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

Enjoyed the Jimmy Hoffa as junk food fiend motif throughout this. Got a pang of nostalgia from the beer-battered hot dogs from Lum's, bc we had one of those joints where I grew up. Have eaten at Umberto's Clam House too, though not the original location where Gallo got hit but the second one two blocks away. The guy who ranked the food in this movie on Twitter neglected to include what was being served at Umberto's, but of course if we're not even sure who made that hit we probably can't know what food was on the table.

And then there's the post-movie roundtable discussion on Netflix, where I tried to figure out what each guy was drinking.. iirc:

Pesci: martini
Pacino: perhaps an old-fashioned
Scorsese: wanna say a Benedictine & brandy with a big ice cube but could be scotch
DeNiro: had one empty glass in front of him and another with whiskey (?)

DeNiro had a coffee

That's right, a cup of espresso

who played rickles? worst impersonation imo

― mh, Saturday, November 30, 2019 10:32 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't even realize that was supposed to be Rickles until the credits. And Van Zandt's over-the-top gesticulating as Jerry Vale was just dumb.

just feeling the need to point out "water under the dam"

This is an interesting piece about the movie's political shortcomings.

As De Niro’s Frank points out, for a period in the middle of the 20th century, Hoffa was one of the most famous and influential men in America, but today he’s virtually unknown, and young people tend to know him mainly for having disappeared. The Irishman treats this as simply the inevitable result of the passage of time, which tracks with the film’s primary concern of depicting an elderly Frank looking back on his life and realizing that his illegal activities and violent tendencies have left him lonely and unloved. But to me, the fact that Hoffa has been memory-holed and turned into a joke felt very familiar, the sort of thing that mainstream culture does to people whose ideas it finds troublesome. Turning Hoffa into a punchline is a great way of avoiding the question of what the organization he ran, and unions in general, tried to accomplish. By ignoring this, The Irishman flattens the history it claims to depict.

As portrayed in The Irishman, Pacino’s Hoffa is a true believer with feet of clay. He’s happy to work with the mob and use their connections to advance his career, but sees himself primarily as the union’s steward (and particularly, the steward of its billion-dollar pension fund). He doesn’t think of himself as a mobster or a criminal, but as a man using all the tools at his disposal to protect the members of his union. When he’s jailed, his replacement is more amenable, allowing the mob to use the pension fund as a piggy bank. Hoffa’s threats to shut off the money spigot (and call in existing loans) if he regains control of the Teamsters’ union are the reason he’s killed. I have no idea how accurate any of this is (and apparently the real Sheeran’s claim to have killed Hoffa has been greeted with derision by the FBI and other experts on the case, so it’s probably a solid bet that the rest of the movie also plays fast and loose with history). But it seems to me that there’s a much more interesting story to be told here than the self-pitying musings of an aging mobster, and that 2019 is just the right time to tell it.

...

Though the film notes the role of unions in protecting the rights of workers and securing their retirement, it usually does so with a heavy layer of irony. At the beginning of his criminal career, Frank weasels his way out of a charge of having stolen his truck’s load of sides of beef—which we saw him do—through the protection of his local union. Frank’s young daughter Peggy becomes enamored of Hoffa and the ideals he seems to represent, of protection and solidarity for the working man, but her enthusiastic recitation of his stump speech at school is intercut with examples of Hoffa’s corruption and the illegal acts Frank performs for him. When Frank himself becomes the president of a local, we’re shown that he uses that position for graft and violence. The Irishman could have used that irony to point out how Hoffa and his mob connections ended up slaughtering their own cash cow, and, along the way, hurting millions of American workers. How their actions caused unions to become associated with corruption and crime in the minds of middle class Americans, who happily elected the plutocrat-backed politicians who promised to fight that corruption, and ended up gutting workers’ rights for everyone. But instead the film remains focused on the personal, with no broader political statement.

i had no idea what this film was before watching first half last night. Spent a lot of time pausing and trying to give labor/politics/mob context to 15 y/o. my lol takeway was “huh, i didnt know deniro had blue eyes.”

he doesn’t!

that’s the lol part.

more like The Fremen

The thing I got from the portrayal of unions and Hoffa in the film was that the fall had happened a long time ago. The union is already mob-controlled, already fatally compromised, and there isn't really anything in that portrayal that says anything about honest, good, socialist unions. That thing just isn't in the film.

i spent too much time trying to contextualize this to the kid, to explain that my own opinion in the strong need for unions is by no means the view of unions in which i was raised. My eternally gop 70s conservative family construction advised that unions were inherently corrupt and not interested in actual labor rights, less so the post-reagan , slightly philosophized “right to work” critique, though they are obv quite linked.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/26/jimmy-hoffa-and-the-irishman-a-true-crime-story
a worthwhile read here
i think there's an argument to be made that scorcese is consciously mirroring the bullshittery of Sheeran to show how the glorification and puffery of brutal venal men amounts to nothing but meaningless life
but i can see where someone with skin in the game (like that essay's writer and the earlier union rights essayist) could be infuriated by a netflix generation seeing this very fictional film as some sort of sparknotes explanation of hoffa and the us labor movement of the 50's-70's

blame the GOP's successful use of Hoffa as scapegoat

ibid

On another level, however, the forty-four year whodunnit obsession—which The Irishman will almost certainly perpetuate—also distracts us from the larger and still-relevant lessons the Hoffa saga can teach. In the late 1950s, Hoffa ran the largest union in the country, and his stranglehold over transportation routes gave him extraordinary power against management interests and thus enormous influence over the national economy. It was a precarious time for the increasingly sclerotic American labor movement, which was just beginning its long decline toward its present, comparatively pitiful state. Hoffa might have used his genius for organizing and his control over transportation networks to lead the labor movement in a very different direction than the one it in fact took. But Hoffa’s amorality and criminal associations made this impossible—and would destroy him.

Hoffa’s demise had tragic consequences for all of labor. To bring Hoffa down, a young Robert F. Kennedy, leading a Senate investigation known as the McClellan Committee, engaged in famously abusive and broad-brush tactics that had the effect of making large parts of the American public think that unions had grown into dangerously powerful institutions that threatened America’s economy and even its moral sense. The righteous Boston liberal gave the post-World War II conservative critique of American unions a broad public audience and a credibility that anti-labor forces in the business community and Congress never could have achieved. As the labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein has noted, the McClellan Committee hearings had a “devastating impact on the moral standing of the entire trade-union world” and “marked a true shift in the public perception of American trade unionism and of the collective-bargaining system within which it was embedded.”

Bobby Kennedy continued the abusive tactics of what had become a vendetta against Hoffa when he was Attorney General in his brother John’s administration. Kennedy finally got his man with two criminal convictions in 1964. He had always assumed that removing Hoffa from the Teamsters would eliminate the mob’s influence on the union, but he never realized that Hoffa, despite his turpitude, was keeping the organized crime relatively at bay. When Hoffa went to jail in 1967, the mob infiltrated the union and gorged on its pension funds as never before.

That irony was soon compounded by another. Hoffa’s threat, after his release from prison, to upset the mob’s happy arrangement with the Teamsters is what got him killed. And it was the notorious Hoffa hit that finally roused the federal government, after decades of fiddling, to commit the resources and imagination needed to really understand the problem of labor racketeering and, eventually, to break the mob’s hold on the Teamsters Union, and its criminal power more generally. As Al Sproule, an FBI agent who worked the Hoffa case from New York in the 1970s, told me, “If Jimmy was left in the street, a lot of people would not have gone to prison and the Teamsters Union and ‘organized crime’ would not have been affected as dramatically as they have been.”

The storm of mob prosecutions that followed JH's disappearance fueled all those hits circa 1980. The Mafia started to really fall apart.

I got a kick out of Frank's Jack Benny-esque "thanks for the kind words, I don't deserve this award, but then again, I have bursitis and I don't deserve that either" quip. I've always planned to use that if I ever get some kind of big award, hopefully "astigmatism" or "tinnitus" are the biggest maladies I can substitute for "bursitis" if the time ever comes.

bad film takes on twitter are fine but the constant misuse of terms, particularly in regards to editing, is going to be the death of me. if you hated a movie that’s fine, just don’t say it’s because a jump cut disrupted a scene’s verisimilitude or something else that you googled

— nick usen (@nickusen) December 1, 2019

i assume this is about sheeran's phone call with jo hoffa (which he is still recalling, in an addled, anguished tone years later). what DO we make of that

is there a jump cut in that scene?

seems so (or whatever it's called, i don't care about that) - i actually rewound to check, it was so conspicuous. once he gets on the phone there are two shots of him face-on, the second the longer one, and there's an evident discontinuity between the two, like we're seeing his jumbled mind or something

I agree with Morbs that it's the highlight of the movie

and yeah, "water under the dam" I forgot about that, hilarious

there’s some slight ribbing on union rules at the beginning when Frank’s charged with theft — he says that his only violation was helping to carry the meat from the truck into meat lockers

presumably it was the responsibility of the shops to unload and Frank was doing labor uncompensated, which is verboten. but in teamster world, who unloads a truck is important as loading, driving, unloading are codified union duties and even making an attempt to move cargo off script is a violation

I think the accusations of unions being crooked have some basis in the arcane rules about who does what, but their application leading to more ridiculous scenarios ballooned post-Hoffa and I’ve heard stories from Chicago that are pretty wild. Don’t walk to the other side of the construction job site if you’re part of the engineering company — you have to use the driver

there's an evident discontinuity between the two

Marty has never cared about continuity

it's true but that cut is def deliberate: like frank the movie stammers.

as does leo in Once upon a Time...

I took it was showing us that because he's rehearsing what he has to say, he's kind-of stopping and starting in his head. Kinda like that "Listen you fuckers, you screw-heads.." startover moment in Taxi Driver.

Did anyone spot Stephen Van Zandt playing the nightclub singer in the white suit? Can't have been him singing i guess.

He was kind of on my mind already because the slightly uncanny ventriloquist's dummy vibe Pacino as Hoffa had reminded me of Silvio Dante, but I didn't know it was him til the credits

On that Sopranos tip, it was good to see Robert Funaro and Kate Narduzzi. I also got a real "declining Uncle Junior" vibe from the brief Joe Kennedy scene, kinda wonder if that was Dominick Chianese in an uncredited cameo...

He was kind of on my mind already because the slightly uncanny ventriloquist's dummy vibe Pacino as Hoffa had reminded me of Silvio Dante, but I didn't know it was him til the credits

― Dadjokke (Sgt. Biscuits), Monday, December 2, 2019

good cach

catch even

playing the nightclub singer

Jerry Vale smdh

love when u show up to call people poseurs

no brush up on yr mid 20th-c pop singers who played themselves in Casino

love when u show up to call people poseurs

― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Monday, December 2, 2019 5:09 PM bookmarkflaglink

On that Sopranos tip, it was good to see Robert Funaro and Kate Narduzzi. I also got a real "declining Uncle Junior" vibe from the brief Joe Kennedy scene, kinda wonder if that was Dominick Chianese in an uncredited cameo...

― henry s, Monday, December 2, 2019 4:53 PM (fifty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also always fun to see paul herman aka beansie as one of deniro's first mob victims.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Beansie!

Is Jerry Vale famous?? I’ve never heard of him. I did spot that was meant to be Rickles doing the comedy though so swings and roundabouts.

He was. He was also in both Casino and Goodfellas as himself.

He doesn't perform much anymore tho. Possibly because he's dead.

#14 US hit, 1956

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3RKMuyG_G4

I can't stand that comic who plays Rickles, but the rhythm and material were a pretty good rip, as one can compare the mob jokes here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5_V9RT8aR8

https://news.avclub.com/martin-scorsese-politely-reminds-everyone-the-irishman-1840154689?rev=1575321645319&utm_content=Main&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=SF

In reality it was Peter Lemongello who was singing that night at the Copa that Crazy Joe dropped in. Lemongello has an interesting story himself, see Wiki.

btw kid next to me on the subway was watching the film hunched over his phone … skipping 30 seconds ahead frequently (any domestic scenes)

from Wiki:

Earlier that evening, the Gallo party had visited the Copacabana with actor Jerry Orbach and Orbach's wife, Marta, to see a performance by comedian Don Rickles and singer Peter Lemongello.

kinda wonder if that was Dominick Chianese in an uncredited cameo...

thought the same but it's credited to 'eugene bunge'

I agree with Marty that Marvel garbage is not cinema but I am watching the I-man on my phone in hour long intervals over a couple of days (and it’s great)

Eugene Bunge totally seems like a made-up name but I'll take Marty at his word...

sounds like a serial killer that Macabre wrote a song about