e.g. the director could’ve been pass-out drunk the night before, meaning he wasn’t easily awoken. I think Rob is being very unfair in his extreme negative reaction to this scene.

Tony Montana also kept standing while riddled with bullets, but that's just the power of insane amounts of cocaine. He would have died from a heart attack just minutes later anyway.

My late father's favourite film: his take on the message of the horses head was the mafia showing that they could make all the guy's own loyal staff do absolutely anything and he wouldn't even see it coming - since it would have been impossible any other way.

Its also possible the guy was drugged by his own staff too, since there would be no chance of not waking from normal sleep when the head was put in the bed. He could just have easily been waking up with treasured body parts in a drinking glass on the nightstand - and the blood on his lower body pyjamas was suggestive of that. It would otherwise have made more sense to put the head on the pillow eye to eye with him for the worst awakening imaginable.