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

Also re: the two titles

It’s interesting to me that Marty hasn’t had a bold, post-rock band-ass title since “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Pretty much everything in the last 45 years for him has just been plain, matter-of-fact titles about what the film is about ie, Goodfellas, Casino, The Aviator, Joker

Between Bronson in The Irishman and Necro in Good Time its a boom time for the goon cru at the movies

I saw the fear of his final wishes as an extension of his pushover personality.

yeah I realized the other day that the coffin is the only real choice he makes semi-independently in practically the whole movie

Hence why his daughter's decision to avoid contact flummoxes him: an act demonstrating more will than he's ever shown

yes! at the beginning when pesci asks him point blank if he was afraid of dying he not only describes becoming passive in the war but then immediately begins stammering for the first time as if for fear of having to describe without euphemism orders he has taken:

once i saw that i was getting through the war, i looked around me, and i said, i said, from now on whatever happens happens... you know, y-you got orders, you follow them. they tell you to bring some prisoners into-- prisoners into the-- into the woods, yknow? a-a-a-and t-t-they don't tell you what to do. but. they just say, you know, hurry up.

it's a movie about being a postwar company man. he even gets a watch!

re the title i was in the honolulu airport bookstore the other day and they had the sheeran memoir, but of course it had been retitled THE IRISHMAN, and i kept loling at the unfairness somehow of making it look like someone had written a book about themselves and called it THE IRISHMAN

see? He was too passive to even approve the title change.

they tell you the, they tell you the title's gonna cause confusion, yknow? and they don't tell you what to do, but

lol

thought it was interesting that after a long period of shooting strictly in 2.35:1 cinemascope scorsese went back to the non-anamorphic 1.85:1 for this, which he last used for goodfellas.

not sure it has any non-technical reason (like, maybe 1.85 was better for the cameras that were used to do the de-aging shit), but had me wondering if it was meant to draw a visual-language line back to goodfellas, which this film is certainly in conversation with

A little more on the Walnut Creek thing

https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/irishman-bufalino-true-story-mob-hit-walnut-creek-14875864.php

re the title i was in the honolulu airport bookstore the other day and they had the sheeran memoir, but of course it had been retitled THE IRISHMAN, and i kept loling at the unfairness somehow of making it look like someone had written a book about themselves and called it THE IRISHMAN

Funny, when someone watching the movie cold would assume from the opening and end that it's called I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES (really liked those three opening titles).

This film has many flaws, but - a couple of days after viewing - it also has a really haunting quality that stays with you and grows within you. Pvmic, but this is definitely Scorsese's ghost movie - DeNiro, pale white like a ghost by the end. I think it really helped that I finally got around to watching the Rolling Thunder documentary the night before; In Sight and Sound, Scorsese says that some of the things he'd experimented with in Rolling Thunder bled into the way he went about making The Irishman, and that's really true - not only thematic links - death of the dream, something rotten at the heart of the American empire etc etc - but many stylistic similarities too, especially the way that found footage is used in both. There's a lot about masks and truth (surprise) in Rolling Thunder and I'm charitably taking the almost disastrous de-ageification effects here as a continuation of that conversation - DeNiro, Pesci, Pacino wearing masks of their own younger selves, death masks.

just read the whole thread, great posts throughout. bg's "no one left to throw him away" and dlh's "postwar company man" takes stand out right this second. i saw this on sunday on an enormous screen at the Belasco Theatre (normally a stage-show venue - a very cushy movie experience i gotta say!) and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. didn't feel the length at all. agreed that not giving a little more context to organized labor feels sort of irresponsible, like scorsese is basically ceding all political ground to the creators of anti-labor political cartoons. but it's a movie about men more than movements, or maybe men who belong to organizations would be a better way to put it. and hoffa (as the one who has caught fish) is the only person who can see himself outside the organization, or at the top of one (it's MY union).

this is another way to frame hoffa's inability to grasp that what frank is telling him is "if you do this they will murder you," and frank's inability to pose this explicitly despite all their years together. frank, and bufalino, are speaking in company lingo (the mob equivalent of AT&T's "men with bell-shaped heads" - men with gun-shaped heads perhaps), and hoffa is speaking as an individual. this does not make him heroic; it just explains his doom. the tragedy is like the kind you learn in high school... nobody changes, they are exactly the people they are and this leads to why they die the way they die. frank lives to the end almost by accident but also partly because of who he is in a similar way, i think.

"it's what it is" was my favorite piece of dialogue.

because you sensed Hoffa might have understood, but that he also might not have understood the gravity, to your point.

i think that hoffa knows what he's been telling. he explicitly is like "they wouldn't dare, i have files on them" etc. he's too ego/monomaniacal to back down

"It is what it is"
"so what it is what it is"
"they're gonna fucking kill you"
"oh sure they're gonna kill me"
"they're going to send me on a plane to pick you up and take you to a house and kill you"
"cmon you can't fly a plane!"

re unions, one of Scorsese's favorite American films (and mine) is On the Waterfront, which he admits is politically problematic.

xpost that's definitely not the version of "Epic" I remember

having seen the irishman i can now confirm that norman jewison's "f.i.s.t." is the best mob/hoffa film

xp that reads a bit more like "RV" to me

am i insane but was zach woods in this for 10 seconds as one of jimmy hoffa's sons (?) with no dialogue?

hoffa does seem to understand when he says "they wouldn't dare" but otoh he repeatedly emphasizes that he would release things if they came after him. he never says that he's arranged to have them released if something happens to him, which is what you'd say if you were really thinking in terms of your possible assassination. it does seem unthinkable, or at least unsayable. when he says "very simple when you say it that way" i think he means to rebuke frank for his stammering and circling. but it really refers to his own delusion, because the thing he says is simple isn't true anymore. even though frank cannot be frank-- can only talk in company speak to use DC's metaphor-- the company is what is true now. and it has something to do with the war.

frank lives to the end almost by accident but also partly because of who he is in a similar way

as ray romano says in court early on: this man is an exemplary employee.

agree that it is a classical tragedy. also-- for being set against, and mythically explaining, a historical transition-- an epic.

and yeah i haven't looked it up but i could've sworn too NA.

no that was another actor

agree that it is a classical tragedy. also-- for being set against, and mythically explaining, a historical transition-- an epic.

― difficult listening hour,

Is it? Frank learns nothing.

do people learn in tragedies?

yes they do i suppose, too late. there's distinctly no moment of realization for frank; he never has to put out his eyes; but as DC says the unchanging characters enacting fate are there.

(none for hoffa either.)

Saying he learns *nothing* is a Sotoesque exaggeration. In both film and book, he asks "What kind of man makes a call like that?"

Oh.

A movie about a man who needs to toe the line, kind of shakes his head and continues on when others don’t do that, and is left standing there with no one left and no line at the end

This movie made me very sad. Mortality is a bitch

It’s almost like he feels himself starting to learn something, but doesn’t know what to make of it

hmm.... I took it as, hoffa got that the mob was talking about killing him, but didn't *get* it, if that makes sense. like no, man, for REAL killing you. somehow frank (who to be fair is not shown to have a gift for rhetoric, or a great deal of initiative to blow against the wind) cannot muster breaking out of mafia code language and talk to him like a human being. he fails hoffa at this point, long before he pulls the trigger.

one thing i didn't grok: hoffa's lame son is the driver to the ambush and sees hoffa get out of the car with frank... why wouldn't frank be suspect #1? why wouldn't they go back to this house? I'm guessing i missed something...

It was really a communication breakdown on both sides. Hoffa likewise was unable to convey that his death would lead directly to the destruction of the mob. There was a kind of mutual assured destruction going on, except these knuckleheads couldn't figure out how to articulate it.

also remember Hoffa brushes off at least two assassination "attempts" earlier in the movie, and the last one in the courtoom he completely laughs off (you run towards the shooter!) adding to his existing megalomania and giving him some reason to not take it seriously

did we cover the experience of pesci being wheeled off "to church" and never coming back? is that a metaphor for the clumsy stupidity of hypocritical religion? given that it doesn't reflect the book, it's clearly meant to set the tone for the final fifteen minutes or so.

i took it as frank being typically stoic about how life is at that age - every now and again, you'll wave a friend off and you'll just never see them again and you're a bit lonelier

also remember Hoffa brushes off at least two assassination "attempts" earlier in the movie, and the last one in the courtoom he completely laughs off (you run towards the shooter!) adding to his existing megalomania and giving him some reason to not take it seriously

I assumed this was fake/staged to divert attention (and make his hopeless "son" look good)??

btw i saw a guy watching this on his phone on the train this morning, watching it headphone-free with the sound off and the subtitles on, in what i can only describe as an open provocation of visionary director martin scorsese

don't believe shooting was staged; it was some nut with a cap gun

not sure that Bufalino getting religion doesn't "reflect" the book; he did, it seems

It’s almost like he feels himself starting to learn something, but doesn’t know what to make of it

To paraphrase "A Good Man IS Hard to Find", you get the sense that he might have started to evolve into a decent person, or at least a reflective one, if he'd had someone pointing a gun at his head every day of his life.

uh unintentional emphasis there

I'm only halfway through this but was idly thinking about how the protagonists of Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, and this are all figures who go through major traumas/transformative experiences and yet emerge on the other side essentially unchanged. Dunno if that's a conscious theme Scorsese is exploring with each of these, but he does seem to have a fascination with people who don't learn or are unwilling to change.

there was a tweet about this that I can't find right now which claimed one side effect of the not-quite-convincing "de-aging" effect was that it made the film come off like the corrupted/inaccurate memories of an old man. that thought definitely came to my mind while watching it. there was def something very uncanny valley about "young" DeNiro still walking & talking like an old person, not to mention the pronounced creases at the end of his mouth which no one under 60 has. it hurt my brain to look at. good movie though

The Irishman uses this very mortal limitation to its artistic advantage. It turns De Niro’s age and slowness into an existential ethos: Scorsese’s film is framed very much as the memories of an old man looking back on a life of violence and regrets — De Niro’s character sits in a wheelchair in a nursing home, mostly unresponsive, in the opening scene — it makes sense that the film’s version of “young” De Niro exists in this neither-here-nor-there space somewhere between youth and old age. This mimics the way memory often works: When we remember incidents from earlier in our lives, we imagine ourselves as younger versions of the people we are now, instead of the people we really were back then. As has already been memed to death, De Niro in The Irishman carries the same glower throughout the film, whether he’s a young man executing Nazis in World War II, a middle-aged man doing mob hits, or a geriatric man reflecting on his joyless, loveless, empty life. That’s sort of the point of the film.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/the-de-aging-in-the-irishman-how-bad-is-it.html

framing it as "how memory really works" is kind of a distraction but otherwise that gets at what ward was talking abt re death masks, also on my tip it is neat that a young man executing Nazis in World War II is the earliest version of him we see, sparing us the loose end of a young freshfaced frank who nevertheless looks like a cybermummy

In the run-up to today’s world premiere of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, speculation understandably focused on the extensive de-aging technology used to transform Robert De Niro (current age: 76), Al Pacino (current age: 79), Joe Pesci (current age: 76), and some other members of the cast into younger versions of themselves throughout the film. Truth be told, many of us were worried more than a little concerned — especially after some brief advance footage and a not-very-good trailer revealed a “young” De Niro with an eerily smooth sheen on his face.

lol

there was def something very uncanny valley about "young" DeNiro still walking & talking like an old person

when frank 'threw" the guns in the river i was "LOL you ain't even gonna make the water dude, what is wrong with you?"