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

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*

it was moist because there was a fish in the back seat! This is not complicated. It just ran on a bit too long.

See? The running time made an obvious joke flaccid

It clearly did for you, yes. I am not blaming the film’s run time, just the length of that particular pre-murder shaggy dog story and its particular obviousness as such.

Was someone trying to fuck the fish

but paquin is REALLY egregious

I have bad news for you about basically every post-Margaret Paquin film role

Again though: the film’s air of preordained outcome and mad lib gangster dialogue made for pleasant but valid page turning; the decision to keep the camera running much longer than it had to implicates the viewer in a way I thought made the movie matter. “Hey, you wanted the tough guy bullshit; here’s how it actually resolves.”

Separately, this could’ve lost a half an hour in its belly with zero impact and I wouldn’t argue otherwise. But everyone’s enjoying themselves so much onscreen and behind the camera (and not incidentally, in my audience at least), it seems churlish to bitch.

xxp
didn't realise Captain Birdseye was a teamster. i'm learning new things from this movie before i've even seen it.

Valid=vapid in that post

I'm not gonna get to see this before the 27th

tbh I didn't mind the shaggy bits cause I knew he was setting Netflix's money on fire

On the contrary: it'll play well on Netflix, just not in the cinema.

I saw it in the cinema fwiw and was not bored or annoyed at any point (the last post was a joke; setting Netflix's money on fire was merely a bonus)

I like Anthony Lane's remark: structurally it's Wild Strawberries with guns. And I appreciated its fascination with geriatric crime. But by the time it got to the third hour and the film was figuring out how to kill Hoffa I felt a quiet soul death.

On the contrary to YOUR contrary!
I love discussing le cinema

and the film was figuring out how to kill Hoffa

It's not doing this.

Anyway, KJB and I both liked. I think the phone call to Hoffa's widow is late-career peak for de Niro -- it's like the whispery equivalent of cut-up poetry.

(of course I haven't seen Bad Grandpa)

I think the phone call to Hoffa's widow is late-career peak for de Niro -- it's like the whispery equivalent of cut-up poetry.

yes that is an absolutely staggering moment

it's the best thing he does in the film; thought he mostly just wandered through otherwise but that's a good moment of a man losing his soul

there's now a mini controversy about Paquin's role in this because of course there is

It's not doing this.

It is.

With the distance of several days, it's fine second-tier Scorsese, his An Autumn Afternoon: the material isn't fresh but the 'autumnal' notes are.

De Nro and Pesci are at their peak, Pacino less so. These Method hams like him and Nicholson have to imitate him when the surest way would've been to evoke Hoffa without bothering with the accent and hairline.

People grousing about Paquin's low number of lines (I assume that's the 'controversy' bcz I don't give a flying shitto) would not have understood the power of silent cinema. She's there to haunt her father -- words are mostly superfluous -- and that's why you need an actor of "her stature" to pull that off.

(frankly I had forgotten she was the lead in Margaret)

and she's actually *named* Margaret in this one

"evoking Hoffa" doesn't sound fun... guy was a bellowing steamroller. (I bet that Robert Blake miniseries from the '80s has some ham too.)

You're missing my point. Few actors in the last 30 years bother looking or sounding like RFK besides a broad Bahston Braaahmin accent, so why try for "truth" with Hoffa? It freezes the actors.

Is there controversy over Paquin? My cavil was, "Hey, is that Paquin, and why is she just glowering?"

“I kept asking Steve Zaillian if we can layer her in the story,” Scorsese said at the DGA Theater in NYC. “I decided that she doesn’t have to say anything. You see your father do something like that, I’m sorry… You see him crush the guy’s hand like that… other kids maybe, but this kid couldn’t take it. She looks at him. She knows he’s up to something and Lucy was great, but Anna ultimately was amazing in the looks. She has one line in the film. There’s something you can’t talk about. She knows it. She knows who she is. He knows she knows. Even when she’s sitting there and the police are talking about Joey Gallo being [murdered.] ‘A lone gunman walked in…’ and you see she’s looking at him.”

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/10/martin-scorsese-anna-paquin-irishman-1202185371/

I've heard Hoffa and Pacino doesn't esp sound like him. Many viewers are going to be confused by Al playing an Irish-Pa Dutch guy though.

Won't bother linking to the Guardian "writer" who at one point opines "She seems more like a symbol than a real person." BINGO, SWEETZ, YA GOT IT

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

omg KJB and I both failed to figure out who SVZ was. I did wonder why they got a fire-hydrant-shaped Jerry Vale.

Jim Norton should be thrown away regularly fwiw

"acting" is when the actor says lines!!!

yeah exactly... "line count," what a clown.

anyway the Hoffa role is kinda written as heavily comic... I didn't see it as an impression. If anything my main problem is he was too much like Big Boy Caprice -- which was also his chief virtue!

Lmao

Cos

Argh stupid phone, dont mind me

"Hey, is that Paquin, and why is she just glowering?"

She hates and fears her father.

You can argue the nonverbal approach doesn't work, and that's fine, but the intention is clear.

on soundtrack choices

https://www.slashfilm.com/the-irishman-soundtrack/