THE IRISHMAN, A Martin Scorsese Picture with de Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Keitel

can someone explain why the film appears on Netflix starting today, and is still in a few dozen theaters? I thought there was going to be no overlap, contractually.

also Anna seems pleased with the film and Marty

Paquin on why Scorsese chose her: https://t.co/Hy6nikReLj pic.twitter.com/kid1LjyIVa

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) November 27, 2019

Gonna give Bo Dietl prime real estate in end-of-year movie polls pic.twitter.com/ykKFJWymAq

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) November 27, 2019

Jesse Plemons barely has more dialogue than Paquin and it’s mostly arguing about fish WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE

Finally have multiple videos of Jimmy Hoffa open-mouth gnarling on testimonial dinner steak while glowering at his many enemies pic.twitter.com/hYPrCfX71G

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) November 27, 2019

Liked this but by no means a masterpiece, or a career summation. And the meaninglessness of their lives and their power, I thought that was all conveyed pretty clearly in Goodfellas and Casino. The last half hour is the only exceptional part of the movie.

Pesci has never been better. Dead ringer for Sidney Lumet of all people. Pacino sucked, pick a fucking accent dude. Reminded me of Orson Welles trying to do Irish in The Lady from Shanghai.

The criticism of Paquin is baffling to me... I thought her performance was substantial and by no means quotidian. What is this literalism with line counts? Come on.

Morbs OTM about DeNiro calling Hoffa's widow. I didn't think he was particularly remarkable until the last half hour.

Loved the Touchez Pas Au Grisbi motif incorporated throughout, first in its original harmonica version and then those mournful cellos.

What's up with the two titles?

FBI: Frank, everyone’s dead. Tell us what happened to Hoffa.

Frank: Hey! Im so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity / helping someone who’s in crisis / dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you. Could we connect

— Alex Sherman (@shermitthefrog) November 28, 2019

What's up with the two titles?

(Based on nothing, obv:) I wonder if Netflix insisted on The Irishman, and Marty was like fine but I’m still putting the title I like better in the actual movie

that was my guess too. Good for him

Liked this but by no means a masterpiece, or a career summation. And the meaninglessness of their lives and their power, I thought that was all conveyed pretty clearly in Goodfellas and Casino. The last half hour is the only exceptional part of the movie.

Pesci has never been better. Dead ringer for Sidney Lumet of all people. Pacino sucked, pick a fucking accent dude. Reminded me of Orson Welles trying to do Irish in The Lady from Shanghai.

otm

I loved the 'secret' title. It also ties into how language is constantly used to mask things, they paint houses, things are what they are. Nobody talks about how serious and dangerous what they do is. To a large extent, it seemed to me to be a film about psychological repression. The most uncanny thing to me was how it felt like there were all these other stories going on, which nobody really knew about. The fact that the death dates of all the gangsters kept popping up, and that they all seemed to die 79-81, ended up being really creepy. And there's all this stuff about politics and union organization, which is never really delved into, the alliance with Nixon, why it seemed the mob was basically allowed to take over. I thought it was a pretty fantastic portrait of history.

From what I can recall none of that stuff was elaborated on in the book. It certainly adds to the sense of a world of hidden agreements and associations - one which Sheeran and the rest of the "soldiers" and made guys would never be privy to. Certainly creepy.

Gathering the family around the TV to watch The Irishman and then secretly playing John Travolta’s GOTTI and seeing how long it takes everyone to figure it out

— Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) November 29, 2019

I Heard You Use E-Meters

de-aged deniro, meant to sheeran at 30 or so, assaulting the grocer with all the grace and ferocity of 2019 robert deniro is a bit of unintentional humour

yeah that was... rough

I’m pretty sure it’s good actually

The de-aging looks weird at first but I got used to it after a couple of scenes, probably cause Scorsese is so stylised anyway. There’s something v effective about the obvious bleeding through the bandage

I think this guy I follow put it really well

You can tell they are old in the irishman, but it works. The weight of their future is pressing upon them from their youth, making them stiff and sore, faces blanched into ageless putty by their actions

— bobsy (@bobsymindless) November 29, 2019

The only time it was really a problem for me was the scene where young Pesci first meets deniro at that gas station. No idea what age he was supposed to be but Pesci looked truly horrifying, like he was wearing a melted Halloween mask or something.

I heard someone saying that it worked for them bc the movie is framed as Franks reminiscences, and you often remember your younger self and your friends as just being the present versions of you in the past, which is kind of an interesting take imo even I don’t really subscribe to it myself.

Will see this soon, but still astounded it cost $200 million. If Marty is spending that much on this sort of story and still complaining about Marvel movies he's kind of missing the point. I heard Edward Norton on the radio more or less boasting that "Motherless Brooklyn" "only" cost $27 million or so and "small" movies that "cheap" (scarequotes mine) are getting harder and harder to make.

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2018/the-10-best-micro-budget-movies-of-the-21st-century/

No marvel chat itt for Christ’s sake

DeNiro pretty convincingly portrayed someone younger in Goodfellas, I thought his first appearance when “he couldn’t have been more than 28 or 29 at the time” was believable, they just did a little dark hair color and some makeup and it worked esp if you consider ppl from that era looked older and DeNiro up to age fifty still had a certain lithe vitality. They only had to age him forward a few years for that film too.

tangerine, tiny furniture, blair witch, primer, paranormal activity, mariachi and resolution and all come to mind as great under-100k-budget films
fuck kevin smith btw

hm, little clicking around suggests moonlight was made for 1.5 million and was already a huge success pre-oscars with 23 million... but then went on to make 65 million post oscars, which makes it the biggest ROI in modern theater history
BUT that's still not even half of what Doctor Strange made!

Will see this soon, but still astounded it cost $200 million.

I thought Blair Witch was the ROI record holder?

i guess i'm thinking of modern theater history as "since turn of the century" but yes, Blair Witch was a monster. those guys never quite were able to do it again huh?

Will see this soon, but still astounded it cost $200 million. If Marty is spending that much on this sort of story and still complaining about Marvel movies he's kind of missing the point. 


this literally had nothing to do with what he was saying about Marvel films

hm, little clicking around suggests moonlight was made for 1.5 million and was already a huge success pre-oscars with 23 million... but then went on to make 65 million post oscars, which makes it the biggest ROI in modern theater history

Check out Magic Mike

xpost Oh, I know, I just meant if you're making a "real cinema" (or whatever) gangster movie, and telling that story takes $200 million, then you're really no better than blockbusters that cost as much, especially when you're leaning so hard on digital effects. Back to that Edward Norton interview I referenced, he specifically cited the cost of this movie and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (which was maybe $100 million?) as what "little movies" like his are up against.

xpost Oh, I know, I just meant if you're making a "real cinema" (or whatever) gangster movie, and telling that story takes $200 million, then you're really no better than blockbusters that cost as much, especially when you're leaning so hard on digital effects.

What

I guess I'm not making myself clear. I think $200 is a lot of money, a blockbuster budget. And a lot of that money went to digital effects in this, right? So when you're spending huge amounts of cash and leaning on huge amounts of FX, then it seems (and yeah, no need to go into this again) pretty rich to complain that those other multi-hundred million dollar movies packed with digital FX are not to your liking.

200
200 dollah
200 dollah blockbuster

Scorcese complains that the superhero movies crowd out the entire marketplace to the detriment of theatrical cinema - don't think many are really arguing about that part. But maybe it does weaken his argument a little, having to go to Netflix of all people for unlimited money to "waste" on a low-key historical drama that probably could've been made for 25% of that. At least, it might if Irishman wasn't good...

The CGI in The Irishman and the CGI in any given Marvel movie are not the same at all—in terms of "leaning" on CGI, take all the CGI out of The Irishman and Guardians of the Galaxy and see which movie loses less. they're just trying to make older actors look younger, which is still really hard and really expensive, it costs a lot for a subtle effect that just barely works imo.

Barely related: there was a quote from some director who was asked, years and years ago at this point, about their favorite use of CG, and the director cited Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility." The interviewer was of course a little confused, and the director noted one scene of a storm rolling in that apparently used computer effects, the argument being (at least at the time) that CG should be used to create things out of your control, but that the best CG does not call attention to itself and, in fact, may be best when totally unnoticed.

Anyway, distant point being, were it not for the parade of Marvel movies et al. Marty would likely have not had access to a technology he was happy to spend tens of millions on. Maybe he should just think of those movies as the world's most expensive and successful experiments in R&D.

Will see this soon, but still astounded it cost $200 million. If Marty is spending that much on this sort of story and still complaining about Marvel movies he's kind of missing the point. I heard Edward Norton on the radio more or less boasting that "Motherless Brooklyn" "only" cost $27 million or so and "small" movies that "cheap" (scarequotes mi

Will see this soon, but still astounded it cost $200 million. If Marty is spending that much on this sort of story and still complaining about Marvel movies he's kind of missing the point. I heard Edward Norton on the radio more or less boasting that "Motherless Brooklyn" "only" cost $27 million or so and "small" movies that "cheap" (scarequotes mine) are getting harder and harder to make.

I really liked this anyway. The CG stuff only stuck out in the beginning. Got used to it fast. Seemed totally inconsequential to me.

Seemed very much about aging out, losing it, and dying on all levels. A lot of Old Man Rambling moments, both in the acting and writing, but made sense and seemed intentional given the context. All the clunky elements worked in its favor.

i've gotten about an hour into it, going to finish tomorrow

I dont like the de-aging. Film is too much about images to stuff your movie with an odd visual effect on your stars faces.

The final half hour is good cinema. The rest is overly long. I didnt feel the Hoffa-Sheeran relationship enough, you have so long a film to develop these things, you think youd do that. It's the emotional core of the movie, this man killed one of his closest friends and lost his daughter and sold his soul in doing so. it doesnt quite connect for me.

me neither

i keep coming back to the scene where frank is explaining how you want a clean weapon you can throw away once the job is done, and thinking about how frank himself is used as a weapon, getting more and more tarnished each time, until eventually there’s no-one left to throw him away

de niro does a really good job of playing frank as the guy who’s just not quite smart enough to grasp what’s going on until it’s too late

I found Dominick Lombardozzi's fat suit way more disturbing than digital De Niro.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKn8WNlXsAMRzSQ.jpg

i think on second viewing (in which i went from liking it to loving it) it became clear that it’s less about someone who lost their soul than someone who never had one. frank’s ultimate horror is that even his own inner life is meaningless to him, it’s just this endless purgatorial damnation (it’s key that he DOESN’T die at the end)...and there’s that moving scene with the priest at the end with the line “lord help us to see ourselves.”

it’s just this endless purgatorial damnation

and now you're free! until later today, when we have to put you through all of this again.

if he loses his soul it's at anzio. loved how many people say "you know, it's like in the war" to him while talking around murder. economic-- political-- even spiritual.

yeah, I'm not sure if Frank ever had a soul, but if he loses it, it's definitely in the war.

if he doesn’t have a soul why is he so affected by his daughter rejecting him?

Narcissism?