How not to watch a movie

A little while back, Debbie got me the Godfather Trilogy DVD collection. I loved it as I had not seen any of these movies, but really wanted to. Shortly thereafter, we watched The Godfather and I was very impressed. Last night, we decided to watch The Godfather II. My initial impressions were not very good, which surprised me greatly because I had heard that this was one of a handful of trilogies where the second movie is considered better than the first. Just a few of the problems I had with the movie after watching it are:

• The movie seemed to pick up right in the middle of the action with no exposition and no real story telling as to what happened between the last movie and this one.
  
• There were far too many references to things not shown in the course of the movie that I thought should have been. I could not count the number of events I had to pick up through some throw away line a character mentions in passing.
  
• For all the accolades Robert DeNiro received for his work in this, I felt he hardly appeared at all. His scenes were very short without much acting for me to even think this was worthy of such praise.
  
• I found the movie incredibly short, only 70 minutes, to be considered such a masterpiece, particularly when I felt so much was missing from the movie to begin with
  

Now, anyone who has seen The Godfather II can probably pick up why I did not enjoy this movie as much as I thought I would. We only watched Disc 2. That's right folks, yours truly here completely ignored the Disc 1 sitting right next to Disc 2 and started watching a 3 hour 20 minute movie 2 hours and 10 minutes into it. No wonder I felt so disjointed. It was funny though because I wondered why the DVD makers would put the 1st and 2nd DVD's in the same jacket while the 3rd movie and an extras DVD were in their own separate jackets. I even got angry at one point from trying to explain to Debbie what was going on, probably because I had such a hard time following it as well. *Sigh* I guess this is like A Few Good Men where the first part of the movie I saw was the final, climactic courtroom scene. I had no idea what happened prior to that for years. I didn't care because I knew how it ended. I guess in this case though, I definitely need to go back and watch Disc 1.