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

Saw it opening night, it was very good. the first two hours were so preordained, so much gangster fan service scripting, so much special effects and explosions that i did have the "well how is this different from a marvel movie" thought but the last 30 minutes really redeem the film and act as apologia for scorcese's big dick bad guy fantasy fuel. DeNiro is fine, Pacino is a restrained as he's likely to be for the rest of his career and Pesci is fucking amazing as the most menacing grampa ever. He'd be winning a best supporting actor Oscar as long as he did the press stuff and is friendly on camera which i suppose he won't do.

it is a FAST 3 1/2 hours if you can believe it.

were you aware (as I only just became) that Sheehan's story is bogus, and if so how did it affect the experience?

Sheeran

Isn't every gangster story largely bogus

I don't know, maybe the peripheral details but not the central thesis?

I generally approach any gangster story as a fantasy.

some for me e.g. Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco have a little more life than others for being based on true stories

i was not aware of how "real" the story was but the meaninglessness of these gangsters' lives and their totally full-of-shit lives is absolutely at the heart of the film... so you guys are OTM with what i think Irishman (which was clearly meant to be called I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES and which it should be called) is about

I have no idea if it's bogus or not, but all sorts of ppl who've dealt with this world for decades differ on that. And I'm not interested in "deciding."

btw ulysses all the Osc*r supporting talk is around Pacino

Hoffa - GREAT ASS!

talk about a 3-hour film that felt longer...

were you aware (as I only just became) that Sheehan's story is bogus, and if so how did it affect the experience?

I don't know short of a ruling what would make an "official" debunkment but I found this enlightening

https://www.thedailybeast.com/martin-scorseses-the-irishman-is-a-big-lie-heres-what-really-happened-to-jimmy-hoffa

I don't get the point of making a big deal of this in the context of the movie.

I get why Don Shirley's family objected to Green Book (Joey Lips's white knighting) but this Scorcese film, if it's entertaining, whatever.

Zodiac was based on a book written by a discredited author who floated debunked theories and yet i enjoyed that one even with that knowledge

a 'countermyth' to JFK also part of this

a plausible one, true or not

i had some issues with this but the plot driving forward was not generally one of them. you thought it was slow morbs?

I haven't seen it yet; MoMA next Saturday afternoon.

Netflix will not release b.o. numbers, but there were numerous sellouts in NYC

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/box-office-the-irishman-harriet-wide-1202186843/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/movies/irishman-belasco-netflix.html

My "3-hour film that felt longer" was about Heat, by the minor-league Scorsese.

(following Neanderthal's assquote, which i have no memory of in the film and know solely thru ILX)

Ive always had less than zero investment in the mystery of What Happened To Jimmy Hoffa and am hoping that the movie's impact wont rely on me giving too much of a shit about it.

He manages a Walgreens now under the psudonym Todd Steele

i do care about what happened to hero of labor james r hoffa but yeah, this is a movie, who cares if its accurate

xp to morbs, ah gotcha.
fwiw within the film hoffa is not treated as a "great man" except in the sense that he has outstanding charisma. he - and basically every man who gets a screen credit - is a sociopath and sees violence and potentially murder as potentially useful tools.
aside from hoffa's wife, women have virtually no place in this world. anna paquin has maybe two sentences in an extremely halfhearted subplot.

This was ehhhh to pretty good? By the time it hits Hour #3, we thought, "Wait, why should we care so much about the death of Hoffa?" Joe Pesci and De Niro are baby powder soft and quite poignant, although it's impossible to separate our feeling for them as aging actors from the characters.

Nicholson as Hoffa was more effective.

The editing remains wizardly.

it is a FAST 3 1/2 hours if you can believe it.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Sunday, November 3, 2019 1

Not really: often a pointless 3.5 hours.

Is there any nudity

no Jake

meh, everybody doesn't care about something

for me, it's old Pazz & Jop results

Is there any nudity

al pacino is fully naked from the waist down in each and every one of his scenes, a fact which has been embargoed from all reviews so far but which i can exclusively reveal here on ilxor dot com

"Just when I thought they were up, they keep pulling them back down!"

lol

Edelstein: “This is the first Scorsese movie in which the images don’t seem unified either by fever or by the kind of hard, rigorous focus that is fever’s opposite.”

I resented after several hours how Scorsese cast Anna Paquin only to restrain her to scowling for a total of 12 minutes running time.

Edelstein not OTM about the rich period detail of the RFK-Hoffa grilling. However, the set design for the HoJo in the last third, its pool, and shitty roadside lounges is fabulous even when the film's rhythms at this point resemble a solid episode of Mad Men (and it has that episodic rhythm of good TV).

Not really: often a pointless 3.5 hours.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, November 6, 2019

sounds like it was for you! I got there fifteen minutes before showtime to a packed house which means that, as the ten senior citizens I had to goosestep over to get to my seat suggested, I was very much trapped. you sip your soda slowly, i tell you. but the upshot was that the film flew by and by the time we got to the painfully nonredemptive end, I was unclear how long this was going to go on... which helped the drama tbh. If i had been watching this at home on Netflix, I can almost guarantee i woulda been half attuned and checking my phone, likely woulda punched out at the moment they introduced the new mob boss only to kill him. Another win for seeing things in theaters imo.

I agree, as I noted above, on Scorcese's lack of engagement women here (and, in general unfortunately), Paquin especially.
"why should we care about the death of hoffa" is really less the meaning of the film than "watch this brute sell the last of his scruples and kill his hero in the name of meaningless, sexless power"

I resented after several hours how Scorsese cast Anna Paquin only to restrain her to scowling for a total of 12 minutes running time.

weirdly I found her lack of dialogue quite affecting

like, these guys do nothing but talk all fucking day, and here's this quiet person who can see through it all without a word. her affection for Hoffa (purely because, we assume, she'd never *seen* him do anything crooked) just made it even more painful!

Ive seen Paquin in just one movie in the last 10 years and that sucks. I'm not gonna watch True Blood, thanks

Scorcese's lack of engagement women here (and, in general unfortunately)

He kinda went off on this in a recent interview. He's given signature roles to Burstyn (Oscar!), Liza (likely her second-best film role), Sharon Stone, Sandra Bernhard, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, a few others. In this story, women are not at the center, so whaddya want?

how about "(and, in general as of late, unfortunately)"? Like say the last eight years.

and it's not that they're not in the center, it's that they exist only to be placate, protected and avoided.

Well except for Silence, those movies didn't have any good roles for men either.

Maybe he could give a woman in a mob picture the equivalent of what Coppola wrote for Diane Keaton in Godfather II -- "IT WAS AN ABORTION, MICHAEL, BECAUSE ALL OF THIS MUST END" -- and it'd be the biggest false note in the movie.

(obv there weren't any Portuguese female monks in the 17th century)

xp maybe he could make a point of having a female character with any sort of defining or interesting characteristics? just spitballing here.

"why should we care about the death of hoffa" is really less the meaning of the film than "watch this brute sell the last of his scruples and kill his hero in the name of meaningless, sexless power"

I didn't care because Scorsese didn't show what exactly Hoffa sold out except endless references to The Pension Fund or whatever. But how did it affect Hoffa's supporters?

"only to be placated, protected and avoided" seems like a decent summary of the way women are treated by men who lead these lives. I haven't seen the movie's treatment of Sheeran's divorce, but in the book it's clear he chose the Family over his family.

like, these guys do nothing but talk all fucking day, and here's this quiet person who can see through it all without a word. her affection for Hoffa (purely because, we assume, she'd never *seen* him do anything crooked) just made it even more painful!

― Simon H.,

That's not what you cast an actor of her stature to do, but whatever.

yeah Hoffa made the pension fund a Mafia bank, and then he made blustering noises about ratting. Finito.