Robert De Niro Casino Pictures

mods please lmk if this violates the rules. i’m posting here because I write about the mob/casino and many relevant themes that are important elements of the Sopranos, in my opinion. I think they’re of the same medium and genre so wanted to post here. Hope that’s alright. Cheers! (11 min read) ————————————————————————
EDIT 2: TL;DR -
Casino is a story of sexual and financial intrigue, mob violence, union pension fund embezzlement, a “love” story, and the protagonist's masochist addiction to the pain and chaos his lover inflicts on him. It turns out that the sharp-minded genius who meticulously runs the casino, is no more rational than the gamblers who routinely frequent the casino, coming back to lose their money and hoping that the odds will magically shift in their favor.
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Every good filmmaker makes the same movie over and over again—Martin Scorsese is no different
Scorsese's Casino is a phenomenal story of the condoned chaos and "legalized robbery" that happens on a daily basis to gamblers who bett away thousands of dollars and return each day for more “FinDom,” but without any of the sexual sadism. The whole scam only persists because the house always wins: the odds are stacked 3 million to one on the slot machines, but the same shmucks return wide-eyed each day hoping for a different outcome, devoid of any rational re-evaluation required to maintain their grasp on reality, and the liquidity of their bank accounts.
Casino is a story of sexual and financial intrigue, mob violence, union pension fund embezzlement, a “love” story, and the protagonist's masochist addiction to the pain and chaos his lover inflicts on him. It turns out that the sharp-minded genius who meticulously runs the casino, is no more rational than the gamblers who routinely frequent the casino, coming back to lose their money and hoping that the odds will magically shift in their favor.
Robert De Niro plays Sam "Ace" Rothstein, recruited by his childhood friend Nick "Nicky" Santorno to help run the Tangiers casino, which is funded by an investment made with the Teamsters’ pension fund. Ace’s job is to keep the bottom line flowing so that the Mafia's skimming operation can continue seamlessly. De Niro's character felt like half-way between Travis from Taxi Driver (of course, nowhere as mentally disturbed) and half of the addictive excess, greed, and eccentric business-mind of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Ace’s attention to detail gives him a rain-man-esque sensibility; his ability to see every scam, trick, hand signal, and maneuver happening on the casino floor make him the perfect manager of the casino, and take his managerial style to authoritarian heights in his pursuit of order and control over what is an inherently unstable and dynamic scheme; betting, hedging outcomes, and walking the line to keep the money flowing and the gamblers coming back. I’m not claiming Ace is autistic, I'm no clinician, but his managerial sensibilities over the daily operations of the casino, from the dealers to the pit bosses, to the shift managers, are to the point of disturbing precision, he has eyes everywhere, and knows how to remove belligerent customers with class and professionalism, but ultimately is short sighted in “reading” the human beings he is in relationship with. Ace is frustratingly naive and gullible in his partnership with Nicky and the threat he poses to him, and in his marriage with Ginger.
Ace has no personal aspirations to extract millions of dollars for himself out of the casino corruption venture. Ace simply wants the casino to operate as efficiently as possible, and he has no qualms about being a pawn of the bosses. While Sam, “the Golden Jew”—as he is called—is the real CEO of the whole enterprise, directing things at Tangiers for the benefit of the bosses “back home.” Ace’s compliance is juxtaposed with Nicky’s outrage upon feeling used: he gripes about how he is in “the trenches” while the bosses sit back and do nothing. Note that none of the activity Nicky engages in outside of the casino—doing the work of “taking Las Vegas over”—is authorized by the bosses. Ultimately Nicky’s inability to exert control over his crew and the street lead to his demise.
In the end, capitalism, and all that happens in the confines of the casino, is nothing but “organized violence.” Sound familiar? The mob has a capitalist structure in its organization and hierarchy: muscle men collect and send money back to the bosses who do not labor tirelessly “in the trenches.” The labor of the collectors is exploited to create the profits of their bosses. The entire business-model of the Mafia is predicated on usury and debtors defaulting on loans for which the repayment is only guaranteed by the threat of violence. But this dynamic is not without its internal contradictions and tensions, as seen in Casino.
In a comedic turn, the skimmers get skimmed! The bosses begin to notice the thinning of the envelopes and lighter and lighter suitcases being brought from the casino to Kansas City, “back home”. The situation continues to spin out of control, but a mid-tier mafioso articulates the careful balance required for the skimming operation to carry on: to keep the skimming operation functioning, the skimmers need to be kept loyal and happy. It’s a price the bosses have to pay to maintain the operation, “leakage” in their terms. Ace’s efficient management and precision in maintaining order within Tangiers is crucial for the money to keep flowing. But Ace’s control over the casino slips more and more as the movie progresses. We see this as the direct result of Nicky’s ascendance as mob kingpin in Vegas, the chaos he creates cannot be contained and disrupts the profits and delicate dynamics that keep the scam running.
Of course I can’t help myself here! We should view Scorsese’s discography, and the many portrayals of capitalist excess not as celebratory fetishization, but a critique of the greed and violence he so masterfully captures on film. See the Wolf of Wall Street for its tale of money as the most dangerous drug of them all, and the alienation—social and political—showcased in Taxi Driver. Scorsese uses the mob as a foil to the casino to attack the supposed monopoly the casino holds on legitimate, legal economic activity that rests on institutionalized theft. When juxtaposed with the logic of organized crime, we begin to see that the two—Ace and Nick—are not so different after all.
The only dividing line between the casino and organized crime is the law. Vegas is a lawless town yes, “the Wild West” as Nicky puts it, but there are laws in Vegas. The corruption of the political establishment and ruling elites is demonstrated when they pressure Ace to re-hire an incompetent employee who he fired for his complicity in a cheating scam or his stupidity in letting the slot machines get rigged; nepotism breeds mediocrity. In the end, Ace’s fall is the result of the rent-seeking behavior that the Vegas ruling class wields to influence the gaming board to not even permit Ace a fair hearing for his gaming license, which would’ve given him the lawful authority to officially run Tangiers. The elites use the political apparatus of the State to resist the new gang in town, the warring faction of mob-affiliated casino capitalists. While the mob’s only weapon to employ is that of violence. The mafia is still subservient to the powers that be within the political and economic establishment of Vegas, and they’re told “this is not your town.”
I’d like to make the most salient claim of this entire review now. Casino is a western film. The frontier of the Wild West is Vegas in this case, where the disorder of the mob wreaks havoc on, an until then, an “untapped market.” The investment scheme that the Teamsters pension fund is exploited for as seed capital, is an attempt to remain in the confines of the law while extracting as much value as possible through illegal and corrupt means for the capitalist class of the mob (and the ultimately dispensable union president). Tangiers exists in the liminal space of condoned economic activity as a legal and otherwise standard casino. While the violence required to maintain the operation, corrupts the legal legitimacy it never fully enjoyed from the beginning. This mirrors the bounty economy of the West and the out-sourcing of the law and the execution of the law, to bounty hunters. There is no real authority out in the frontier, the killer outlaw on the run is not so different from the bounty hunter who enjoys his livelihood by hunting down the killers. Yet, he himself is not the State. The wide-lens frame of Ace and Nicky meeting in the desert felt like a direct homage to the iconic image of the Western standoff. The conflict between Ace and Nick, the enforcer and the mastermind, is an approximation of the conflicts we might see in John Wayne’s films. The casino venture itself could be seen as an analogy of the frontier-venturism of railroad pioneers going to lay track to develop the West into a more industrial region.
I would have believed that this was a documentary about how the mob took over control of the Vegas casinos in the 1970-80s … if it were not for the viewer being expected to believe that Robert De Niro could play a Jew; it's hard to believe a man with that accent and the roles he’s played his entire career could be a “CRAZY JEW FUCK!!” I kid! But alas, De Niro is a class act and the last of the many greats of a bygone era. At times, it felt like Joe Pesci lacked talent as an actor, but his portrayal of the scummy, backstabbing bastard in Nicky was genuinely remarkable, but I might consider his performance the weak point of the movie. It’s weird to see a man that short, be that much of physical menace. There are a number of Sopranos actors in Casino. I’m sure Vincent Chase watched the movie and said to himself, “bet, i’ll cast half of these guys.”The set design and costumes were gorgeous. The styles and fashion of the time were spectacular. Scorsese’s signature gratuitous violence featured prominently, but tastefully. The camera work, tracking shots through the casino and spatial movement was incredible and I thought the cinematography was outstanding, the Western-esque wide lens in the desert was worthy of being a framed still.
The Nicky//Ace dynamic is excellent and the two play off of each other well. The conflict between the two of them escalates gradually, and then Nicky’s betrayal of Ace by cheating with Ginger marks the final break between the two of them. Nicky’s mob faculties represent a brutal, violent theft that is illegal and requires the enforcement of violence by organized crime. Despite the illegal embezzlement and corruption at play with the “skimming” operation at work at the casino, the general business model of the casino stands in contrast to the obscene violence of the loan sharks. Ace operates an intelligent operation of theft through the casino, and his hands-on management approach is instrumental to the success of the casino. Nicky’s chaos pervades the casino, and the life and activities of “the street” begin to bleed into Ace’s ability to maintain order in the casino. “Connected” types begin frequenting the casino, and Ace unknowingly forces one particularly rude gambler to leave the casino, who happens to have mob ties with Nicky. The “organized violence” of the casino cannot stay intact perfectly, because the very thing holding it together is the presence of the mob. Nicky is in Vegas as the enforcer and tasked with protecting Ace but his independent, entrepreneurial (shall we call them?) aspirations lead him to attempt to overtake what he realizes is a frontier for organized crime to brutalize and exploit the characters of “the street” (pimps, players, addicts, dealers, and prostitutes) and the owners of small private businesses.
Nicky is reckless, “when i plant my flag out here you won’t need your [casino/gaming] license” Nicky thinks he, and Ace, can bypass the regulations and bureaucratic legal measures by sheer force of violence alone. But ultimately Nicky is shortsighted and doesn’t have a real attachment to the success of the casino. After all, he isn’t getting profits from it (or much anyway) and isn’t permitted to play a real, active role in its daily functions because of his belligerent, untamed personality. Nicky has no buy-in that would motivate him to follow the rules or to work within the legal parts of the economy, it’s not the game he knows how to play, and win. All that he is loyal to, or deferent too, is the bosses back home; for whom he maintains absolute, uncompromising loyalty to, but still holds intense spite for.
And now to the more compelling element of the narrative. Sam “Ace” Rothstein is positioned as remarkably intelligent, he makes informed decisions that aid in his skill as a gambler, he can read people to determine whether he’s being conned, he has an attention to detail—aided by the casino’s surveillance apparatus which monitors cheating—that is almost unbelievable. Ace knows when he’s being cheated, he knows how to rig the game so that the house always wins, enacting psychological warfare to break down the confidence of would be proficient gamblers, who could threaten Tangiers’ bottom line. But in the end, the greatest gamble Ace makes is his marriage to Ginger. Ginger is the seductive, charismatic, and flirtatious madame who makes her money with tricks and her sexual power. Ginger works as a prostitute, seducing men, and extracting everything she can, almost as a sort of sexual-financial vampirism.
Ginger is the bad bet Ace can’t stop making even when she destroys his life, her own, and puts their daughter Amy in harm’s way. Ginger is the gamble Ace made wrong, but he keeps going back to her every time, trying to rationalize how she might change and be different the next time. Ace is not a victim to Ginger’s antics. Ginger makes it clear who she is: an addict, alcoholic, manic shopaholic who will use all of her powers to extract everything she can from everyone around her. She uses everyone to her advantage and manipulates men with her sexual power in exchange for their money and protection. Ginger had a price for her hand in marriage: $1 million in cash and $1 million worth of jewelry that are left to her and her alone as a sort of emergency fund.
Ace’s numerous attempts to buy Ginger’s love—and the clear fact that no matter how expensive the fur coat and how grand the mansion, none of it would ever be enough to satisfy her—mirrored Jordan Belfort’s relationship with Naomi in The Wolf of Wall Street. Both relationships carried the same manic volatility and conflict over child custody was found in both films, with the roles reversed in the respective films. Ginger may be irredeemable and a pathological liar, but Ace can’t claim that she wasn’t clear with him; when he asked her to marry him, Ginger said she didn’t love Ace. Ace replied that love could be “developed” but required a foundation of trust to develop. That trust was never there to begin with. The love was doomed from the start to destroy the two of them; two addicts, two gamblers, lying on a daily basis to one another and themselves about reality to justify their respective existences, the marriage, and Ace’s livelihood. And as Ginger pointed out, “I should have never married him. He’s a gemini, a triple gemini … a snake” Maybe astrology has some truth to it after all.
Now I’m not licensed (but hey neither was Ace, and he ran a casino empire!), but Ginger has the inklings of a borderline personality: her manic depression, narcissism, drug and alcohol abuse, and constant begging for forgiveness all seem indications of a larger psychological disorder at play. In the end, Ginger runs away with all the money Ace left her and finds her people in Los Angeles, the pimps, whores, and addicts she fits in with, in turn exploit and kill her for 3 grand in mint coins by giving her a ‘hot’ dose.
Overall, Casino is an incredible cinematic experience. I highly recommend watching this and seeing it as part of Scorsese's anthology of commentary on our economic system and its human victims. I’d argue that Casino, Wolf of Wall Street, and The Irishman all fit together nicely into a trilogy of the Scorsesean history of finance and corruption from the 70s to the 90s.
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EDIT 2: TL;DR —
Casino is a story of sexual and financial intrigue, mob violence, union pension fund embezzlement, a “love” story, and the protagonist's masochist addiction to the pain and chaos his lover inflicts on him. It turns out that the sharp-minded genius who meticulously runs the casino, is no more rational than the gamblers who routinely frequent the casino, coming back to lose their money and hoping that the odds will magically shift in their favor.

I'm going through a binge run of sorts of Martin Scorsese films that I haven't seen that are leaving Netflix soon:

• Mean Streets
• Taxi Driver
• Cape Fear

The others that I've seen previously are:

• Goodfellas
• The Departed
• Shutter Island
• Wolf of Wall Street
• The Irishman

I'm mentioning this just to give you an idea of what films I've seen of his. My favorite although I haven't seen it in a while was Shutter Island.
I'm noticing that at least 4 of the films I've seen are crime/mafia related. And I think a few others I haven't seen may touch on the genre: Casino and Gangs of New York. He's made 25 full-length films so let's say 6 out of 25 are crime related. The reason I point this out is that as I was watching some and thinking back on some of these films, I can't help but think of actors that are typecast for certain roles. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent for directors. But I have a strong association with crime films and Martin Scorsese. Any idea what motivated him to make films that touch on a similar genre? Keep in mind, I might not be making a fair assessment and maybe he's a bit known for his non-crime films.
The films I've seen recently are much fresher in my mind than the others, but I noticed there's a certain pattern to how scenes are filmed. There's just this super close up to the main character that he often does. I feel like I've seen Robert DeNiro up close too much. In some ways, I found it a bit distracting. I don't think this is particularly something only he does as a director. It's just something I noticed in his earlier films. Anyone who's watched his films thoughout the years as they've come out, have you noticed a particular change to his style of filming? Or would you say that he's pretty adaptable and changes things up based on the story?
He does seem to really enjoy playing with lighting depending on what's happening in the scene. Taxi Driver really captured this I thought especially in the dark gritty New York that's shown. It's been a while but I vaguely remember a similar play on lighting in Shutter Island.
And just one aside, but why did he have Robert DeNiro kiss a young Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear? In the movie she's 16 which was disturbing enough. Left me quite uncomfortable. Then I had to look into it further because she looked really young. In real life she had turned 18 yrs old on June 21 and the film released November 15 meaning she was potentially underage when that scene was shot.
Anyways this may all seem a bit all over the place. What I was hoping to get is to generate some discussion as to what others like or dislike about his films and why you think he's been so successful?

should be the name of this sub, half of you clowns think covid is a real pandemic and some sort of actual threat to humanity, despite the average age of people dying being higher than the average age a human dies, 99% of them with multiple serious conditions, non covid deaths recorded as covid, ie a total non event, absolutely normal and expected natural deaths of people close to death - being rebranded and sold to you to justify the permanent restructuring of our slave society and culture
if you havent noticed, the world is already under global control, nations fall in line to unelected global organisations, all singing from the same hymn sheet, the future is extremely bleak if this covid psyop is not challenged
and actually wasting your time discussing biden and trump, jesus christ, how far away from being aware of reality can you be, you seriously think these 2 clowns have a say in anything, they are bottom of the food chain at bohemian grove
you know the movie casino, when De Niro plays Sam Rothstein and he runs the casino for the "mob", they put Philip Green in as the frontman to stand at the mic for the cameras, thats the president, a focal point for the masses to argue over, the illusion that every 4 years something might change for the better if only your guy wins, it will be different this time, "its all over now we got rid of X - its a new start"
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NOTHING FUNDAMENTAL IS CHANGING YOU UTTER SIMPLETONS
STOP PLAYING THE GAME

Among all of Tarantino’s work, I feel like Jackie Brown always flies under the radar. After Once Upon A Time came out, I looked at lots of people ranking Tarantino films and Jackie Brown always seemed to be low. After rewatching it, I cannot understand why.
This is the only Tarantino movie with an adapted screenplay, from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, and I believe the movie benefits from it. A lot of Tarantino movies to me feel like a bunch of great scenes stitched together, whereas this movie has much more of a plot consistently present. It feels a lot more oriented towards reaching an end goal.
I also love the way this movie is about old people. At its root, it’s a movie about old people falling in love. It’s something you don’t really see in A-list movies (apart from the Irishman which was also about old people). The romance between Jackie and Max Cherry always seems believable, and it truly feels like it could be each character’s last chance of finding love. Robert Forster brings a real honestly to the Max character, which adds a lot to their romance.
The acting is really good too. Everybody shines in their roles. The first time I watched this movie, I felt like De Niro was wasted. Watching it again, I thought he was great. It’s such a departure from the roles he usually played around the late 90s, coming off of Ronin, Casino, and Heat. He fits the role of a stoner lazy guy well past his prime so well in his limited screen time. His whole interaction with Melanie towards the end of the film is great. SLJ is great too, and I loved how menacing he was despite the stakes in the movie not being too high. Yeah, $500K is a lot of money, but at the end of the day, his character isn’t as big of a deal as he thinks he is.
All in all, I have almost no complaints with this movie. The pacing feels good throughout, the soundtrack is great (esp Across 110th St), the acting is great, and the dialogue still feels sharp as it is written by Tarantino. Anybody else feel this way and think it should be higher rated? I think maybe people expected something crazier or grander when this came out, as it was Tarantino’s first movie after Pulp Fiction.
Last thing: I really enjoy movies based on Elmore Leonard novels. Get Shorty with John Travolta is really good. And I really recommend Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and JLo, directed by Steven Soderbergh. That movie is so much fun and has all the hallmarks of a Soderbergh movie.

Rotten Tomatoes: 100% (8.97 in average rating) with 41 reviews

Critics consensus: An epic gangster drama that earns its extended runtime, The Irishman finds Martin Scorsese revisiting familiar themes to poignant, funny, and profound effect.

Metacritic: 92/100 (23 critics) "must-see"
As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie.

De Niro’s always at his best in the context of a Scorsese-mandated tough-guy routine, and Frank Sheeran gives the actor his most satisfying lead role in years. Sheeran appears in virtually every scene, and the story belongs to his colorful worldview the entire time. He may be an aging man telling tall tales, but that puts him in the same category as the one behind the camera. Sheeran, however, lost touch with his world long before he left it. With “The Irishman,” Scorsese proves he’s more alive than ever.

-Eric Kohn, IndieWire: A

Despite the movie's many pleasures and Scorsese's redoubtable directorial finesse, the excessive length ultimately is a weakness. Attempts to build in social context during the Kennedy and Nixon years, at times intercutting news footage from the period, aren't substantial enough to add much in terms of texture. The connections drawn between politics and organized crime feel undernourished, and the movie works best when it remains tightly focused on the three central figures of Frank, Russell and Jimmy. Netflix should be commended for providing one of our most celebrated filmmakers the opportunity to revisit narrative turf adjacent to some of his best movies. But the feeling remains that the material would have been better served by losing an hour or more to run at standard feature length, or bulking up on supporting-character and plot detail to flesh out a series.

-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.

-Owen Gleiberman, Variety

And the big ticket world premiere at this festival is its opening-night film, The Irishman, a nearly three-and-a-half-hour gangster epic from New York’s own hero, Martin Scorsese. The Irishman is less literal about its meta moodiness than Pain & Glory is, but it still speaks disarmingly quiet volumes about what the autumn of life might mean for its creator.

-Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

For much of its duration, The Irishman covers familiar ground but is slickly entertaining, if a little repetitive in the third hour. There’s an almost meta-maturity, as if Scorsese is also looking back on his own career, the film leaving us with a haunting reminder not to glamorise violent men and the wreckage they leave behind.

-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 4/5

Ultimately, “The Irishman” is a major success for Scorsese—not only does it incorporate the best aspects of his past crime dramas and their thrilling energy, but it adds context to those films and wrestles with their legacy resonantly. In a way, “The Irishman” fills in the gaps between “Goodfellas” and “Casino” to tell the overall story of the mob’s rise and fall in postwar America, but it does so while anchored to one man’s story and morality. The law never catches up to Sheeran—not for the real damning stuff anyway— but as Scorsese demonstrates with profound solemnity, he cannot outrun his conscience.

-Joe Blessing, The Playlist: A

Nothing this misshapen ever flies—Scorsese once managed to make a movie called The Aviator that was similarly overburdened—yet his all-over-the-place enthusiasm plays nicely against the material’s death stench. Tidy as it may be to expect, Scorsese doesn’t need to cap his career with a sign-off to the gangster epic; that would be way too sentimental for him. What The Irishman does become, in its final hour, is something better, a film about broken trust, to family and God. De Niro’s Sheeran, like the monks of Scorsese’s magnificent Silence, wrecked by spiritual compromise, can't express his pain. This may not be why the average fan comes to a Marty movie, but it’s the statement this director, now 76, feels like making. After so much brilliance, Scorsese is being too hard on himself (maybe this review is too), but when The Irishman is about doubt, it’s as personal as it gets.

-Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: 4/5

People will want to see The Irishman because of De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino all in a mob movie again, directed by Martin Scorsese. And, boy, yes, that’s there. In the scenes where they are younger, the de-aging is … pretty good. I’d say the best I’ve seen so far. But it’s one of those things that if you stare at it, yes, you can see the imperfections – especially when De Niro or Pesci are acting alongside, say, a non-de-aged Ray Romano. But you do get used to it. And the way I look at this is, well, this is the small price to pay to get all these actors together again to tell this story. To star in Martin Scorsese’s phenomenal film about the price we all pay for our sins of youth … even if you or I didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa. The Irishman is terrific and Netflix got their money’s worth.

-Mike Ryan, Uproxx

As much as they take special care to tell the audience that their characters are rotten to the core, Goodfellas and Casino and another spiritual relative, The Wolf Of Wall Street, have been misunderstood as glorifications; it’s an inevitable consequence, perhaps, of following ugly men with occasionally glamorous lives. Scorsese takes no such chances with The Irishman, a crime epic that pushes further forward in time than most, to a truly ignoble end. Eventually, it reminds us, we’re all just fitting ourselves for coffins.

-A. A. Dowd, Uproxx: A-

The film – at three hours and 19 minutes – never flags. The Irishman may not be as groundbreaking as Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, but then again, what is?

-Caryn James, BBC: 4/5

Scorsese is so adept at storytelling, and his cast is so unbelievable, that the film, which clocks in at 209 minutes — even longer than The Return of the King and Avengers: Endgame — barely feels its length. The Irishman feels more like being caught in a dream or reminiscence, with all the tenderness we’re willing to afford in those in-between hours. Only Scorsese and his assembled cast, not to mention longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, could bring that all into reality.

-Karen Han, Polygon

Some may balk at the 209-minute runtime, but there’s never a moment where this story drags. Indeed, the three-plus hours practically fly by, because we’re so swept up in this decades-long journey. There’s not a single second wasted here, because one gets the sense that all the characters are hanging on for dear life – literally. As the years tick on, and their bodies fail them, The Irishman‘s main players find themselves closer and closer to oblivion.

-Chris Evangelista, /FILM: 10/10

Five decades is a lot of history to hold together, and it could have easily crumbled. Remember “Gotti”? But Scorsese is at the top of his game here. His film is never boring, and it explores some unexpectedly deep themes for mafiosos.

-Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post: 4/4

With The Irishman, director Martin Scorsese proves to be in an alluringly funereal mood.

-Keith Uhlich, Slant: 3.5/4

There is no arguing that The Irishman is a masterpiece. It is Scorsese revisiting themes seen in his past work with new elements of excitement, despair, and wit. The great performances and incredible filmmaking make this fictionalized tale of Frank Sheeran a story to end the decade, one that has seen many changes within the film industry — and hopefully introducing a new era of Martin Scorsese.

-Shea Vassar, Filmera: 5/5

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

-Stephanie Zacharek, TIME

A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid — and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.

-A. O. Scott, The New York Times

Scorsese is probably the last big-budget filmmaker who mostly declines to tell the audience what to think, much less boldface and underline why he’s telling us a story about self-serving criminals and whether he personally condemns them. “The Irishman” doesn’t break with that tradition. The opportunity to sit with the movie later is the main reason to see it. For all its borderline-vaudevillian verbal humor and occasional eruptions of ultraviolence (often done in a single take, and shot from far away) it feels like as much of a collection of thought prompts and images of contemplation as Scorsese’s somber religious epics “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Kundun” and “Silence.” God is as tight-lipped as Frank.

-Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com: 3.5/4
DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese
WRITER
Steven Zaillian
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Rodrigo Prieto
EDITOR
Thelma Schoonmaker
Release date:
November 1, 2019 (limited theatrical release)
November 27, 2019 (Netflix)
Budget:
$159,000,000
STARRING

• Robert De Niro as Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran
  
• Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa
  
• Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino
  
• Harvey Keitel as Angelo Bruno
  
• Bobby Cannavale as Felix "Skinny Razor" DiTullio
  
• Anna Paquin as Peggy Sheeran
  
• Stephen Graham as Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano
  
• Ray Romano as Bill Bufalino
  

You can check out a video version of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OQkxioCNrw&t=3s
1 The first scene shot in the film was Morrie’s wig commercial, directed by Stephen R Pacca, who owned a window replacement company and directed and ran a similar ad in New York City that Scorsese was inspired by
2 When Jimmy is handing out money to everyone, Robert De Niro, ever the perfectionist, didn’t like how the fake money felt in is hands. He wanted real cash to be used, so the props master gave De Niro $5000 of his own money. No one was permitted to leave the set at the end of each take until the money was returned to the props man and counted.
3 Sticking with De Niro being a sticker for authenticity, according to the real-life Henry Hill, the protagonist of the movie, De Niro would phone him 7 or 8 times a day, wanting to discuss minute details of his character, even ow he would hold his cigarettes.
4 The classic Funny how scene is based on an occurrence which actually happened to Joe Pesci. When he was working in a restaurant years ago, he complimented a gangster by telling him he was funny, but the remark was met with a less than impressed response. Pesci told this to Scorsese, who implemented it into the film, and the scene was directed by Pesci himself and not included in the shooting script of the film, meaning his and Ray Liotta’s interactions would elicit genuine reactions from the supporting cast.
5 Henry Hill said that Joe Pesci’s portrayal of Tommy was 90 to 99% accurate. The only exception was that the real Tommy was a much larger and powerfully built man.
6 Veteran actor Al Pacino, who director Martin Scorsese wanted to work with for years and who he would later work with in The Irishman, was offered the role of Jimmy Conway. Pacino turned it down, for fear of being typecast as a gangster actor. He would go on to regret this decision.
7 Much has been made about real life mob involvement in the making of Goodfellas, from Robert De Niro attempting to contact the real-life Jimmy Burk, to Scorsese hiring background actors with real life mafia connections, such as Tony Sirico, who would later find fame playing Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos. According to Nicholas Pileggi, author of the book Wiseuy upon which Goodfellas is based, there were several mobsters hired as extras in order to add authenticity to the film. They provided the studio with fake social security numbers, and as such it is unknown how they were paid.
8 Ray Liotta’s mother died whilst the movie was being filmed, and Liotta used his emotions over his mother’s death in his performance, most notably in the scene where he pistol whips another man.
9 When Joe Pesci’s mother saw the film, his real life mother, she liked it, but questioned her son if he had to swear so much. 5 years later in Casino Catherine Scorsese, who played Pesci’s mother in Goodfellas, complains to her son in Casino about swearing too much.
10 The painting of the two dogs and the man in the boat that Pesci’s mother in the film paints was actually painted by Nicholas Pileggi
11 The Lufthansa heist, which plays a major part of the movie, did not have its case solved and closed until 2014, and most of the surviving participants were arrested.
12 When Henry Kill is introducing mobsters to us in the bar, one of them is a character named Fat Andy. This character is played by Louis Eppolito, Eppolito was at the time a former NYPD detective whose father, uncle and cousin were in the mob. 15 years after the release of Goodfellas, Eppolito, along with his police partner, were arrested and charged with racketeering, obstruction of justice, extorsion, and up to 8 murders. They were both given life sentences, with an added 80 years each.
13 The F word and its derivatives are used 321 times in the film, at an average of 2.04 per minute, and almost half of them are said by Joe Pesci. At the time it was made, Goodfellas held the record for the most amount of profanity in a single film.
14 The scene where the three main characters eat with Tommy’s mother was almost completely improvised by the cast, including Tommy asking his mother if he could borrow a butcher’s knife and Jimmy’s remark about the animal’s hoof. Scorsese did not tell his mother tat Pesci’s character had just violently beaten a man, only that he was home for dinner and that she was to cook for them.
15 The real life Jimmy, along with Paulie whose death is mentioned in the film, also died in prison in 1996. He would have been eligible for parole in 2004.
16 Paul Sorvino wanted to drop out of the role as Paulie just three days before filming was schedule to start, as he felt he lack the cold personality to play the role correctly. After phoning his agent and asking him to release in from the film, his agent told him to think it over for a while. Later that night, Sorvino was practicing in the mirror and made a face that even frightened himself, and he was convinced that he would be able to play the role.
17 According to film legend, the real life Jimmy Burke was so trilled that Robert De Niro was playing him in the movie, that he phoned up De Niro from prison and gave him advice. This is something denied by Nicolas Pileggi
18 Even though Joe Pesci was in his fourties during the filming of Goodfellas, the real life inspiration for his character was in his 20 when the events of the film took place. Scorsese was initially concerned with Pesci being too old to play the role of Tommy, and Pesci sent him a video of him walking
19 Nicolas Pileggi spoke to Henry Hill throughout the script writing process, and he says much of the voice over narration in the film are almost exact quotes from Liotta himself
20 According to Debi Mazar, Henry Hill’s girlfriend in the film, when she trips after meeting Henry she actually tripped over the camera’s dolly track. Scorsese kept it in the film because it looked like her character was overwhelmed by Henry.
21 One of the daughters of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco’s characters, the one too shy to give Paulie a kiss when he visits their home, is actually the daughter of Harvey Keitel, with whom Braco had the child.
22 In order to better get into character, when driving to and from the set Ray Liotta would often listen to tapes of interviews Pileggi had with the real Henry Hill. Liotta noted that Hill spoke casually of murders and other serious crimes whilst eating potato chips.
23 After seeing the film, Henry Hill thanked Liotta for not making him look like an asshole. Ray Liotta response was to think to himself “did you even watch the movie?”
24 The famous long take of the Copacabana took just 7 to 8 takes to get right
25 Henry Hill’s life after he went into the witness protection program was adapted into a movie released the same year as Goodfellas – called My Blue Heaven. Nicholas Pilei’s wife wrote the script for the film.
26 According to Scorsese, legendary actor Marlon Brando attempted to persuade him to not make the movie.
27 The real life Henry Hill was paid around half a million dollars for the movie.
28 Robert De Niro was offered the roles of both Jimmy and Tommy. He chose the former.
29 Despite it’s status as a classic, Goodfellas only won one Oscar. And its winner, Joe Pesci, was so surprised, that his winning speech was one of the shortest in Oscar history, simply saying, “it’s my privilege, thank you”
30 Frank Vincent, the man who plays Billy Batts and is beaten and stabbed to death by Joe Pesci, and who also starred with Pesci in two other Scorsese films – Ragin Bull and Casino - actually has a long history with Pesci. The two used to be bandmates and a comedy duo in the late 60s. They also starred in the low budget 1976 mafia film The Death Colelctor, where they were spotted by Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, and eventually hired for their roles in Raging Bull.
31 The producer’s original choices for the roles of Henry and Karen were Tom Cruise and Madonna.
32 Paul Sorvini improvised the slap that his character gives Henry in the scene where Paulie confronts Henry about drug dealing
33 In the original shooting script of the film, the Billy Batts shinebox scene was the very first scene in the film, followed by the dinner at Tommy’s mother’s house. Then Liotta would say the phrase “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster” and the movie would show his youth and growing up.
34 Early screenings of Goodfellas were met with poor reception. According to Pileggi, one screening had around 70 people walk out, and in another the film’s team had to hide at a local bowling alley as a result of an audience angry at the film’s level of violence.
35 In spite of the film’s violent reputation, there are only 5 on screen deaths
36 When Spider is shot by Tommy, Michael Imperioli broke a glass in his hand and had to be rushed to hospital. But when he got there, the doctors attempted to treat his apparent gunshot wound. When the actor revealed what his real injury was, he was made to wait for 3 hours in the emergency room. Scorsese told Imperioli that he would tell this story one day on the tonight show with Jay Leno, a prediction which cam true in 2000.
37 US attorney Edward McDonald, the fed who explains the ins and outs of the witness protection programme to Henry Hill and his wife, is actually playing himself in this scene, re-enacting the conversation he had with the real Henry Hill. McDonald volunteered to play the role and won a screen test when Scorsese was location scouting his office as a possible filming location.
38 The movie ends with Henry in the witness protection program, but after the film’s release, as a result of violating his terms and conditions, including going around and telling people who he was, Henry Hill was thrown out of the programme.
39 Henry requests that he isn’t sent anywhere cold when g egos into the programme. In the ending of the film, he picks up a newspaper for Youngstown in Ohio, a place which has below freezing temperaturs in winter, suggesting that Henry’s wish was not granted.
40 The film’s ending, where Joe Pesci fires several bullets staring at the camera, is a homage to the landmark 1903 short film The Great Train Robbery, widely considered one of the first narrative pictures. Scorsese saw his movie as part of a tradition of outlaws in American pop culture and noted that, in spite of the fact tat the two films are separated by almost a century, according to the man himself, “they’re essentially the same story.”

As in : What was your moment when you noticed "Hey, this could really be awesome as a full-fledged hobby, this is something that I can have a lasting interest in ?
My main Hobbys are primary Movies, Film & Cinema, as well as Manga & Anime.
Fair Disclaimer : This is going to be way to long, I don't really expect anyone to read through all of it. More than anything I wrote that for myself, I just felt an itch that I needed to type that all out for once.
For me it was when I first watched Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Die Hard (1988). I had watched them both within the same week for the first time.
But before I can talk about that, I have to go back a little further.
Up to this point I had only watched Disney Cartoons (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy), Disney Movies (pretty much ALL the animated Disney classics + some Pixar, I guess). Parallel to watching a lot of Disney stuff, I also read many many Disney Comics starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and Many More (Here in Germany Disney Comics are pretty famous and well known).
And I watched A LOT of Anime (Shonen). And I mean a lot. My biggest Anime fandoms where no doubt Pokemon, Digimon, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh, Detective Conan and Inu Yasha. Of all these Animes, I had also read the Mangas. Later on, when I started to read more manga (including reading rough scanlations online) and watching anime subbed online, I got into Naruto, Shaman King, Hunter X Hunter, Bleach and Death Note. AND - what's important - even before I watched real movies I was pretty damn big on CLAMP X/1999, Cowboy Bebop, Hellsing, Gantz, Trigun and a couple more I don't recall (Speed Grapher, Trinity Blood ?) ... So more mature stuff was not unheard of to teenage me.
I also was a huge Nintendo Fan : Super Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Star Fox, Pokemon, Kirby, F-Zero, Super Smash Bros. - you name it, but this is a whole different story altogether. I only ever owned Nintendo videogame hardware though and I exclusively played major Nintendo IP's. Never had a PlayStation, never wanted one. Yeah, I guess you can say I had picked my side.
Anyway, back to films :
The only live action films I had watched up to that point were superhero comicbook adaptations (DC Comics & Marvel Comics). I still watch those to this day, and I like them well enough, but I always knew and always felt that thes were just adaptations of a much bigger comic-universe and that there was verd little intrinsicly cinematic about then. Of course, with the advent of the Jaggernaut that is the MCU that has changed to a certain degree.
It's kinda hard to say why I was so wild for the Donner / Reeves Superman films, the Burton / Keaton Batman films, and yes, also the Schoemaker films (I know, I know ...) or the Raimi / Maguire Spider-Man films ... I don't exactly know why. Funnily enough I never really got into the DC Comics and Marvel Comics, which are the source material to these films. And neither did I ever really get into their cartoon adaptations. I am not sure why, wrong place, wrong time I guess. Plus I was effectively preoccupied with Anime.
Anyway, I suppose I was daunted by the sheer amount of material. I was always a kid who liked order and oversight in and over his collection and hobby. I didn't understand the publication history, multiple concurrently running series featuring the same hero, story arcs being spread out over up to 4 or 5 series, crossover events with other heroes, never knowing which crossovers are actually important. Add to that the fact that each issue in germany combined like 2 or 3 us-american issues, sometimes combining issues of different series into one german issue running under the brand of the main hero it featured, which made it all even more confusing. I tried to get into american superhero comics multiple times, bought quite a few issues and even read a couple of stories I really liked. But it just never clicked.
Then there are of course collected editions if story arcs or certains character runs by singular authors and artists (called graphic novels), but then there are also One-Off Standalone / Spin-Off / Elseworld stories and graphic novels. And last but not least, there are these company wide major mega crossover events that tend to reset large chunks of the universes and characters continuity. Supposedly in order to create new entry points for new readers, but I don't know ... To me, that made it even more confusing. Besides, I like to get a full story of a character I like. I don't want to be told basically "yeah, you know kid, basically 80% of what we have published until now doesen't count anymore lol".
With manga you have a clear beginning, one series, weekly or monthly chapters, collected volumes (tankobons) and once it's finished a clear ending. Sure it can be long as hell (in the case of One Piece over 90 volumes already), but at least when you read or watch it all you have a complete story. I guess I just always preferred that. Maybe that's why I liked the early Comicbook film adaptations of DC Comics and Marvel Comics : As a way of simplification.
Now, there was a time when I only watched DC and Marvel adaptions out of principle, even though even back then I already knew that some of them where pretty fucking bad. I had a weird obsession with Batman Returns though, which I still have to this day. Probably has something to do with the fact that I was like 10 when I first watched it and really, really liked Michelle Pfeiffers Catwoman, if you know what I mean.
But then my interest in - for lack of a better term - "real" Films started to rear it's head. Films that where originally cinematic.
I had a phase where I was pretty obsessed with the Die Hard and Indiana Jones movies. They proved to be pretty damn good gateway blockbusters. Indiana Jones functioned as a gateway to Star Wars and that whole universe George Lucas had created. By the way : Yes, I watched Indiana Jones before Star Wars. The Indiana Jones films also served as a gateway to ALL the other Steven Spielberg films (the serious ones as well). I was shocked how many movies I had heard of but never cared for were actually Spielberg movies. The unbelievable range from "Jaws" to "Schindlers List" or from "E.T. theExtra-Terrestrial" to "Amistad" or "Minority Report" first made me realize how important the DIRECTOR is.
After that I had a phase where I wanted to be cool and prove to myself I am hardcore enough to watch A LOT of Horror. My idea of Horror though, back then at least, was limited to 90% slasher. So I obsessed over Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and pretty much all of Romeros Living Dead (Zombie) films. It was arround that time that first torture porn wave swept over the Horror landscape and I was pretty proud of myself watching Saw and Hostel and talking about them at school, even though I remember HATING them.
During the same time there was the Fantasy craze of the 00's and I got pretty involved with the Harry Potter and the The Lord of the Rings movies as well, but that always remained a secondary interest. I never read any of the books of either series, I have admit to ny great shame. It just wasen't the right time for me to read young fantasy or high fantasy novels. Even though I did like to read as a child and youngster. But when Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings were all the rage I just was preoccupied with different interests, so it kinda fell through the cracks. I do however remember that I liked those films of Harry Potter that I had seen and most certainly all of the The Lord of the Rings films a great deal.
Anyway, after the Spielberg well ran dry I took advice from my friend who was a couple of years older than me. He was like you like Die Hard, well good for you since there's a whole world of 80s balls to the walls action flicks out there. Thusly, the door to Schwarznegger and James Cameron opened.
I probably don't have to tell you that The Terminator movies where my highlight (as well as Predator, which I was pleasantly surprised to learn had the same director as the first Die Hard). After I had seen Aliens, which I loved, I was shocked to find out it was a sequel. So I went back to the first. And so I discovered Ridley Scott. Funnily enough by means of arguably his worst film Alien 3 I learned about David Fincher, who remains one of my favourite director to this day. David Finchers two best works, by the way, are Zodiac and The Social Network, and not - albeit great - Seven and Fight Club, as many would have you believe. That is a fact and nobody will ever convince me otherwise.
Ridley Scott led to me discovering Blade Runner (the Final Cut on my first watch, thankfully) which, for some time, I was convinced was the final word in cinematic quality. I also developed an almost unhealthy obsession with the hard-boiled Michael Douglas starrer Black Rain. I guess it spoke to me because it was set in Japan and I was such a big anime fan.
Parallel to all this, roughly arround the time I started watching Cameron flicks, I also got balls deep into Quentin Tarantino. I remember I felt so smart and accomplished for having "discovered" Tarantino, I felt like a connoisseur of fine wine haha. What did I know he was mainstream. Well he wasn't for ME at the time. Needless to say, I loved all his films, even the slower paced Jackie Brown. Didn't like Death Proof so much, which was his newest release at the time. Naturally Tarantino led me to Robert Rodriguez, whose films I NEVER liked. Not even the ones generally considered good (From Dusk till Dawn, Sin City). For me he always felt like a pretentious poor mans Tarantino. Anyway, Quentin Tarantinos films taught me, for the very first time just how important a screenwriter and a good screenplay are.
After discovering hard SciFi with Ridley Scott and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (who of course was on my radar because of Batman Begins and nothing else lol), I finally felt smart enough to tackle Stanley Kubrick who, as I had heard and read on multiple occasions, was supposed to be the best director of all time, or at least one of the very best. So I bought a BluRay set containing all of his films from Lolita all the way to Eyes Wide Shut. And while I am sure HE IS one of the best directors of all time ... for me ... NOPE. His aesthetics, his way of telling a story , everything ... simply not for me. Stanley Kubrick's kino and I would not become friends. Not gonna lie, that made me a little sad back in 2008 / 2009 I think, because I really wanted to like his work. I felt like I was supposed to.
But then I caught - totally by chance - Martin Scorseses Casino (1995) by aimlessly flipping through TV channels at night. It was the last 20 minutes of all things. I think I didn't skip to the next channel because I thought the verbal house fight between DeNiro and Sharon Stone was hilarious (Note : The only thing I knew Robert DeNiro from at this time was Jackie Brown).
Anyway, then came the montage of the whacking with House of the Rising Sun which culminated in the now infamous cornfield murder. It was so raw and brutal. There was no music. There was no style or choreography to the beating. It wasn't "cool". There was no heroic escape nor was there a daring hero swooping in to save the day (note that at this point I didn't know that the Joe Persci character was a despicable gangster in his own right). All of it ... it just felt like I was watching a real mafia killing. And I ... WAS ... HOOKED. I rented Casino the next day and watched the whole thing. Talked about it with the guy from the video store. So he gave my GoodFellas. Mean Streets. The Departed. Raging Bull. The Aviator. Taxi Driver. The King of Comedy. After Hours. Scorsese Scorsese Scorsese.
Now I gotta say I was never big on the crime genre, neither in movies nor television. So I probably would have never actively looked out for this movie. But I found it. And that's that.
While Spielberg made me love movies as a medium, Scorsese and DeNiro made me love the craft of actually directing a movie and the art of acting.
DeNiros filmography led me to the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone. And with these movies I realised why I didn't like Kubrick. While Kubrick was cold and sterile, albeit highly intelligent, Coppolas and Leones movies where more character driven, driven by plot, story and acting performances ... and in general simply "warmer", if that makes any sense. They just felt like their was more blood and life and passion to them, compared to all of Kubricks work.
I first got into The Godfather movies and The Dollars trilogy of course, but over time I came to appreciate, in some cases even love, the smaller, quirkier, more unknown movies of these directiors like The Conversation (a film that taught me the value and importance of sound-mixing), Rumble Fish (my first glance into surrealism / expressionism) or Duck, You Sucker ! which was the first movie that I watched that got a message through to me about genuine class struggle and the futility of revolutions though history. Apocalypse Now made me realize and think about for the first time in my life what philosophy is all about. Once Upon a Time in the West made me understand why people like the opera. Something I never understood prior to watching this movie. When I was watching Once Upon a Time in the West for the third or fourth time it finally struck me, that, by all means, I was watching (and enjoying !) what was essentially an opera on film. And finally, Once Upon a Time in America, which I first saw at the age of 24 or 25, for the first time in my life made me think about topics such as true lasting friendships, the passing of time, missed opportunities, my own inevitable mortality, one-sided love and bitter regrets.
And so films, my primary hobby as of today, HAVE definitely had a big influence on how I look at the world, who I am and how I think about certain things. And for that, I will be forever grateful.

This is my first real Weeknd album roll out and I am really liking it. Of course I knew who he was before it started but After Hours (the track) got me looking into all his old stuff which was great. I also really liked the videos and the feeling that they had.
For references, I can pick out three visual references but I'm not sure which other ones maybe in there somewhere so do let me know because I'm finding this stuff really interesting
The red suit is like the suit worn by Robert De Niro in Casino (1995) also this picture really reminds me of the Heartless video
The mustache and glasses are like Dr Gonzo's in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
and the one most people have heard (I'm not entirely convinced but still), the whole blood on the mouth thing could be a reference to Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019)
There probably is more, so let me know because I really want to put these together so I can write about them.

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Most people would say that the greatest gangster movie ever made is The Godfather, but a strong argument could be made instead for Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. It is certainly the more entertaining of the two, with its impeccable soundtrack, fast cuts, sense of humor, voiceover narration, and all-over-the-place narrative structure.
RELATED: Goodfellas: 10 Most Iconic Moments, Ranked
Also, it’s based on a true story. The life of Henry Hill actually happened. The Corleone family is entirely fictional. Goodfellas_’ adaptation of true events adds a whole new layer to both the comedy and tragedy of the story. With that in mind, here are the 10 Most Memorable Quotes From _Goodfellas.

Updated on May 28th, 2020 by Ben Sherlock:_Even with the critical acclaim met by The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas remains one of his most popular films. A number of critics compared The Irishman to Goodfellas, but called it a more mature film. It has a slower pace, a more nihilistic tone, and a heavier focus on the immense guilt rattling around the heads of mobsters. With its rapid pacing, pitch-black humor, and Jules and Jim-inspired all-over-the-place editing, Goodfellas is endlessly rewatchable, so we’ve updated this list with a few more entries._15 I Like Going This Way…

“I like going this way. It’s better than waiting in line.”
The long tracking shot through the Copacabana found in _Goodfellas_ is one of the most iconic shots in the history of cinema. Henry skips the line, takes Karen into the club through the kitchen, and has a table brought out for them right in front of the stage. It’s easy to see why Karen was seduced by Henry’s lavish lifestyle.

14 You Wasted Eight F****** Aprons On This Guy

When a man with a gunshot wound collapses on the doorstep of Tuddy’s restaurant, Henry springs into action and starts plugging up the wound with aprons until the man makes it safely into the back of an ambulance.

For all intents and purposes, this makes him a hero. But Tuddy doesn’t see it that way; he just sees all the missing aprons. He says, _“You’re a real jerk. You wasted eight f*ckin’ aprons on this guy. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you. I gotta toughen this kid up.”_13 To Me, It Meant Being Somebody In A Neighborhood Full Of Nobodies

What makes Goodfellasarguably the best mob movie ever made is that it doesn’t just depict hitmen killing people for mafiosos and gangsters stealing cigarettes out of trucks. It also shows the seductive nature of the mafia lifestyle.
We understand exactly why Henry Hill wanted to be a gangster, and why that lifestyle seemed so appealing. When he was growing up, being a gangster seemed like “_being somebody in a neighborhood full of nobodies._”

12 F*** You, Pay Me

In voiceover, Henry explains what it’s like to have Paulie as a business partner: _“Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, he can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now, the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fck you, pay me.”_11 You’d Be Late For Your Own F***** Funeral

Long before Pulp Fiction_would make him an icon, Samuel L. Jackson played a small role as Stacks Edwards in _Goodfellas. Instead of ditching the truck that they used in the Lufthansa heist like he was supposed to, Stacks got stoned.
So, Tommy goes over to his apartment and tells him to get dressed. But while he’s getting dressed, Tommy says, “_You’d be late for your own f*ckin’ funeral,_” and shoots him in the back of the head.

10 They even shot Tommy in the face…

They even shot Tommy in the face, so his mother couldn’t give him an open coffin at the funeral.

Perhaps the most awful moment in the whole of Goodfellas_is when Tommy heads to what he thinks is the ceremony in which he’ll be made and gets killed. As Henry explains the whole thing, we get a haunting look and how strictly the mafia stick to their rules: _“It was revenge for Billy Batts, _and a lot of other things. And there was nothing that we could do about it. Batts was a made man, and Tommy wasn’t. And we had to sit still and take it. It was among the Italians. It was real greaseball s**t. They even shot Tommy in the face, so his mother couldn’t give him an open coffin at the funeral.”_9 I got to admit the truth…

I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.

One of the smartest moves Martin Scorsese made with the writing and directing of _Goodfellas_was following Karen’s storyline as well as Henry’s. Not only does the movie explore the mentality of someone who ends up being a career criminal; it explores the mentality of someone who gets romantically involved with one. And Lorraine Bracco plays the character with so much gravitas and humanity. Our first glimpse into her psyche is a fascinating one: _“I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.”_8 I’m an average nobody…

I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.
At the end of Goodfellas, it might seem as though Henry gets off easy by selling out all his friends to the FBI and going into the Witness Protection Program. But as his final voiceover monologue points out, he’s left completely unfulfilled. He had everything he ever wanted and then lost it. Now, he has to live a mundane life in the suburbs like everybody else. Henry might have avoided jail by ratting out all of his friends – something he was told since his childhood never to do – but he feels just as trapped in his new life as if he had gone to jail.

7 I’m gonna go get the papers…

I’m gonna go get the papers, get the papers.

A commonality among the best crime stories is that they explore how criminals get their nicknames, and it’s usually something pretty trivial. For example, in the very first scene of the very first episode of The Wire, Jimmy McNulty launches into a monologue about how a kid was given a beautiful name by his mother and then one day, just because he forgot to grab a sweater on his way out and he ended up with a runny nose, he ended up with the lifelong nickname Snot. This was pioneered in Goodfellas, in which Henry Hill says, _“There was Jimmy Two Times, who got that nickname because he said everything twice.”_6 Hey, Tommy, if I was gonna break your balls…

Hey, Tommy, if I was gonna break your balls, I’d tell you to go home and get your shine box.
Joe Pesci’s character Tommy DeVito has a contentious relationship with pretty much everybody, but none more than Billy Batts. Billy knows that Tommy is a hothead and he likes to push his buttons. Tommy asks him politely, _“Just don’t go bustin’ my balls, Billy, okay?”_RELATED: Goodfellas: Every Major Performance, Ranked
And then Billy says, _“Hey, Tommy, if I was gonna break your balls, I’d tell you to go home and get your shine box. Now, this kid, this kid was great. They used to call him Spitshine Tommy. I swear to God! Now, he’d make your shoes look like f**kin’ mirrors. ‘Scuse my language.”_It’s a tense scene, since we’re just waiting for Tommy to erupt – and he does.

5 If we wanted something, we just took it

Part of what makes _Goodfellas_the quintessential mob movie is its exploration of the mob lifestyle and what leads people into organized crime in the first place. As Henry Hill explains in voiceover: _“For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked sh**ty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day and worried about their bills were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice, they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.”_4 Oh, I like this one…

Oh, I like this one. One dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way.

One of Martin Scorsese’s directorial trademarks is putting his mother, Catherine Scorsese, in his movies. But she usually has a cameo role. Her biggest role is in Goodfellas, when she plays Tommy Devito’s mother. Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry go to visit her and have a bite to eat. It’s a long scene, at least in relation to this fast-paced movie, and the tension comes from the fact that there’s a guy bleeding out in the trunk of their car. The whole time, he’s in the back of our minds, while Tommy nonchalantly analyzes his mother’s new painting: _“Oh, I like this one. One dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way, and this guy’s sayin’, ‘Whadda ya want from me?’”_3 Never rat on your friends…

Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.
Martin Scorsese wasn’t able to secure the funding for _Goodfellas_until Robert De Niro agreed to play the mobster Jimmy Conway in the film. He’s not the star of the movie, but he is an important figure in Henry Hill’s life. As a kid, Henry is arrested and doesn’t tell the cops anything, which makes the other mobsters proud.
RELATED: “As Far Back As I Can Remember…” 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Goodfellas
Jimmy says, _“I’m not mad, I’m proud of you. You took your first pinch like a man and you learn two great things in your life. Look at me. Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.”_On repeat viewings, this scene acts as harrowing foreshadowing for the big finale.

2 What do you mean I’m funny?

Joe Pesci could’ve won his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor on the basis of this scene alone. It’s one of the first scenes in the movie and establishes his dangerously unstable jokester character early one. Henry says, “You’re really funny!”_and his smile drops. “_What do you mean I’m funny?… _You mean the way I talk?”_Henry says, _“It’s just, you know, you’re just funny. It’s funny, the way you tell the story and everything.”_Pesci’s character Tommy DeVito says, _“Funny how? I mean, what’s funny about it?”_Eventually, it devolves and he’s shouting: _“I mean, funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh, I’m here to f**kin’ amuse you?”_And then it turns out he was messing with him the whole time.

1 As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster

This line from near the beginning of the movie is not just the best quote in Goodfellas; it might just be the single greatest quote in film history. Not only is it memorable and an exciting way to start the movie; its placement in the story speaks volumes. We’ve just seen these three guys sitting in silence, driving through the countryside, and then they open the trunk of the car to reveal a bloodied man. They stab him, shoot him, and bury him. Then Scorsese closes on Ray Liotta and, in voiceover as Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches” comes on the soundtrack, he says, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” You really wanted this life? It opens the discussion of the mobster lifestyle that the whole film explores.
NEXT: 5 Reasons Martin Scorsese’s Casino Is Underrated (And 5 Why It’s Just A Goodfellas Rip-off)
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I've just finished watching Raging Bull for the first time and I gotta say I'm underwhelmed. Firstly I felt the cinematography was fantastic and the choice of black and white was unique. I also felt De Niro played well and I gotta respect the weight gain in both physicality and obesity towards the end.
Honestly though, I felt like it was a pretty decent, down and out boxer film; showing the tole that an aggressive personality can play on an individual. Other than that, I didnt real feel nothing. I didn't feel the rapport between the two brothers before the fight was anything special. I felt the first encounter between de Niro and his new wife was slightly confusing. All of a sudden he drops his ex and continues on with her. From that point he's a paranoid wreck who hits his wife whenever he feels her to be misbehaving.
Skip to fat de Niro and he's meeting chicks to "allow them into his new bar". I dunno I don't really feel like i understood the character de Niro plays. Don't get me wrong, at some points he's fantastic and the moments are phenomenal. But it's when the plot tries to develop and a few fights pass that I feel like I'm not really learning anything about de Niro character.
I don't know. I feel I'm wrong in my interpretation because of how deeply I respect scorcese, de Niro and Peschi. Any of you guys want to share your opinion on why I must have misunderstood some things and what I should have been looking out for to make me appreciate the film more.
I feel Taxi Driver, Silence, King Of Comedy, Casino and maybe even the Irishman are all much better after my first viewing. I'm open to having my mind changed, so hope yall can do that.

I know this take is super late but whatever I'm in class and this was on my mind:
I understand that people like this movie a lot, but I don't see it. I have seen it on more than one occasion so I could try and understand why people like this movie. I have talked to people who have seen it. I've watched video essays on it. Despite all that, I don't understand why the movie reached such acclaim.
Let me start by listing the things I like about this movie:
Al Pacino's performance as Jimmy Hoffa is damn good, most likely being the best performance in the movie. He's a fantastic actor, so this comes as no real surprise. I wouldn't say anything extreme like it was better than his role as Michael Corleone, but it was a strong depiction of Hoffa. His personality, while grounded in the blue collar work ethic and his hard-fought virtues, is damn-near larger than life. Every scene he's in, he commands your attention, with his brazen, confrontational attitudes, to his somewhat humorous manner.
Joe Pesci, while absent in some long stretches of the movie, gives a good performance of Russell Bufalino. This was a noticeable departure from the more fiery roles we come to expect from Pesci (like Goodfellas and Casino) but he nonetheless is one of the best parts of the movie. There's an empathetic, caring nature of his character that contrasts nicely with the more conniving, apathetic business side of him.
The story is legitimately interesting. I understand this mostly lies in the real-life mythos of the disappearance of Hoffa, but it's impossible not to gawk at the sheer size of the story. Constant power struggles between various mobsters? Union campaigns? Fighting for control of the Teamsters? There's nothing about the story that is not pure intrigue.
Now, for the things I dislike about the movie:
FRANK SHEERAN
Frank Sheeran is a character with a complete lack of depth and personality. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, but could they have made the protagonist any more unbearably boring? I don't even fault De Niro too much for this because he does the best with what he's given. Unfortunately, what he was given was a completely blank slate, and Scorsese said "Be like this." Sheeran is a "witness character," meaning that he watches more powerful and interesting people around him do a bunch of important and powerful shit before he gets his one moment to do something that defines the story. He has few, if any, discernible character traits, except that he was violent one time to a shopkeeper and he is friends with Jimmy Hoffa. We're *supposed* to believe that this character is important and wields a level of influence and power, both in the mob, and in the Teamsters, yet, somehow, he is constantly powerless to affect any change in the story. On top of this, he has no character arc. He starts killing people, and he hurts a shopkeeper one time. At some point down the line, he kills his friend, and that makes him sad.
It takes him 3 hours and 47 minutes of film time to realize that killing is wrong? Oh my god, what genius!
I understand that what I just said was reductive, but I'm trying to illustrate the lack of thought given to an arc that was placed there rather intentionally. He's a hitman, a union leader, and the confidant of Jimmy Hoffa who struggles in his parental role as he resorts to violence too quick. There is a rich arc there that should be told, but this has to be balanced with him not doing anything so the main story can play out.
My main point about Frank is that the movie doesn't know whether or not to make him important or completely passive. Let's be clear: passivity has a place in storytelling. One of the best examples I can think of is Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby, where him being a witness makes more sense and serves more of a purpose. I'm not saying it's impossible for a passive witness to be given an arc, but that's a challenge which requires a deft hand that the writers did not have when writing the script, as the film constantly flops between "Oh he's important and a character you should focus on!" and "lol nvm not really."
CHARACTERIZATION
Building off the last point, the characterization has serious issues that no one seems to address when talking about this movie. We are constantly given information about characters via cutaways, montages, or people just fucking telling us. Let's keep talking about Frank, since we were just talking about him. We are told Frank is a hitman for the mob when we see a montage of Frank throwing guns in a river while his older self narrates over it, and then we are shown that he has grown to be more violent in regular dealings when he beats up the shopkeeper. Aside from the fact this is very sudden and takes place over the course of 2 minutes, why did this change have to happen if we were just going to be told it anyway? Why not introduce him as a hitman struggling with his growing violent tendencies? Also, and much more egregious, why the hell is this the only real incident of his violent behavior affecting him outside of work? That's clearly what the scene is trying to portray, but it only happens once. If his character is changing, then it isn't just a one-time thing. Patterns form, with the violence potentially growing, as his character steeps deeper and deeper away from acting how he used to. Eventually, with his murder of Hoffa, he comes to realize how much he's changed as a person. Not only does that sound more intriguing, it's also more realistic.
This affects more than just Frank though. What about Russ, who was one of the better parts of the movie? Well, we see him dine with Frank a few times in the beginning, and we are literally told that Russ saved his life and that he is a great friend to Frank. Obviously, this is meant to communicate that he considers Frank a friend. Unfortunately, this suffers from the same mistake as last time. Russ is straight up absent for a huge part of the middle of the movie, where he all but disappears. How are we supposed to believe that he's a great friend if we've just seen them eat and bowl twice and we're just told it once? That doesn't make the audience believe anything.
The story is severely limited by the way in which characters are built, as it weakens the impact that arcs can have, and it puts a severe damper on potential character moments. Instead of letting us see how a character is, we have to constantly be artificially told how things are, or how this character is, when a better alternative would be to show us naturally.
THE TONE
This movie is pretentious as hell for a story that has such a weak protagonist and characterization. Everything about this movie screams "TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!" as if it was a fucking Christopher Nolan movie. The muted colors, the ham-fisted symbol of the daughter, the loaded cast of people who do absolutely nothing, and the hilariously dumb stills of characters with their faces and their deaths.
I understand that they aren't 1-to-1 but tell me that those still shots of the faces with their fates isn't as ridiculous as this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOpapeX6Vzs
Also, how quick was the whole idea of "painting houses" dropped? As soon as he stopped painting houses in the movie. I mean, he does this whole pretentious, "Before the mob I thought when you said you paint houses, it meant you paint houses" speech. Then, when they get on the road, they do a laughably bad edit of the car and these 3 black frames coming in and out saying "I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES."
This movie is horribly pretentious for the story it tells. Hell, it's pretentious for the story it's trying to tell too. At its best, while it is a story about the Teamsters and the mafia, the story of a violent father, and the story of the greatest Union leader the US has ever seen, it's also not a super complex analysis of the way of the world or human nature. I mean damn, the Godfather is much more thorough in its dissection of capitalism, family, and masculinity, and if it had some of the shit that was in this movie, it would be too much.
ANTI-AGING
This isn't as serious a criticism of the movie but I think it's important to mention: the technology is fucking stupid.
First off, while I acknowledge how impressive the technology is, it's extremely limited in what it can do. Sure, these characters look SLIGHTLY younger. They also still move like old people because old people are the actors getting re-aged. Yes, if they sat down in front of me and stood still, I would be convinced, but no, I watched a geriatric De Niro beat up a shopkeeper with slightly smoother skin. It wasn't convincing.
Second, how much age does it really take off? De Niro does not look that young in the beginning of the movie, like he's pushing 55-60. That's an achievement, but it's not super effective to the audience. Plus, any age after that still makes him look really damn old. I have to be honest, I thought De Niro looked the same across however many years it was supposed to be. It didn't impact my viewing experience tremendously, but it was weird.
This brings me to my main point: why the fuck wouldn't you hire younger actors? Sure, I understand that these people are all legends and they can act and all that, but this younger generation has some great actors too. Is it in any way possible for the mantle to be passed? Mob movies are among some of the greatest movies ever made. Do we just let the flame die out because there will be no more actors from the original movies? What a ridiculous notion. I want to see new movies, new art being made. This movie feels like it's supposed to be a farewell, but art is supposed to evolve. You don't just close it up and say "We're done, no more." You keep the style going until it's outta gas. Using old actors will probably kill off this genre quicker than the styles being outdated.
CONCLUSION (tl;dr)
This movie has serious flaws that diminish some of the potential good that is inside this movie.

3/31/19-12/4/19
IMDB synopsis: “A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement with the slaying of Jimmy Hoffa.”
I’m a pretty big fan of mob movies, and I’m an even bigger fan of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, so I wasn’t going to wait too long to see The Irishman. Having said that, I deliberately kept my expectations reasonable, since the trailer fell a little bit flat, and the enormous runtime (3 hours, 29 minutes) likely foreshadowed a self-indulgent director. So what’s the bottom line?
If you like mob movies, and if you keep your expectations reasonable (like I did), this is a fine film. Pacino is really the glue that makes it watchable; he is fantastic as Jimmy Hoffa and he should definitely get an Oscar nomination. DeNiro (playing the hitman) and Joe Pesci (playing the mob boss) are also very good. In that sense, “The Irishman” is really an actor’s showcase – allowing 3 of the best living actors to shine in their twilight years. The plot itself is good enough – engrossing, albeit predictable and with a shortage of real action. In terms of the runtime, yes, Scorsese could unquestionably have cut at least 30-40 minutes, and probably should have. Having said that, I have to admit, I was never really bored (I looked at my phone just twice, and very, very briefly - a real accomplishment for me!).
A few other notes: I was OK with the “de-aging” special effects; I thought it would be distracting, but I got used to it pretty quick. BillSimmons said it was like “really bad botox,” and I think that’s a good way to look at it. Also, please don’t think this is the definitive story of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa; according to what I’ve read online, the real “Irishman” was almost certainly full of shit. So treat this as fiction, or at least, mostly fiction.
So, overall, I think this is a film that’s somewhere between good and very good, but falls short of greatness. I’m actually not sure what the case for calling this a “great movie” would be. The 3 main actors are playing roles they are way too old for (check out DeNiro’s curbstomp scene; it’s ridiculous), the plot is very dialogue-heavy, and it’s way too long. I don’t even think it’s as good as “Casino,” nevermind “Goodfellas.” Still, I do recommend it. I think most people will like it, but not love it, and that’s good enough for a (tentative) recommendation.
Rating: 6.4 / 10

Martin Scorsese delivers another high octane gangster story with Robert De Niro as the real life casino owner Sam “Ace” Rosenthal. Though I wouldn’t say I liked this as much as “Goodfellas”, this movie is still an incredible piece of film that’s not talked about enough. In many ways, this film is similar to past Scorsese pictures—mainly “Goodfellas” and “Raging Bull”—but it’s also different in a number of ways.
Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci (Pesci playing Nicky Santoro) make a wonderful duo. Niro’s character has this intense and calculating feel to him at all times. There are many scenes where Niro as Ace is watching for cheaters in his casino, and his facial expressions are able to convey how analytical the character is. Pesci, of course, plays the “tough guy” role the best that he can. Like in “Goodfellas”, he’s a crazy guy that could go off the handle at any time. I also can’t not mention Sharon Stone as Ginger. She plays a person that’s self-destructive and selfish. Let me tell you, she can play a person you can hate. There’s even a sequence where she nearly kidnaps Ace’s kid. Even though I’ve never been around anyone like that, I could tell that the display of someone who never learns and ends up with same problem constantly was realistic.
The cinematography, music, and writing are three notable things in this movie that jumped at me. I can still see the many glamorous shots of the casinos, the money, and the high life. One specific shot that made me say “woah” was when Ace was waiting for a meeting with Nicky in the middle of the desert. As Ace is looking at Nicky’s car pull up, we see the car’s reflection in Ace’s sunglasses. I thought that was a cool shot that’s able to show how nervous Ace was at the moment. Moving on to the music, Scorsese is an expert at matching music to his films. The only directors I know that do it as good or better are Tarantino and Kubrick. From beginning to end, the music marks certain changes that are happening in life. At first, the music is happy and about good things. Then the songs change to more darker themes as the film progresses. Not to sound like a broke record, but that’s similar to how “Goodfellas” did it. Finally, the writing was effective and powerful. I was absorbed into the story from first few seconds. I wanted to hear and see what was going to happen, and I just loved seeing how Ace lived his life. Additionally, the way that characters speak to each other felt real. And those argument scenes between Ace and Ginger have this somber and authentic mood to it. Frankly, everything about this film is astounding.
When I was watching this, I picked up on the theme of trust. More specifically, how trust can affect relationships. I noticed that this came up quite often: Ace wanted to make sure he could trust Ginger; Ace and Nicky trusted each other; and the bosses trusted Ace. But once this trust is broken in any of these relationships, the relationship itself fails. Ace couldn’t trust Ginger, so their marriage was failing. Ace and Nicky weren’t good friends anymore because Nicky didn’t trust him. And the bosses almost killed Ace because of the distrust. For all three, the reason trust was broken was because of greed. This goes to show, trust is a vital aspect of any relationship. If your head is not in the right place, everyone will eventually drift away from you. In this way, I find this film is like “Raging Bull”. Except here, it’s the woman that’s causing the problem. To further explain, “Raging Bull” is about a man who’s distrusting of his wife for no reason other than his paranoia, and “Casino” is about a man who’s distrusting of his wife because his wife is an unfaithful person. I like how you get two different versions of the same issue if you’ve watched both movies.
As for any underlying issues, I don’t have any deep concerns other than that the theme of “crime doesn’t pay” in here is generic since so many other movies has this message. I will say, though, that this film did not resonate with me like past Scorsese films have. It might be because I think “Goodfellas” is a better movie, or maybe the movie didn’t try anything too unique in its delivery.
As I’m wrapping up this review, I’d like to say that this is a fun movie that any fan of gangster movies or Scorsese films can get behind. You will not be disappointed if you chose to view it. All aspects of filmmaking and acting is masterful. I will rate this a 9.2/10.

As a potential last hurrah for 3 titans of cinema (and Joe Pesci), The Irishman is the perfect film for the 'end' of the careers of Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. A big budget, star-studded gangster epic is the bread and butter of all three and, in that sense, The Irishman is a genuine triumph fit to stand alongside Casino and Once Upon a Time in America (albeit not Goodfellas or The Godfather). It's not a perfect film, however, and not even up there with the best of the respective trio but the art of film making on display is second to none.
When I first heard about this film I was very excited; a potential swansong for the greatest living director and two of the world's finest actors? What could go wrong? Very little, as it turns out, and perhaps my biggest complaint is that the runtime is maybe a little long at 3 hours and 29 minutes - I wasn't kidding when I said it was a gangster epic. The only other minor slight is that the digital de-aging performed on Pesci, Pacino and De Niro is sometimes a little more noticeable than I'd like but more on that later. Besides that, I don't have any other real issues.
The plot is slick and interesting; an up-and-coming mob hitman (De Niro) is assigned protection to Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), union king of the USA, by one of the many mob bosses (Pesci) keeping the unions temporarily in check. I'm sure most of us have heard stories about Jimmy Hoffa and what might have happened to him, and I certainly don't want to spoil the many goings on of the plot, but lots of the little details from the many versions of the events surrounding Hoffa's disappearance inform the story and it's fun seeing the choices that characters make leading to the eventual 'reality' of things and how everything could probably have been avoided - at least as far as the film is concerned.
The ensemble cast is as good as you could want but the show stoppers are, of course, De Niro, Pacino and Pesci who give a masterclass but also look to be having a lot of fun. In fact, Pacino looks to be having a bit too much fun because, in order to capture Hoffa's larger than life public persona, Pacino chews scenery like his life depends on it and at times you'd swear you were watching a Pacino impressionist rather than the actual guy. This is obviously toned down in more subdued moments but you can see how Hoffa commanded such control if he was even half as charismatic as Pacino makes him out to be.
I'm going to wrap this mini review up because I've got a bit of something else to talk about so, suffice to say, if you like Scorsese films, gangster films, any of the actors or even have a passing interest for whatever reason then watch this film because it's awesome.
Now, a little something about the digital de-aging I mentioned earlier because this is something that really worries me, especially in conjunction with other things are currently in motion in the world of cinema.
I said that the digital de-aging is a little bit noticeable at times on our three leading men. The problem, obviously, is that all three are in their late 70s and the characters they play aren't. The technology is interesting, I don't think there's any getting around that, but I fear it could lead down quite a dark path.
The first issue is that I imagine the technology is going to be hit and miss. Here, I'd say it's a hit. The actors look younger and their faces don't get lost in the uncanny valley. A big miss was, of course, Rogue One where a horribly doughy Carrie Fisher turned up as a young Princess Leia. Not only did her face look fucking awful but I honestly wasn't sure whether or not Disney had resurrected Ray Harryhausen and got him to create a Carrie puppet to put through Dynamotion.
I don't know where his digital de-aging technology is going to lead. I mean, could Scorsese have chosen different actors to play the youngest version of the characters in The Irishman? Of course he could but he chose not to. Does that mean there aren't any actors up to the job of playing the parts? Maybe. De Niro played a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II and you'd say he's a perfect fit. The technology to make Marlon Brando didn't exist then (and let's face it, it never will) but you get the sense it wouldn't have been done even if it was possible.
I think that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, however. The biggest issue is what might start to happen next is already happening: the casting of dead actors. Rogue One is once again the high profile example of this, bringing Peter Cushing back from the dead and, ironically, making him look better than the Carrie puppet despite being deceased for the best part of 22 years. There was also fairly recent news that James Dean, dead for some 64 years, has been cast in a new Vietnam war Drama called Finding Jack. I'm not the only one horrified by this, of course, and there's been fairly widespread condemnation of the practice (though not directed at Rogue One for some reason) and hopefully this will dissuade people from trying again but it won't, not really.
The kickback against Finding Jack might stop another attempt for a few years but it'll be back, the technology practically demands it. And that's probably the world we're going to live in, if indeed we're not already living in it. Franchises are never allowed to die so why should their stars? The allure of the current crop obviously isn't strong enough but cast a long dead, genuine A-lister and people will line up out the door, for sheer curiosity's sake if nothing else. Then it'll be the norm and nobody will even notice when Star Wars 18 releases and Harrison Ford's corpse is dug up to be 3D scanned so he can be a force ghost.
Maybe SquareSoft had the right idea with digital actors. I mean, Aki Ross was awful but at least they didn't need to perform necromancy to create her...

I'm seeing Robert De Niro in a new light. I only knew him as Goodfellas/Casino/Meet the Parents De Niro and he was pretty relaxed compared to the beast he is in Raging Bull. The scenes where he's hitting Joe Pesci and his wife(s) look almost too real. I can't wait to dive into trivia behind the movie. Each fight scene was done so unique, even the intimate scenes when he's first seducing Vicki were done so well. Robert De Niro definitely crushed the role but I feel like the last act of the movie was definitely the weaker part where he's a comedian. Was this based on a true story?

(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.
https://archive.is/Jstm5

(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.