The Pope of Greenwich Village -- The Movie!

As regular readers of this blog know, I recently read The Pope of Greenwich Village and enjoyed it. (I was right about Eric Roberts, by the way. Man, that guy can be annoying.) My wife ordered it on NetFlix and it came yesterday (we had to wait quite a while, as we have one of those two-movies-a-month limits on our account) so we started to watch it. I say started, because she fell asleep about 1/3 of the way through and then quit altogether when I couldn't bring her up to speed on the plot. I think her comment was, "this isn't very good."

I don't know if I agree or not. The screenplay was by the author of the book so I expected it to be the same story, which it was with a few exceptions. But the devil is in the details as they say. The movie was certainly true to the spirit of the book, but didn't capture a lot of the neat details from the book. Barney's exit was less than exciting (and completely different from the book) and (Spoiler alert!) Charlie (played by Mickey Rourke) winning on the horse was a let-down. Finally, the final scene doesn't make any sense because the tape is supposed to be blank. (Speaking of not making any sense, this whole post doesn't make any sense because no one has ever heard of this book -- or the movie.)

Finally, it was cool to see about 5 future Sopranos stars in various bit parts in the movie, including Frank Vincent (Phil Leotardo) as 1st Crew Chief, whose only roll was to look mean and remove appendages.