Late to the trend but these are all the movies I watched during the quarantine. I just went back to work this week so I saw that as more or less of the end of the quarantine for me. Rated the movies on a scale of 1-10 with a short review of each movie. Hope you enjoy it and sorry for any grammar errors I wrote all of the reviews today so I went through them fairly quick.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Great start to an amazing franchise 9/10 (Rewatch)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Another good entry to the series but definitely not as good as the first or third 8/10 (Rewatch)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: In my opinion the best Indiana Jones movie, Sean Connery is great in this 9.5/10 (Rewatch)
The Great Gatsby: Interesting movie, I really enjoyed how grand everything felt but would have been much better if they used music that fit the time rather than Jay z songs 7.25/10
Burnt: Enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought I would with it being about cooking 7/10
Memento: One of the most mind bending movies I have seen. Great movie 9/10
Saving Private Ryan: Had meant to watch this awhile ago and I'm glad I finally did. Definitely live up to the hype 8.75/10
Zodiac: Really good movie with some great acting. Crazy to think they came to close to catching him (allegedly) 8.25/10
Days of Thunder: Entertaining but the plot is really all over the place and seem very just slapped together 5.5/10
The Running Man: Classic Arnold movie cheesy but in the best way possible 8/10 (Rewatch)
Rocketman: Was very disappointed with this movie I was not a fan of the more musical style rather than biopic. I really enjoyed the Queen movie and was hoping for something similar but I was very wrong. Although Taron Edgerton is very good as Elton 5.5/10
The Fighter: Christian Bale almost never seems to disappoint and Mark Wahlberg is good as well. Very inspiring story 7.75/10
Lucky Number Slevin: Really interesting movie seems predictable at first but catches you off guard 7.5/10
True Grit(2010): Heard a lot about this movie and was not disappointed at all 9/10
Whiplash: I had the impression I wouldn't like this movie but by the end its hard not to be amazed by the performances. Also the the cinematography was surprisingly good 8.75/10
Clear and Present Danger: Decent movie with a good cast although easily forgettable 6.75/10
Old School: Hilarious comedy movie I had never heard of until recently, give it a watch you wont regret it 8/10
Looper: Really enjoyed the plot of the movie and the whole time travel aspect. The Joseph Gordon Levitt CGI on his face to look like Bruce Willis just felt weird though 8/10
A Night At the Roxbury: Very dumb comedy not necessarily in a bad way. A lot of better comedies out there 6/10
Death Proof: I know this is a popular opinion but my least favorite Tarintino movie. You don't really care about any of the characters and their is little to no actual story being told 5.75/10
Jackie Brown: Again definitely one of my least favorite Tarintino movies but much better than death proof. Really loved Samuel L Jackson in this one 7/10
Kill Bill: Great Tarintino flick with amazing action and an awesome cast 8.5/10 (Rewatch)
Kill Bill vol 2: Good follow up to the first and has a satisfying ending, not as exciting/fun as the first 7.75/10 (Rewatch)
Equilibrium: You can tell how hard this movie tried to be the matrix. Still has some redeeming qualities 6/10
The Hunt for the Red October: Another Jack Ryan movie, I liked this one better than Clear and Present Danger. Good story and very suspenseful 7.5/10
Casino Royale (2006): My favorite Daniel Craig Bond movie so far and great start to a new era of Bond. Also Mads Mikkelsen is great as Le Chiffre 8.5/10
Quantum Of Solace: Extremely disappointing movie after how great Casino Royale was. The villain barely feels like a villain and the editing/ camera work in this movie is one of the worst I have ever seen 5/10
Skyfall: A return to form after Quantum of Solace. Much better and cohesive story and with a compelling villain 8/10
Goldeneye: My favorite Bond movie I have seen so far (all the ones i have listed here). As much as I enjoy the Daniel Craig movies I have always like the gadgets and a bit campy vs the very realistic Craig 8.75/10
12 Monkeys: Had never heard of this movie before but It was awesome and quickly became my favorite time travel movie. If you haven't seen this movie watch it asap! 9/10
Star Wars The Phantom Menace: Started a Star Wars Marathon and got sidetracked but I have to admit I have always loved the prequels having grown up with them even though im well aware of the issues that plague these movies. Duel of the Fates is Tied for best lightsaber duel of all time 7.5/10
Star Wars Attack of the Clones: For sure the worst movie of the prequels imo but still a lot of memorable parts and another good duel with Count Dooku, Obi Wan, Anakin and Yoda 6.5/10
Star Wars the Clone Wars (2008): I love the clone wars tv show but you can easily tell this movie was just episodes of the show put together to movie length. Also the animation in this movie and the beginning of the series in pretty poor but thankfully it only goes up in quality 5/10
Dune: Ok Movie but does not hold up well at all. Its obvious the plot of the book was far too much to contain in one movie. I'm looking forward to the remake of this and that they are going to do it in multiple movies rather than just one. As much as people shit on remakes this one movie that really deserves another go especially with modern special effects 5.5/10
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood: Might be a bit of a hot take but my favorite movie of all time! I loved every moment of this movie and the connection between Dicaprio and Pitt is pure gold. I could watch this movie every night and still enjoy it just as much as I did when I saw it for the first time in theater. 10/10 (Rewatch)
Donnie Brasco: Not a bad mob movie Depp and Pacino are both good but it follows all the typical mob tropes 7/10
Ace Ventura Pet Detective: Jim Carrey is always great and Ace Ventura is no exception. Solid comedy 7.5/10
The Lord Of The Rings The Fellowship of the Ring: An amazing beginning to one of the best film trilogies of all time 9.25/10 (Rewatch)
The Lord Of The Rings The Two Towers: My personal favorite of the LOTR movies you just can't beat when Gandalf shows up at the battle of Helms Deep 9.5/10 (Rewatch)
The Lord Of The Rings The Return of The King: Another amazing movie and a great ending to such a great film trilogy also with one of the best battles ever filmed 9/10
Spy Game: Entertaining and fairly suspenseful movie not a bad watch 6.75/10
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: First Jay and Silent Bob movie I have seen, was a fun movie and I liked all the cameos 7.25/10
Total Recall (2012): Not a terrible movie but the original with Arnold is much more memorable and a lot more fun than the 2012 version 5/10
Constantine: Bit of a weird movie but was still entertaining and has a great dark tone. Hard not to love Keanu 6.75/10
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Very dark movie but I absolutely loved this movie. Great murdemystery along with great performances from Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. Must watch if you haven't seen it 8.75/10
Sin City: Really interesting story and has a very different style to it. Makes you feel like it has been pulled right from the comic book. Also a really awesome cast 8.25/10
From Dusk Till Dawn: This movie really caught me off guard. Very campy 90's style but I had a blast watching this movie and would definitely watch it again. Seeing Tarintino as a main character in a movie is weird but also hilarious 7.75/10
Team America World Police: Really dumb movie but it is still pretty funny 6.25/10
American made: Another movie its hard to believe that its a (mostly) true story. Tom Cruise is really great in this 7.75/10
Live Die Repeat / Edge of Tomorrow: One of the most amazing concepts for a story I have seen in years and they manage to pull it off in an amazing way. Both Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt are great in this movie. Loved the dark humor and quirkiness of all the characters 9/10
Blade Runner: Amazing movie that still stands up today. Such a great story and the atmosphere of the blade runner world is like no other. RIP Rutger Hauer 9.5/10 (Rewatch)
Blade Runner 2049: A great sequel to the original Blade Runner. 2049 is one of the most beautiful moves I have seen with gorgeous cinematography from Roger Deacons. One of Ryan Gosling's best performances 9.25/10 (Rewatch)
American History X: An important story about how even smart people like Edward Nortons character can be convince into an evil cult like mentality. This movie also breaks down the race tensions and shows how nobody can really be too far gone to be changed for the better 8.25/10
The Ninth Gate: Easy to watch movie with a interesting story. Nothing special but still enjoyable 6.75/10
Fury: Really good WW2 movie, you get really invested into all the characters and shows what the war was like towards the end 8/10
The Chronicles Of Riddick: Enjoyable action movie looks pretty good for an early 2000s movie since they used a lot more practical effects rather than the typical shitty cgi at the time 6.5/10
Sicario Day Of The Soldado: Pretty bad sequel. The first half of the movie is decent but the second half is slow and boring. The story just ends up really going nowhere and is just a letdown 4.5/10
The Prestige: I can't believe it took me this long to see The Prestige but holy shit is it an amazing mind bending movie. Both Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are amazing in this. Chris Nolan is such a great director and I can't wait for Tenet to finally come out 9.5/10
The Bourne Identity: Good and Entertaining action movie. Matt Damon is a great Jason Bourne 7.75/10
The Bourne Supremacy: Another good action movie that's fun to watch throughout 7.75/10
The Bourne Ultimatum: I feel like Ultimatum really took the Bourne franchise to another level. Really great action and intriguing story Best Bourne movie for sure 8.25/10
Knives Out: Really fun murder mystery with a great cast. Only gripe is that they wouldn't have given away so much so soon. You know most of what happened like 30 min into the movie 8.25/10
Murder On The Orient Express: Another really funny murder mystery. All the characters are very quirky and unique which makes the whole movie a lot of fun. The ending is also very satisfying how it all comes together 8.5/10
Layer Cake: Good movie but I cant help feeling like this is a Guy Ritchie movie without the Guy Ritchie flair to it 7/10
Wind River: I really liked Jeremy Renners whole tracking aspect in this movie rather than the typical Detective stuff you see in most murder mystery movies. Also you really feel and understand the pain some of the characters go through 8/10
Let me know what you think!
submitted by [I copy/pasted this from an email I wrote, so I apologize for any formatting issues, including weird double-spaces]
A friend of mine this morning remarked that he was angry about the terrible writing on the current season of
Game of Thrones, and was bemoaning the fact that many films and TV series spend millions upon millions on actors and CGI but can't seem to find a competent writer to proofread them. My response was "Why should they?" The show is ending and everyone is talking about it. The last episode had upwards of 18m viewers; the writing does not need to be good to accomplish its purpose of generating revenue for the broadcaster in this, its final season. They certainly do not need,
as petitions have asked, to remake the entire eight season, relying on the notoriety of the name to keep it going. The conversation then devolved into a discussion of the theory of making film adaptations of other works, which I shall mercifully spare you all.
This anecdote sparked a long-restive line of questioning in my head of "How much does name recognition actually matter?" A large number of very successful films and series have just been sequels of previous films, re-makes of old films, adaptations of popular books, comics, TV series, and even toy lines (looking at you,
Transformers). Obviously, this line of complaint about novel storylines in film is nothing new, as I quickly found
this article from 1989 exploring the abundance of summer sequels (for those of you agog at the price of a movie ticket 30 years ago, $6 in 1989 is about $12.40 in 2019 dollars). There was also an intriguing
article (one of a series) by Stephen Follows in 2015 looking at sequels in a statistical analysis. I found other articles as well, but none looked at the datums exactly how I wanted, so I did my own analysis!
Methods: I took the top-10 US-grossing films of each year for the past 20 years (1999-2018), and categorized whether they were sequels, remakes, and/or adaptations. I used boxofficemojo for the raw data on box office gross and my own judgment and research in the categorization (discussed below in excruciating detail).
Results: Of the 200 films (10 highest-grossing for each of 20 years) I looked at, 162 (
81.0%) were a sequel, remake, and/or adaptation of other media. For the past 10 years (2009-2018), the number is even more egregious at
88.0%. Breaking down the individual categories, 101 (50.5%) were sequels, 29 (14.5%) were remakes, and 125 (62.5%) were adaptations of other media; obviously, there was considerable overlap among these categories.I noticed interesting trends even among the 38 films that were based on original plots. Of those 38 films, eight (21.1 %) were Pixar films (relying on
that name recognition to promote them); this trend is also indicative of the general trend of "original" films: 42.1% were children's animated films, 10.5% were Romantic Comedies, 21.1% were other adult comedies, and only 26.3% were dramatic films. Even more interestingly, of these 38 "original" films that were successful, 17 (44.8%) later went on to become a franchise themselves, inspiring sequels and/or reboots...so far. A prime example of this phenomenon is
Despicable Me, an original film which spawned two direct sequels (
Despicable Me 2 and
Despicable Me 3), as well as one spin-off (
Minions) which all made the list. Milk that cash cow for all it's worth!
The tables of results are available as an Excel spreadsheet upon request. Feel free to poke through it at your leisure and yell at me about how you disagree with my categorizations. I did not triple-check the data, so it's possible there are some straight-up errors in there as well.
Conclusions: The question I asked was not "How much are common themes reiterated?" but rather "How much does success rely on name recognition?" The overwhelmingly noticeable phenomenon is that in an era of increased production costs and more internet-based media consumption, film producers seem unwilling to invest huge amounts of money in making a film that will not have the draw of immediate name recognition, or perhaps such films just simply do not have the wide appeal necessary to generate revenue to the same degree that films of well-known material can.
Notably,
zero of the top-10 films from 2018 and 2017 were based on original stories and characters, and you have to go back to 2013 to get a successful original film that is not a children's cartoon (
Gravity). Looking forward to the 2020s (assuming humanity and the film industry continue to exist), we can expect this trend to become even more pronounced. Why invest in uncertainty when there are sure bets that can rake in the dough?
Minutiae of Methodology and Titillating Tidbits (Presented in no organized way whatsoever)
- I counted every Marvel Cinematic Universe film after 2009's Iron Man as a sequel (as well as adaptations), since they had tie-ins, a reliance on a common cast of characters, and numerous inter-film references to a substantial degree. Of the 200 films on the list, 24 were films based on Marvel characters
- All eight Harry Potter films made the list, but only six Star Wars movies made the cut. The widely panned Han Solo film did not.
- Other series of note: DC comics adaptations (11 films), Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit (6 films), Twilight (5 films), Hunger Games (4 films), James Bond (4), Fast and the Furious (3), and Disney "main line" films (12, including "classic" Disney adaptations of fairy tales [e.g. Tangled], Disney "flagship" properties [e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean], and live-action adaptations of classic films [e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Maleficent, etc.]).
- When you factor into account that Disney also owns Pixar (13 additional films), Marvel (24 additional films, though some (the original X-Men and Spider-man films) were produced by other entities), and Star Wars (6 additional films), it is very apparent that Disney's habit of "buy the Intellectual Property Rights to EVERYTHING" is going quite well for them. It is very likely that a number of other less-obvious films were also produced by Disney, but I did not feel like checking the production company of every single film on the list. Sorry.
- Of the 200 films, 71 fulfilled only one of the criteria (sequel, remake, or adaptation); 89 fulfilled two; and only two films fulfilled all three. Those two films were Casino Royale and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
- Biography films (e.g. Bohemian Rhapsody) and historical films (e.g. Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk) were counted as adaptations: even if there was not necessarily a single book, series, or other piece of previously-produced intellectual property that could be pinpointed as the one from which the film was adapted, they are still adaptations based on people or events that already have name recognition.
- It's worth noting that some of the adaptations' final plots ended up rather different from their source material. Fans of Frozen will note that it bears little resemblance to Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen (an incredibly religious tale about the love between children), and my criteria even include films like Shrek (very loosely based on the book). Regardless of how close they were to the source material, these stories were first-degree derivative works of other media and at least partly reliant on inspiration from that original work as well as the public's familiarity with it to boost their profile ("close enough for lawyers"); thus they were counted as adaptations.
- A couple other interesting judgment calls on my part include The Mummy (which was preceded by a 1932 film of the same name) and Scary Movie. The latter was particularly difficult as it is not itself a sequel, but it relies incredibly strongly on the visuals and audience familiarity with the Scream film franchise, as well as the tropes of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Thus, I counted it as a derivative work.
- The downside to these investigations was that I was forced to search to see if the Adam Sandler film Big Daddy had spawned any sequels. I was incredibly grateful to discover that it had not.
- Every James Bond film was counted as an adaptation of Ian Fleming's books, despite the fact that those books are far outdated and bereft of material for the number of Bond films that have been made; regardless, the character is derivative.
- I managed to resist counting James Cameron's Avatar as a remake of Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves, as my focus was on franchise name recognition, rather than thematic similarities. I really wanted to, though. :-P
- One of the films that took me down quite the rabbit hole was Chicago, the 2002 musical film, which was based on a stage musical (first produced in 1975); however, a the same story was presented in the 1927 silent film Chicago, which was based on a 1926 play of the same name, which in turn was based on the true story of Beaulah Annan, who killed her boyfriend in the house she shared with her second husband in 1924 (she was acquitted of the crime, but died in 1928 at the ripe old age of 28 due to tuberculosis, after going through another husband and a half). Alas, Chicago did not get extra points for being ultra-derivative. I guess stories about uxoricide never get old.
- The abundance of children's movies makes a certain kind of sense, as children have not yet been inundated with media to such a degree that new stories are lost on them.
Anywho, I hope this has been as interesting for you as it has been for me (unlikely).
Have a good weekend, folks!
submitted by (Official Trailer -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHXxVmeGQUc )
Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Steven Zaillian, based on the book by Charles Brandt
Veteran American director Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman sets out to dramatize the life of Frank Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro), a member of a Pennsylvania crime family and a Teamsters union official.
Shortly before his death in 2003, Sheeran told author Charles Brandt that he had killed his former boss (and longtime friend) Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters president from 1957 to 1971, who disappeared in 1975. Sheeran’s claims have been strenuously and convincingly contested by various sources. (Brandt’s book is I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, 2004). Costing nearly $160 million and with a running time of 209 minutes, The Irishman is Scorsese’s longest and most expensive film.
The new film is being treated by the American media as a significant cultural event. The Irishman took over the 1,000-seat Belasco Theatre in New York City’s theater district in November for a month of screenings, imitating a traditional Broadway schedule, with only eight shows a week. It is now available on Netflix.
The film has received universal praise from critics. Innumerable publications have pronounced it “epic” or a “masterpiece,” or both. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott argues that Scorsese’s work “is long and dark: long like a novel by Dostoyevsky or Dreiser, dark like a painting by Rembrandt.” The critic who differs sharply with these views is very much fighting against the stream.
While not as overtly misanthropic or malicious as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Gangs of New York (2002) or Goodfellas (1990), The Irishman is a poor, shallow, trite work, which goes back over territory Scorsese has covered numerous times. It continues and even deepens an unhealthy and tedious obsession with the representation of mob figures as somehow holding the key to understanding modern American life. The fact that the filmmaker goes to such great lengths to make figures who coldly kill for money and power into essentially sympathetic or compelling characters is hardly to his artistic or intellectual credit. (Nor is it to the credit of the critics who succumb to the same attraction.) More importantly, this speaks to the general cultural and political stagnation of the past several decades.
It is one of Scorsese’s misfortunes that he was long ago, to a certain extent by default, proclaimed the “greatest living American filmmaker.” An undoubtedly gifted individual, he has been working, through no fault of his own, during the weakest decades in the history of the American and global cinema, a period when filmmaking in the main has turned its back on the lives, conditions and feelings of the great mass of the population. Moreover, there appears to be no one in or around the circles in which Scorsese travels who offers serious criticism or an objective appraisal of his film work.
The Irishman distinguishes itself somewhat from the rest of Scorsese’s work by its ostensible dealing with political and historical events. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by US-sponsored Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro regime, the Cuban missile crisis a year later, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Watergate affair in the 1970s and, of course, Hoffa’s murder in 1975 all come in for treatment of a sort, along with a number of prominent “mob hits.”
However, each incident—except for Hoffa’s killing—passes by in a matter of seconds, with virtually no explanation or context provided. One suspects that certain episodes, such as Sheeran’s recognition of E. Howard Hunt (Daniel Jenkins) during the Watergate hearings as one of the men he met years before during his purported participation in the Bay of Pigs plot, will be entirely incomprehensible to most viewers, especially younger ones.
The filmmakers have divorced The Irishman from a serious assessment of Hoffa’s role, the broader evolution of the American labor movement and conditions of life in the US in the mid-20th century. Instead, Scorsese and screenwriter Steve Zaillian offer their audience a rambling, highly repetitive, at times incoherent drama, which presumably depends for its success with critics on a number of extended set pieces involving De Niro, Al Pacino (as Hoffa) and various other performers doing their best impressions of “tough guys.” Reality and history don’t figure largely here. These are impressions working from other impressions arranged according to Method Acting clichés (inspired to an extent by On the Waterfront, directed in 1954 by one of Scorsese’s idols, anti-communist informer Elia Kazan), and not necessarily life.
One of the few solid notions one takes away from the film, at least its final act, is that being alone and isolated while growing old is a terrible fate. Along these lines, Scott in the Times argues that “public affairs and Cosa Nostra chronicles aren’t really what this movie is about.” Its real theme involves “a deeper, sadder lesson that has to do with the inevitability of loss. The loss of life, yes, but also the erosion of meaning that accompanies the fading of experience into memory and memory into nothing.” So the $160 million budget, the re-creation of various locales in the 1950s and beyond, and all the rest are merely scaffolding for a “meditation” on loss? A feeble, unconvincing argument, which, if taken seriously, only underscores the considerable waste of talent and resources involved.
The Irishman opens with an aged Frank Sheeran recounting his time with the Mafia as he lives out his last days in a nursing home. The film is told mostly through flashbacks in a non-linear way. (As an aside, the production uses new “de-aging” technology rendering De Niro (76) and co-stars Pacino (79) and Joe Pesci (76) considerably younger as certain portions of the plot require. A visual effects team, according to one account, “creates a computer-generated, younger version of an actor’s face and then replaces the actor’s real face with the synthetic, animated version.” The technology no doubt has impressive possibilities, but in The Irishman, as a result, we see an impossibly younger De Niro as a World War II veteran and other similar anomalies. One wonders why the production couldn’t have simply hired younger actors.)
In 1950s Pennsylvania, Sheeran works as a truck driver for a meat delivery company. Caught stealing from the company, he is defended by lawyer Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano), who then introduces him to his cousin, Russell Bufalino (Pesci), the head of a northeastern Pennsylvania crime family and a significant national figure.
Sheeran begins doing jobs for Bufalino, eventually including murders. Bufalino hands the telephone at one point to Sheeran, indicating that Hoffa is on the line. “I heard you paint houses,” Hoffa says in their first conversation, a code phrase apparently for carrying out a contract killing.
The Teamsters chief becomes close to Sheeran and his family. In his narration, Sheeran asserts that in the 1950s, Hoffa “was as big as Elvis. In the ’60s, he was like the Beatles. Next to the president, he was like the most powerful man in the country.” Hoffa becomes more and more entangled with mobsters, allowing them to borrow large sums of cash from the Teamsters’ pension fund to build casinos in Las Vegas and finance other projects.
In 1958, Hoffa is questioned by Robert F. Kennedy, then chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, at a public hearing about organized crime. Three years later, the newly elected president John Kennedy appoints his brother as attorney general and the latter organizes a “Get Hoffa” squad of prosecutors and investigators. This concerted effort eventually results in Hoffa’s conviction in 1964—in two separate cases—on jury tampering charges and fraud. Hoffa begins serving his sentence in 1967.
After four years and nine months in prison, Hoffa is pardoned by President Richard Nixon in December 1971. The government adds the restriction that he not run for the presidency of the Teamsters again. Hoffa nonetheless begins to campaign for the post, angering the mobsters with public accusations about his replacement Frank Fitzsimmons’ having sold the union out “to his underworld pals.” Hoffa declares, “The mob controls him, which means it controls our pension fund.” Despite warnings, Hoffa keeps up the demagogic attacks, as well as his megalomaniacal claims, “This is my union!”
In the end, Sheeran reluctantly agrees to participate in getting rid of Hoffa. The latter is never seen again.
The Irishman should end at this point, but it doesn’t, dragging on interminably. Sheeran attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin), who has abandoned him because of his mob dealings. We watch the elderly Sheeran collapse in his home and be placed in a retirement home. Does Scorsese stage these latter scenes because he recognizes that Sheeran is not an attractive figure and thus a good deal of effort is required to make him seem human and sympathetic before the credits roll?
The one serious opportunity to make something of Sheeran comes early in the film when the De Niro character recounts to Bufalino/Pesci that he spent four years in World War II, including a staggering 411 days in combat. He also describes shooting unarmed and defenseless German prisoners. The picture of brutality in the imperialist slaughterhouse goes a long way toward explaining his and other Mafia soldiers’ indifference to killing and suffering in the postwar era, but Scorsese drops the matter almost as soon as he raises it. Such historical and social concreteness is not his métier.
In any event, there is considerable question as to whether the claims Sheeran made in 1972 to Charles Brandt, the author of I Heard You Paint Houses, about shooting Crazy Joe Gallo—a New York crime figure—and Hoffa, for example, are true. Various journalists, police and FBI officials emphatically reject Sheeran’s confession, although they concede he may have been involved in Hoffa’s killing in some fashion. There is no corroborating evidence to back up the gangster’s extravagant, deathbed contentions.
It seems irresponsible for the filmmakers to have staked so much on such relatively flimsy evidence. But this seems in keeping with Scorsese’s generally cavalier attitude toward historical truth. (One should remember that his Gangs of New York, which passed itself off as incisive socio-cultural history, was based on a collection of tall tales.)
Asked by an interviewer from Entertainment Weekly as to whether he believed “that what you have [in the movie] is what really happened,” Scorsese replied, “No. I don’t really care about that. What would happen if we knew exactly how the JFK assassination was worked out? What does it do? It gives us a couple of good articles, a couple of movies and people talking about [it] at dinner parties. The point is, it’s not about the facts. It’s the world [the characters are] in, the way they behave. It’s about [a character] stuck in a certain situation.”
In fact, if, for instance, official or unofficial CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination were to be established, it would have a devastating impact on American public opinion.
More significantly, Scorsese has never been drawn to presenting actual history. He has his sights set on “higher” things, mythicized history, the working out under varied circumstances of his particular and unchanging concerns—guilt and redemption, “human evil,” criminality, male friendships, loyalty and betrayal, etc.
The director has done little to add to the public’s knowledge about Jimmy Hoffa or the degeneration of the American labor movement. Pacino’s performance is a collection of physical and vocal mannerisms, apparently uninformed by any study of the Teamsters leader’s history or the meaning of his career.
Hoffa (born in 1913 in Brazil, Indiana), a staunch trade union militant in Detroit from an early age, was trained in union organizing in the 1930s by socialists Farrell Dobbs and the Dunne brothers, members of the Trotskyist movement and leaders of Teamsters Local 544 in Minneapolis. Local 544 spearheaded the organization of the successful general strike in 1934, which, in turn, led to the rapid growth of the Teamsters among long-haul truckers in the Midwest.
In 1941, on the eve of World War II, Teamsters President Dan Tobin set about the destruction of the Trotskyist leadership of Local 544. As the Socialist Workers Party’s leader James P. Cannon explained in his 1947 article, “The Mad Dog of the Labor Movement,” when the rank and file revolted against Tobin’s effort to put the local under receivership, the latter “called the federal cops through his friend President Roosevelt, and simply had the leaders [of the local] thrown into prison.”
Cannon continued, “At the same time, a horde of Tobin’s gangsters [headed by Hoffa], armed with blackjacks and baseball bats, were turned loose on the trucking districts with the open connivance of the city police.”
Hoffa, in his 1970 autobiography, paid tribute to Dobbs as the “the master architect of the Teamsters’ over-the-road operations,” “a crackerjack organizer” and “a brilliant strategist.” However, Hoffa went on, he never had any “patience” with either the Communist Party “or with the Trotskyites of the SWP.” He continued: “Both were Marxist; neither believed in a free-enterprise system; both failed to see that workers who leave the enslavement of capitalistic czars for the enslavement of state-appointed czars are no better off and, in fact, lose great economic and social values in the transition … To me, all communists are nuts.”
In the final analysis, Hoffa’s relationship with the mob was a long-term function of his rejection of socialist politics and embrace of the profit system. His gross opportunism and the moral degeneration bound up with it also cost him his life. In The Irishman, Hoffa simply comes across as irritatingly churlish and stubborn. The viewer is almost encouraged to root for his giving in to Bufalino and company—after all, it will obviously save his life and there doesn’t seem to be any principled reason why he shouldn’t go along with the mobsters.
Critics have more than once commented on Scorsese’s fixation with thugs. The Hollywood Reporter recently took note of the “real-life inspirations” for The Irishman’s “film stars:” Sheeran, an alleged hitman; Bufalino, who hid “a vast domain of criminal activity behind his curtain business;” loan shark and racketeer Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale); Sicilian-American mobster Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel); Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano (Stephen Graham), a captain in the Genovese crime family and a Teamsters official; Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (Domenick Lombardozzi), a New York mobster; and Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco), a gangster and part of the Profaci crime family.
Each of these characters, as much as it is within The Irishman ’s power and scope, is given individual and even loving attention. Murderers and psychopaths in many cases, some of whose actions have more than a hint of medieval savagery about them, the foulest and most backward members of society, they are given far more depth and pathos than they possibly deserve.
But what about the Teamsters members themselves? The only scenes in which they are included are ones where Hoffa addresses meetings of drivers (assuming that some of the audience members are drivers and not union officials), who applaud and cheer him on like mindless automatons. No truck driver is singled out for dramatic treatment, only gangsters.
Many scenes in The Irishman are dramatically pointless. Characters argue at length about when it is considered rude to be late or wear shorts to a meeting, etc. This “comic” banality juxtaposed with savage violence (à la Quentin Tarantino) rapidly wears thin. In fact, the banter becomes almost unendurable at a certain point, in part because the lowlife characters themselves and their concerns are not interesting to begin with.
In the narration that opens Scorsese’s Goodfellas, mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) explains, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States … To me, it meant being somebody, in a neighborhood full of nobodies. They weren’t like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted. They parked in front of hydrants and never got a ticket. When they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops.”
This unsavory, juvenile fantasy, which the real-life Hill realized, apparently holds some appeal for Scorsese himself. The filmmaker seems fascinated, like many petty-bourgeois intellectuals, with “strong men,” men with guns or clubs in their hands able to do “whatever they want.” It may not be his intention, but he has, over the course of a number of films, “romanticized the Mafia thug and turned him into a peculiar variety of American folk hero,” as the WSWS argued in a review of Scorsese’s The Aviator in 2005.
Decades in which the “nobodies,” i.e., the working class majority of the population, have been politically, socially and economically suppressed and excluded—thanks in good measure to the suffocating role played by the type of pro-“free-enterprise” trade unionism championed by Hoffa—have had their impact on Scorsese and other artists. They see the active or energetic element in society, malevolent or otherwise, as lying elsewhere. Scorsese’s work reflects these difficulties (or rather wallows in them) without making sense of or grasping their logic. Throughout his career, the director has accepted uncritically and superficially the immediate, retrogressive reality, now in the process of breaking up, as a given.
In recent comments, Scorsese, who has done important work as a producer, curator and preserver of films, has spoken out against large budget, blockbuster films based on comic books. In a New York Times opinion piece in early November, Scorsese repeated a remark he had made to an interviewer in October, to the effect that “Marvel [Comics] movies … seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life.” He added that, “in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.”
Scorsese noted further that “for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation—aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
Scorsese’s criticisms of contemporary Hollywood and the emptiness of its superhero products are entirely appropriate. However, his own efforts, unhappily, do not represent a genuine alternative, but rather the other side of the same deeply unsatisfactory coin. Important “revelations” are all too few and far between in his films, and the director’s conception of the “complexity of people” extends only to a very limited and debased social layer.
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If You Like Joe Biden, You'll Love Scorsese's "The Irishman" - by James Delingpole (The Spectator) 7 Dec 2019
According to Nielsen Media’s ratings service, 17 million people watched ‘at least a few minutes’ of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman on Netflix over its first weekend. Impressive. Rather less impressive, I’m guessing, is the proportion who actually made it to the end of this excruciating ordeal of an embarrassment of a movie. If it was even close to 50 percent, I’d be surprised. Some critics are saying its Scorsese’s best since Goodfellas. Don’t believe the hype. Though it reunites arguably the all time greatest trio of mob movie actors — Joe Pesci, Robert de Niro and Al Pacino — it’s not the performances you notice, but their age. De Niro is 76, Pacino 79 and Pesci 76. Yet they are playing characters who, for much of the film, are supposed to be half that age. In theory this shouldn’t be a problem. A massive chunk of the movie’s eye-wateringly vast budget — $200 million, allegedly, making it by far Scorsese’s most expensive movie — went on pioneering ‘de-aging’ CGI technology. Perhaps it’s too late for Netflix to ask for their money back. Seriously, they’ve been sold a pup.
At first, it’s like an annoying noise in your hotel bedroom that’s keeping you awake: you try to shut it out and pretend it’s not happening. ‘Oh great!’ you think. ‘Classic Scorsese tracking shot. Just like in Casino and Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street’, as the camera tracks through a bustling nursing home before settling on the solitary, very elderly chair-bound figure of — yay! — Robert De Niro.
But while de Niro can more than convincingly pull off ‘Ninetysomething geriatric in chair’, he’s rather less persuasive as ‘Young GI at Anzio’, ‘Driver of a freezer truck in the 1950s’ and ‘Angry dad beating up the proprietor of a grocery store who has disrespected his pubescent daughter’. As de Niro creakily puts the boot in, you’re more worried that the exertion is going to give him a heart attack than you are about the fate of his victim.
Later, having joined the Mob as a hitman, de Niro’s character Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheehan, becomes the loyal confidant of Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, even to the point of sharing hotel bedrooms with him. There’s a scene where the two men are in their pajamas, having some kind of meaningful dialogue which I’m sure was meant to have you thinking ‘This is another of those Heat-style masterclasses’, but which, I’m afraid, just had me going, ‘Ew! Old guys in pajamas. Please, God, don’t let their fly buttons accidentally fall open.’
I hated responding in this way. I’m getting older myself. I want to live in a world where the work keeps rolling in for us wrinklies and we never have to retire. But as Helen Mirren demonstrated so ably in Catherine the Great, there’s nothing dignified or life-affirming about mutton dressing as lamb; well, not until the CGI technology gets a lot, lot better at disguising it, anyway.
What bothers me is that this may be yet another, hideous, politically correct trend that the world of woke luvviedom is seeking to impose on us, whether we like it or not. To teach us not to be racist, we now routinely see black actors inserted anachronistically into period dramas. To force us to celebrate gay/transgendedisability empowerment we’re now told that such parts can no longer be played by straight/cis/able-bodied actors (even though, you might think, that playing characters who aren’t you is kind of the whole point of acting). Now, to ensure that we’re not ageist, we have to sit through three-and-a-half-hour-long Scorsese movies, feigning not to notice that the parade of virile, macho hard-drinking mobsters and their molls look more like refugees from The Walking Dead.
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