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

or fell asleep and left it running, or the numbers are completely made up, no way to know. but heartening if true!

Yeah Netflix “ratings” are in the category of data we Brits call “chinny reckon”

Pretty prime release date for it. Lot of people bored with their relatives.

And thinking about murdering them/putting them in a home?

the one time of year when you go to church

My inlaws came arrived the night before thanksgiving and were p much immediately like “should we out on that Irishman movie?”

Here are 2 things I *never* thought I’d say (and that will soon land me on many “check out this dumb tweet” threads): I think it’s fantastic that everybody is now arguing about MARRIAGE STORY & THE IRISHMAN. And I think their widespread availability on Netflix made that possible.

— Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) December 7, 2019

Speaking of Adam Driver, "The Report" is up on Amazon as well. For sure I'm more able/likely to see all three of these movies at home.

Bilge isn’t wrong there

i finally saw this, had to do it over two nights. next time i'll do it in one since it's a pretty swift 209 minutes. at the moment not much to add, i'll have more to say another time. but i thought it was fascinating in how it was less a "at the end of your life you're going to be alone and abandoned if you make certain choices" as much as "you'll be alone your whole life if you do this." there are so many scenes where Frank is on the outside looking in, not privy to information regarding jobs he'll be tasked with carrying out, watching people talk to one another or make phone calls, just completely powerless and only knowing about something when it's time to get an order, such a passive pawn being pushed around the board that some low-level nobody gangster approaches him on some minor thing and he just shrugs and says ok, and it almost gets him killed for reasons he barely understands. Only an intervention from Russell and some mercy from Angelo Bruno let him live another day. and his allegiance to Hoffa is also something that almost gets him killed, or it's heavily implied that it would, if he himself doesn't handle this thing in Michigan. also near the end when Russell tells him he chose "us over him", that is basically Frank's life: he chose his way of life over anyone else who really cared about him, or who ever could have at one point. After he gets into this life he only survives because other people find him useful vs any of them actually really giving much of a shit about him. Maybe Russell does, but in fairly empty and quietly destructive way.

also Anna Paquin's almost mute role didn't bother me, her presence was palpable in all of her scenes, and someone of her particular charisma and recognizability for that type of role is required.

the same goes for Keitel as well; he's the most fearsome guy in the room, even just as a background figure who periodically makes decisions about jobs Frank carries out, or periodically decides if Frank lives or dies.

there are so many scenes where Frank is on the outside looking in, not privy to information regarding jobs he'll be tasked with carrying out

this movie repeatedly does this weirdly disorienting thing where *something* happens first and then it's only explained later. see the whole "little guy" conversation that happens before we know who the little guy is and the broad daylight assassination scored to Sleep Walk.

I'd have to check, but isn't who the little guy is clarified in voice-over within a minute of his first mention--two at the most? There's a gap, but I don't remember it as being very significant.

The little guy is Joey Pro, and we are introduced to him relatively early in the film, but not as "the little guy." The back-and-forth Frank and Hoffa have in the hotel room about "the little guy" goes on long enough to make you think they might in fact be talking about Russell.

dunno if it's been discussed earlier (i think it was?) but the actor playing joey pro does a great job with a mostly throwaway character

Yeah Stephen Graham, he’s very very good in the Pesci-type role here.

Speaking if which, that scene had one of a handful of Pacino jewels, namely the whole "Ohh, I can breathe now! I can breathe again! Ohh boy." Then nods right off. Not as memorable as "A knife, you charge; a gun, you run" or "What do you know about cleaning up a fish? You ever caught a fucking fish? Didn't think so" but not far behind.

The weirdest coincidence for me was that I saw this the first time on Nov. 11, the day Don Cherry was fired for his reference to "you people"--the exact phrase that gets Joey Pro so agitated.

Ha! I thought the same thing too, when I saw it.

Neither apologized, either.

i think Russell Bufalino's only pseudonym in the film is "McGee" (used regularly in the book)

one of the low-key funniest things about this film was the use of allusive language, like when Frank keeps telling Hoffa, "they're concerned" and later "they're very concerned", the escalation within that is just hilarious to me. "No you don't understand they're really, really concerned" etc etc. I think it was said earlier but no one wants to say anything explicitly and no one ever does, which perhaps IRL is for plausible deniability but for the film works in a very chilling but poetic way, everyone wants to keep the dirty business as far away from their conscience as possible. So even Frank when he pulls the trigger on Hoffa it's almost like he can act like it was outside himself, a separate act which he was witnessing more than actually committing.

frank mentioned something about what mob guys really mean when they say they're "concerned" in that scene in the diner.

He did - it was the scene with Beansie from The Sopranos.

I'd have been such a lousy mobster. That shit needs to be spelled out for me, and maybe even confirmed by email.

i think even then though it's more like "concerned" means "really concerned" and "really concerned" means "desperate"

the clearest it gets is when they say "he's gotta go"

To Australia.

I'd have been such a lousy mobster. That shit needs to be spelled out for me, and maybe even confirmed by email.

"they're really concerned... they turned on their read-receipt notification..."

"it's what it is"
"What do you nean, it's what it is?"
"Do I gotta spell it out for you?"
"Yeah."
"Well I can't."
"Why?"
"Because it's what it is, and if I tell you what 'it' is, I might no longer 'is'"
"That makes no goddamn sense."
"Neither does your haircut. But are you reading me here?"
"Yeah. It's not what it is."
"No, it's what it is."
"What's what it is?"
"IT. IT'S IT."
"What is 'it'?"

*Frank shoots Hoffa and furiously kicks his corpse*

*A wealthy old dowager with a giant fancy hat comes in, starts berating Frank for being the worst housepainter she’s ever seen, smacking him with her handbag*

"I hear you're quite a house painter, Frank."
"Yes, I am, thank you, sir. I also do my own carpentry."
"Oh, you do, do you? That's great. Maybe you could take a look at the new deck I'm building on my house at the lake."
"Sir, does that mean what I think it means?"
"Well Frank, what do you think it means?"
"Um, I think it means what I think it means, I mean, what it is. It's what it is."
"Great! So glad we're on the same page!"

I'm surprised there weren't more who's-on-first exchanges like that. There was that great one between Frank and Angelo early on:

"Frank, do you know who else had an interest in that cleaning business?"
"No sir, I don't."
"I do."
"Oh, you know?"
"No Frank! I do! I know, and I do!"

Haha I liked that one

I didn't think there was anything particularly new with the suspension-of-disbelief required by the CGI - accepting Robert DeNiro as a young Marlon Brando or Winona Ryder in old lady makeup or Brad Pitt as an old baby require a similar level of acceptance from the viewer. It's just that this was achieved with a different and fairly novel technique. As such it involves it's own peculiarities (old men don't *move* like men in their 20s, as has been noted), the viewer either rolls with it or does not.

sorry to be pedantic but the number of people referring to "joey pro" in recent posts has had me chortling

I totally missed McGee = Bufalino, what kind of nickname is that

one for the FBI tapes

xp lol, yes it's "tony pro" my bad

w/r/t the CGI -- it didn't bother me whatsoever, and i didn't even notice it after awhile. DeNiro didn't seem like a young DeNiro ever but then again i mostly bought him as a burly run down bulky mid century thirtysomething, and he wasn't playing a young DeNiro. He was playing a young Sheeran.

I thought the VO was good too, and different. It was this very straightforward thing, it wasn't occasionally poetic like DeNiro's Casino narration, it wasn't nearly as colorful or comedic as Liotta's GoodFellas one, it was this very matter-of-fact info. Perfect for a character who only half-understood what was happening at any given moment and never really caught on to anything until it was too late, including the cost of his chosen life.

Was there any breaking of the fourth wall that you tend to see a lot of in Scorsese pictures? There was Frank in the nursing home, but even then it seemed like he was talking to an unseen interlocutor, not us, the audience. Maybe Frank's VO the whole time was him explaining away his life to the priest? I otherwise don't recall anything.

xp they're all named Tony!

There was the scene where Pacino sat up after being shot in the head and said "But that's not how it happened!"

the cgi didn't bother me either, but i generally am pretty good at suspending disbelief (i didn't notice deniro's stiffness during the grocery store scene or the gun throwing scenes). it did make it a little confusing when it became clear that the story was unfolding with non-linear chronology (with flashbacks from that detroit road trip), because all the de-aged versions of deniro and pesci looked the same to me.

I think when you chuck a gun into the river you probably are going to flick it in, rather than throw it like a baseball. That seemed believable. The grocery store scene was pretty incongruent though. De Niro kicked and stomped the dude slowly and awkwardly, looked young but moved old, and didn't seem all that menacing.

Yea plus his guns landed where other guns already were

they also used cgi for broken glass in a really shitty way in that scene (it fell too slowly iirc).

he chucked a gun like an old man, like he has limited mobility in his limbs and chucking a heavy piece of metal is kind of a strain

I'm just against de-aging, I've realized. sure, do it to make a septuagenarian look 50, maybe. but use it sparingly ffs.

Was there any breaking of the fourth wall that you tend to see a lot of in Scorsese pictures? There was Frank in the nursing home, but even then it seemed like he was talking to an unseen interlocutor, not us, the audience. Maybe Frank's VO the whole time was him explaining away his life to the priest? I otherwise don't recall anything.

i didn't notice anything like this other than the nursing home scenes.

i'm going to try to watch it again later this week, there's a lot about it that is lingering w/me. one thing i noticed is that the violence is fast, they just get it over with and keep walking. Even the Hoffa hit is just two shots and out the door. And it's quite a bit less grisly than his other gangster films.

Sorta felt to me like Scorsese was making up for Casino, which I felt at the time was something of a misreading of Goodfellas (i.e. if it's violence they want, it's violence they'll get.)

I liked the fast plot pacing in general, like how Frank's affair/divorce/remarriage was handled in 2 short sentences of dialogue: "There's no good time to leave your wife. But that's what I did."

Marty explaining duel wielding!!! pic.twitter.com/L1kOmByh6p

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) December 9, 2019

this was way upthread and maybe already answered but regarding the aspect ratio, I bet he shot flat because he knew it would be largely seen on 16x9 televisions.

inevitably so

Frank: I’m a friend of Jimmy Bofa

Jimmy: Who’s Jimmy Bo-

Frank: pic.twitter.com/pupaJD1zKF

— Columbo’s Fake Wife (@SlayerofCis) December 12, 2019