The Irishman (I Hear You Tag Spoilers)

[RumHam]

3 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I wonder why Hoffa had to be disappeared. So many killings, with bodies left in the street or in their houses. Were they afraid he was going to become a martyr for the union folks?

Because he was an infamous public figure and his union ties meant they knew there would be a federal investigation, 

Also it's not a given that Hoffa's body got any special treatment.  Like generally you'd want anyone you killed discreetly to disappear. Hoffa was just famous. 

[DireWolfSpirit]

6 hours ago, Zorral said:

The aging and anti-aging thing was occasionally jarring though I wonder if others hadn't written about it so extensively for weeks before I could watch -- would I have noticed?  I kinda think I would have noticed something, but not sure.

Bingo on the bolded. It's being waaaaaay too fixated on. It's just not that interesting or relevant to the overall scope of Scorcese"s presentation here. A 3 and a half hour film and people are droaning on Deniro not being athletic enough looking in a street fight scene? We could take almost any of the classic 3plus hour epics and find one or two scenes that just didn't work for us on a subjective level. I could do that with Lawrence of Arabia, Goodfellas, Dr.Zhivago, Casino, virtually any movie of this length will have a scene someone doesn't like, but 90+% of the film is so good I am not getting hung up on the legends showing there age.

It's that same appreciation I fealt seeing J.Wayne in The Shootist or Eastwood in Unforgiven and H.Fonda in On Golden Pond. As a movie lover those are memories that stand the test of time, these guys are never doing another of these.

[Ran]

6 hours ago, Zorral said:

The aging and anti-aging thing was occasionally jarring though I wonder if others hadn't written about it so extensively for weeks before I could watch -- would I have noticed?  I kinda think I would have noticed something, but not sure.

I think it's genuinely impossible not to notice if you have watched the actors over the years. There's just no way to forget the knowledge that, hey, De Niro does not look like that, Pacino does not look like that, etc.  The age-appropriate De Niro for that first segment was the De Niro of The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull, completely different physicality to what we had in the film.

I also think if you've watched a lot of mocap digital characters in video games, as some around here have, you'll pick up on the little "uncanny valley" things. Something about Pesci and De Niro at the gas station in their first meeting really had me uncomfortable, that something was "off".

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

I didn't notice anyone startled at how the characters from Ready Player One or Sin City are caused to appear much different through special effects, green screens and so forth. The appearance altering in 300 and Sin City were several orders of magnitude more in those films, yet that's all anyone can talk about in this film?

[Mark Antony]

I was re watching goodfellas and De Niro looks kinda like a old man kicking Billy Batts maybe he just kicks funny. 

[Fez]

Going to repost what I said in the watching thread last month. 

Quote

 

I watched The Irishman. Some friends and I went out to one of the only theaters around that was showing it. It was... fine. It was fine. It was technically very well made, had good writing, good acting, good production values, the digital de-aging mostly worked well (young De Niro didn't work, but middle aged everybody look good). But it was less than the sum of its parts. Which is saying something considering it was three-and-a-half hours long. 

There was no need for the movie to be nearly that long. It definitely dragged, especially at the end. But it would be hard to point out what scenes to cut, because they were pretty much all equally good and all equally relevant to the plot. Which is to say, they were all equally irrelevant to the plot. There really wasn't much of a narrative through-line to anything; it was one long series of "this happened, then this happened, and then this happened" without much to connect it. And even though it was well-acted, there really wasn't much characterization to most of the characters. I couldn't begin to tell you what Frank Sheeran's motivation throughout the movie was, and he was on-screen 95% of the time. He just did things and watched things.

Also, I'm generally not one to notice or point out gender issues in movies. But considering the ultimate point of the movie (and there obviously was one even though there wasn't much of a plot), it's incredibly disappointing how little screentime Frank's wife or daughters had; two of his four daughters I don't think had any lines at all.

 

With more time to think on it, I'm even more ambivalent about the movie. Considering the money and talent involved, I think something much better could've been made. Nowhere close to challenging Parasite as my favorite movie of the year.

[Zorral]

13 hours ago, Nictarion said:

As for the infamous kicking scene

You know, watching that, what I saw / thought, was more on the lines of the director deliberately choosing not to make this an extreme graphic stomp.  For one thing Scorsese is far too good, experienced and savvy not to see how this scene would present to the audience. This sense, that he was deliberately choosing avoidance of detail that could feed salicious joy in witnessing violence, increased throughout the film's progress, because though there is a death toll as high as in any of his and others' mob films, most of the violence, though present, is presented off screen, or at a distance, and we aren't given the aftermath details of blood and brains either.  (Except when the chicken gets its head cut off.  But having witnessed people who know how to use a knife on chicken necks, they do NOT get spurted with blood).

The prolonged, graphic detail, such as we saw in at least one Pesci Casino scene (made way back in 1995!), was veiled.  This choice was deliberate, a re-assessment of these scenes from his previous films that were received with great relish by large parts of the audiences, and which he now thinks were part of our current national problems.  I have no evidence for this, other than, as already mentioned, Scorsese is far too savvy not to know how that scene was played.  Also because he chose to shoot it from mid-distance, choosing not to show faces.  

This goes along with the other criticism that there was nothing for Paquin to do or say in The Irishman.  But this was the point her character was making, which began immediately with younger incarnation of Peggy, from the moment she saw what her father did in the scene above.  She was horrified.  She saw who and what her father was -- and by extension, then, Russ.  This is culminated by putting up the "CLOSED" sign on her teller's window when her aged father shows up, trying to trap her into talking to him at her bank. Peggy was closed to her father.

Peggy's only recourse was silence, and when old enough, removal.  Additionally, then, the contrast with how she received Jimmy Hoffa, her relationship of him makes another powerful statement condemning her father.  The most lines Peggy has in the film are when she reads a paper at school about Hoffa and the Union -- not Paquin's Peggy, but the middle school or junior high Peggy -- all words of admiration of Hoffa and the Union.

[Corvinus85]

Indeed, I found it interesting that there was always a noticeable distance between the camera and the violent scene we were seeing. Even some of the less violent scenes, like

Spoiler

when Pro attacks Hoffa in prison, the camera moves from the closeup shot during their conversation is swapped with the more distant shot when Pro is trying to strangle Hoffa.

 

[Zorral]

The Clam House site is still there -- at least the building was, last time I looked. The sign hadn't changed, but I'm not sure if it was operational.  At one point I ate there fairly regularly, but not in a long time.  I don't have much reason these days to go over there.

 

[ljkeane]

I saw this over the weekend. I thought it was good, it might have dragged a bit at that length watching it at the cinema but watching it on netflix over a couple of nights it was fine, but it's not at the same level as Goodfellas or Casino for me.

After it was talked up so much I didn't think the de-aging worked that well. It was ok when they were just sitting around talking as middle aged men but, like pretty much everyone else has pointed out, the problem with it is De Niro very much moves like a man in his seventies so it's not very convincing for any sort of dynamic scene. I was worried he was going to dislocate his hip in the scene when he's supposed to be beating up the shop keeper and looking back at the thread it seems a lot of other people had exactly the same thought.

[The Last Storm]

Worth the watch, not even in the same universe as Goodfellas and Casino obviously. The Peggy character kinda confused me a little. 

[Relic]

I liked it, a lot. The last 30 minutes were a bold move. Scorsese went for it, like he hasn't done in some time. Putting the futility and pointless nature of all the violence, the power struggles, the greed on full display. 

 

Didnt pay attention to any of the de-aging stuff mentioned in this thread. They all looked old as fuck, and DeNiro didn't look all that intimidating in his geriatric state, but it didn't much matter to me. 

[red snow]

To be honest I thought it was a lot weaker than his recent efforts, Shutter island, Wolf of Wall Street and Silence - Nevermind his gangster films. That said a weak scorsese film is still good, it just felt more like the godfather than his own films which was a bit odd. The CGI/make-up was distracting particulalry when actors real ages were inverted when playing alongside each other. De Niro also looked like "young old De Niro" as opposed to what he actually looked like when he was young which is a pitfall filmmakers should be aware of when deaging actors who we know what they looked like 40 years ago.

Al Pacino definitely got the pick of characters and his scenes really stopped the film from dragging. De Niro was fine but it seemed the character was purposefully downbeat. The Grandpa off "up"  Joe Pesci was interesting in a "pulling all the strings" kind of way. It felt like a lot of the characters were there as cameos rather than having meaty parts though.

8 hours ago, Relic said:

I liked it, a lot. The last 30 minutes were a bold move. Scorsese went for it, like he hasn't done in some time. Putting the futility and pointless nature of all the violence, the power struggles, the greed on full display. 

 

 

I appreciated what he was going for but those last segments really dragged for me and I found my attention wandering - especially with the final scene. Although I guess that's kind of meta in the sense that's what Scorsese was trying to say - these horrible people are ultimately forgettable.

I really liked the "infographics" that kept popping up around various characters saying what their ultimate fate was. I felt that did a better job of showing how pointless, dangerous and futile this lifestyle was. But it does compliment the end scenes too.

[Relic]

18 minutes ago, red snow said:

Joe Pesci was interesting in a "pulling all the strings" kind of way. It felt like a lot of the characters were there as cameos rather than having meaty parts though.

 

Am i reading too deeply into it or was it vaguely implied that Pesci's character might have molested Peggie? He was SO incredibly creepy at one point in the movie, giving her all these gifts, but that plot line was either dropped or kept purposefully muted.  

[Spockydog]

1 hour ago, red snow said:

The CGI/make-up was distracting particulalry when actors real ages were inverted when playing alongside each other. De Niro also looked like "young old De Niro" as opposed to what he actually looked like when he was young which is a pitfall filmmakers should be aware of when deaging actors who we know what they looked like 40 years ago.

I think the de-aging was a gimmicky mistake. Not only because it was poorly executed and incredibly distracting, but De Niro, Pacino, and particularly Pesci, never looked like anything other than really old geezers. The grocery beatdown was pathetic.

And wtf was up with putting Herc from The Wire in an old man suit? Completely pointless, and just added to the crappy Uncanny Valley vibe. 

Abercrombie sums up my feelings entirely...

 

 

[Mark Antony]

It wasn’t a film pretending to be “young and deadly” though. The last hour makes that clear and to me justifies using elderly actors.

[Spockydog]

If most of the action was focused on elderly men, then yes, by all means use old men and de-age them. But for a film about a Mafia hitman in his prime, using a 75 year old man is, in my opinion, a massive mistake. They would have been better off using young actors and aging them up. Although Herc in an old man suit never looked like anything other than that.

And Pesci looked like he had been dug up. In all his guises.

 

 

[red snow]

58 minutes ago, Relic said:

Am i reading too deeply into it or was it vaguely implied that Pesci's character might have molested Peggie? He was SO incredibly creepy at one point in the movie, giving her all these gifts, but that plot line was either dropped or kept purposefully muted.  

I got that vibe too at an earlier point but was it Pesci or Pacino? Peggie's character felt as though it was supposed to have a much bigger role and then wound up on cutting room floor.

 

3 minutes ago, Mark Antony said:

It wasn’t a film pretending to be “young and deadly” though. The last hour makes that clear and to me justifies using elderly actors.

It doesn't justify using the same actor though. If the majority of the film was about a 30 year old (tbh i was never able to work out how old the character was supposed to be) maybe they should have used an actor who fit that age. 

And yes, herc from the wire was the most ridiculous part. Maybe the reason i liked Pacino so much was because he didn't have any weird cgi/make up

[Mark Antony]

I could see people getting the “Peggy molested by Russel” vibes but she just didn’t like him I think. Knew he was an evil influence on her dad.

idk casting a younger actor might’ve worked for the early parts but would’ve taken away from the last third.  

[Spockydog]

2 minutes ago, Mark Antony said:

idk casting a younger actor might’ve worked for the early parts but would’ve taken away from the last third.  

Why? Was the Godfather 2 diminished in any way by having the main character played by two different actors?