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

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?

i mean "soul"'s a lil vague (as ever). frank has dutifully repressed himself into an inarticulate instrument; he did it young; and now, like the fascist soldiers who dug their own graves, he finds at the end of an unpleasant working life that nobody feels merciful towards him and there is no reward. was there another way he could have been? unclear. difficult to imagine. too late now.

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.

def. "frank" is a v fortunate name. liked that hoffa's ultimate moment of defiance (+ simultaneously, blindness) is "this is my union, frank-- very simple when you say it that way", and that when joe pesci is finally sent to "school" it's for saying someone "needs to go to australia" lol

(joe pesci's entire performance being a kind of unslipping mask, w added intertextual thrill from yr immediate suspicion that he is nevertheless a joe pesci character underneath it)

good posts dlh

love bg’s clean gun insight and dlh’s posts!

Suddenly the tossed-out budget has ballooned from $160 million to $200m, not that we'll ever know. Josh, you are making no sense re Marvel v Marty.

As for Pacino's sliding accent, I didn't especially notice nor care (see also Mitchum's Boston yawp in The Friends of Eddie Coyle). And not being moved by the Hoffa-Sheeran relationship -- well, it's a rancid one. I think it's fine to diagnose it from a distance... again, no sentimentality.

The book is particularly daring in partly blaming Frank's service in The Good War for his pathology. Ditto the one scene in the film, plus the "It's like the Army" line.

$200 mil is the last I saw, but yeah, we'll never know. I absolutely concede I'm not making as much sense as I'd like, or at least not consistent with whatever argument Scorsese himself was making (I didn't really follow the debate, tbh, so probably came at it sideways). I tried to clarify, but I guess what I was getting at is that if this story and how it's told took $200 million and lots of VFX, then ultimately the impact on moviemaking is imo just as detrimental (or whatever he was arguing) as CGI people in CGI costumes flying around fighting aliens. (And per what I posted earlier, Scorsese wouldn't have even had access to the tech he used were it not for the inroads made by the Marvel bugaboos he dismissed.) I suppose that's all a different debate.

I think as a filmmaker first it’s safe to assume he’s gonna try to get as much funding for his movies as he can get away with. Also with the cast and sets and locations and fx I think you can see most of the ~160 on the screen.

Re: Sheeran/Hoffa...there’s maybe also a meta-textual element here in that Sheeran thought he was closer to Hoffa than he really was? Maybe the movie doesn’t support this...but it’s clear that he sees his proximity to Hoffa as a “great man” as the one thread of his life that connects to something meaningful.

(fwiw, I was curious, so looked up the reported budget of "Zodiac," which used extensive FX to tell a story set across decades with the same actors/characters, and it cost $85 million, at least in 2007. Tbf, I guess it's a lot easier to make younger people look older than it is to make older people look younger.)

(oh wait, it *cost* $65, but *made* $85, my mistake)

Also Zodiac depicts, like, twenty years, whereas with I Heard You Paint Houses it's more like fifty.

Scorsese's gripe w/Marvel movies was specifically with the stories they tell, not the amount of VFX or size of budget

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

he feels its absence

Maybe the punchline is they talked Pesci out of retirement with a $150 million payday

I do think some of Scorseses films seem quite expensive to an extent where it seems almost decadent. Of course, his films are often about decadence. But I watched The Aviator the other night, and in that film the budget is clearly on screen in a way I found detrimental to the film.

nearly all of the Zodiac effects were environments and buildings, too

xpost Yeah, that and Gangs of NY I kind of agree *did* look a little too expensive, which is a funny complaint.

xxpost lol

Has it been reported with any degree of accuracy just how much the de-aging (keep wanting to type "de-icing") specifically cost?

xpost Yeah, that and Gangs of NY I kind of agree *did* look a little too expensive, which is a funny complaint.

― Josh in Chicago, 30. november 2019 23:50 (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

With Gangs of New York especially, I felt like the script had been compromised to make it more 'commercial'. Also, both films were Miramax films, and feel like it.

You people loling about the budget -- are you accountants? What the hell do you care?

Why does anyone care about anything, come on.

The whole argument against Marvel is that it crowds out other types of film, so that other filmmakers don't get the chances they deserve. I don't think it's out of line to point out that you could make 2000 Tangerines out of The Irishman.

how many seasons of Orange is the New Black could you make, though

and we're back to Marvel, yipee

There’s a discussion to be had about whether Netflix or major studios should be pushing for more small budget flicks but their funding of this one was basically a play to look more serious by making a movie with Scorsese and a budget on par with his other work instead of a one-off

trivial things that bugged me: Pacino's wig. Why was Russell fixing his own salad in Howard Johnson's, had he brought his own oil and vinegar? And I think we hear "Sally Go Round the Roses" playing in 1960.

but I loved that opening tracking shot through the nursing home; that's a Scorsese joke right?

Pacino's rug was awful, and sure, the accent slipping wasn't fatal, and I'd be more forgiving if I thought he was good - he was much better as a Jew in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

w/r/t movie budgets: always remember how dramatically they shrank after the recession. The Mothman Prophecies, which came out in 2002, cost $30 million. that is a solid B movie that would be made by Blumhouse today for less than a million. that was the same year Scorsese scrapped together hundreds of millions to shoot GONY in Italy only to arrive with a shitty movie.