That's right, a cup of espresso
― Josefa, Sunday, 1 December 2019 16:44 (four years ago) link
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.
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Sunday, 1 December 2019 16:54 (four years ago) link
just feeling the need to point out "water under the dam"
― ryan, Sunday, 1 December 2019 17:03 (four years ago) link
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.
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.
― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Sunday, 1 December 2019 17:20 (four years ago) link
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.”
― and i approve this message (Hunt3r), Sunday, 1 December 2019 17:39 (four years ago) link
he doesn’t!
― A victim managed to capture evidence of the gimp (bizarro gazzara), Sunday, 1 December 2019 17:40 (four years ago) link
that’s the lol part.
― and i approve this message (Hunt3r), Sunday, 1 December 2019 17:49 (four years ago) link
more like The Fremen
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 1 December 2019 17:59 (four years ago) link
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.
― Frederik B, Sunday, 1 December 2019 18:02 (four years ago) link
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.
― and i approve this message (Hunt3r), Sunday, 1 December 2019 18:15 (four years ago) link
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/26/jimmy-hoffa-and-the-irishman-a-true-crime-storya worthwhile read herei 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
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Sunday, 1 December 2019 19:08 (four years ago) link
blame the GOP's successful use of Hoffa as scapegoat
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 1 December 2019 19:09 (four years ago) link
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.”
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.”
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Sunday, 1 December 2019 19:14 (four years ago) link
The storm of mob prosecutions that followed JH's disappearance fueled all those hits circa 1980. The Mafia started to really fall apart.
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 1 December 2019 19:33 (four years ago) link
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.
― henry s, Sunday, 1 December 2019 21:18 (four years ago) link
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
― j., Sunday, 1 December 2019 23:17 (four years ago) link
is there a jump cut in that scene?
― flappy bird, Sunday, 1 December 2019 23:24 (four years ago) link
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
― j., Sunday, 1 December 2019 23:34 (four years ago) link
I agree with Morbs that it's the highlight of the movie
and yeah, "water under the dam" I forgot about that, hilarious
― flappy bird, Sunday, 1 December 2019 23:37 (four years ago) link
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 lockerspresumably 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
― mh, Monday, 2 December 2019 00:41 (four years ago) link
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
― mh, Monday, 2 December 2019 00:43 (four years ago) link
there's an evident discontinuity between the two
Marty has never cared about continuity
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Monday, 2 December 2019 04:51 (four years ago) link
it's true but that cut is def deliberate: like frank the movie stammers.
― difficult listening hour, Monday, 2 December 2019 05:35 (four years ago) link
as does leo in Once upon a Time...
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, 2 December 2019 05:40 (four years ago) link
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.
― piscesx, Monday, 2 December 2019 21:02 (four years ago) link
Did anyone spot Stephen Van Zandt playing the nightclub singer in the white suit? Can't have been him singing i guess.
― piscesx, Monday, 2 December 2019 21:24 (four years ago) link
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, 2 December 2019 21:39 (four years ago) link
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, 2 December 2019 21:53 (four years ago) link
― Dadjokke (Sgt. Biscuits), Monday, December 2, 2019
good cach
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 2 December 2019 21:53 (four years ago) link
catch even
playing the nightclub singer
Jerry Vale smdh
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Monday, 2 December 2019 22:09 (four years ago) link
love when u show up to call people poseurs
― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Monday, 2 December 2019 22:09 (four years ago) link
no brush up on yr mid 20th-c pop singers who played themselves in Casino
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Monday, 2 December 2019 22:24 (four years ago) link
― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Monday, December 2, 2019 5:09 PM bookmarkflaglink
― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Monday, 2 December 2019 22:28 (four years ago) link
― 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.
― jacquees, full of cobras (voodoo chili), Monday, 2 December 2019 22:50 (four years ago) link
Oh yeah, I forgot about Beansie!
― henry s, Monday, 2 December 2019 23:53 (four years ago) link
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.
― piscesx, Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:27 (four years ago) link
He was. He was also in both Casino and Goodfellas as himself.
He doesn't perform much anymore tho. Possibly because he's dead.
― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:30 (four years ago) link
#14 US hit, 1956
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3RKMuyG_G4
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:35 (four years ago) link
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
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:37 (four years ago) link
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
― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:37 (four years ago) link
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.
― Josefa, Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:40 (four years ago) link
btw kid next to me on the subway was watching the film hunched over his phone … skipping 30 seconds ahead frequently (any domestic scenes)
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:48 (four years ago) link
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.
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 00:50 (four years ago) link
kinda wonder if that was Dominick Chianese in an uncredited cameo...
thought the same but it's credited to 'eugene bunge'
― j., Tuesday, 3 December 2019 03:10 (four years ago) link
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)
― calstars, Tuesday, 3 December 2019 03:46 (four years ago) link
Eugene Bunge totally seems like a made-up name but I'll take Marty at his word...
― henry s, Tuesday, 3 December 2019 04:23 (four years ago) link
sounds like a serial killer that Macabre wrote a song about
― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 04:40 (four years ago) link
i keep thinking about Frank not wanting to be cremated. he wants to be put inside a metal box in a building because it’s less final. And even insisting on keeping the door open at the end. which i get is a hoffa nod but also feels like a resistance against finality too. it’s like, for all his sociopathic tendencies & general matter of factness about the death of others, it’s an interesting contradiction that he’s so precious about his own end.
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 05:24 (four years ago) link
Since when is there WiFi in the subway??
― flappy bird, Tuesday, 3 December 2019 05:30 (four years ago) link