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

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.

xxp to alfred: I think you're confusing my point: the "brute" there isn't pacino, it's deniro.

Morbs otm. Scorsese's created many indelible female characters. My complaint about this film is the unrewarding familiarity stretched out to Netflix series length.

The road sequences with the cig-smoking wives, Pesci, and De Niro played, like the early bits of Lynch's Mulholland Drive, as if written for hour-long TV segments.

morbs: the divorce is given a single line.
alfred, you clearly found the road trip sequences exhausting by attenuation; i thought they sufficiently encapsulated how these powerful violent men have no real interests or depth of any variety to their life. their failure of imagination is amongst their most damning qualities and they kill people for a living.
i will say that all the back of the car "fish schtick" dialogue got a little exhausting but hey, nothing's ever gonna beat "whattayawant from me"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlyXZG2dupo

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

iirc Keitel is in this for like three minutes?

he also throws away jesse plemons, bobby cannavale, jim norton... Steve Van Zandt does some blink and you miss it lip synching!

but paquin is REALLY egregious.

BTW, Van Morrison is in the closing music and you can't even hear him until after the music credits roll and he starts mumbling "I hear you paint houses..."
i wish i was kidding!

iirc Keitel is in this for like three minutes?

― Simon H.,

yeah!

i will say that all the back of the car "fish schtick" dialogue got a little exhausting but hey, nothing's ever gonna beat "whattayawant from me"

I still couldn't figure out why it was moist, but I didn't care because the movie didn't make me care. This is HOUR THREE.

maybe Fran Lebowitz coulda played a Teamster

Woody Allen usta cast names for 2-minute roles alla time, so Marty has received the baton

Sotosyn, just think of it as his Sandinista!

*shudder*