LOL… remember the ground meat that was redder than normal beef that we nicknamed ‘monkey meat’? Turns out it was horse meat =)
Though I have to admit, I actually like properly knacked and processed horse meat - for a while there was a horse knackers here in CT that would sell out the back door - I used to get the most wonderful tenderloins and one year had a 4 bone prime rib that was amazing, we had to bard it with a slice of beef tallow to get it to roast properly [horse is amazingly lean]
Interview with stepson of Chuckie O’Brien about Hoffa and other topics
So I finally got around to seeing this film, and I have to say, I agree with the majority of posters in this thread. It was a well-made film with a void at its center. I get it - it’s about the banality of evil, about how some of the worst things in the world are done by men who are just following orders given by other men who have convinced themselves that they have no choice. The thing about the banality of evil, though, is that it’s, well, banal. It’s interesting at the intellectual level, but not the emotional. Now maybe you could make an interesting movie about such a fundamentally dull, uninteresting person this film was about. In fact, if anyone could do it, it’s Martin Scorceses. But he didn’t.
Also, if you’ve got Harvey Keitel in your movie, can’t you at least give him something to do? This is the guy who can maketelling a simple story over lunchmore interesting than your entire film!
Count me in the positive column. I thought it was fantastic.
I guess a film like this either grabs you or it doesn’t. It grabbed me.
Many of your criticisms may be perfectly valid, but none of them took me out of the movie one bit. I was riveted from start to finish, and didn’t find a single one of the 209 minutes to be wasted.
I won’t defend this position if anyone argues; it’s simply how I felt.
Though I agree that Harvey Keitel didn’t have enough to do.
It reminded me of Forrest Gump in visiting historical events and persons through a Candide-like protagonist.
What are the main tropes it used? Any particularly clever ways it went about it?
Jumping in late because I just saw the movie. I originally started a new thread but I’m moving my post to here.
I’m a big Martin Scorsese fan. And I like crime movies. So I had high expectations for The Irishman when it was released on bluray a couple of weeks back. It was a Criterion release and everything.
But now that I’ve watched it, I am very underwhelmed. There were good points. But I feel the story dragged; Scorsese included a lot of shots that seemed to have no purpose. There were also a lot of scenes that were tying in the story to historical events, which didn’t seem to have a point. But the biggest problem was the protagonist; Frank Sheeran seemed to be an almost completely passive character. He followed orders. That was it. We were given no insight into what motivated him like we had with Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta or Rupert Pupkin.
After I finished the movie, I went looking at reviews to see if there was some key insight I missed. I didn’t find it. What I did find is that a lot of people seem to have really liked this movie. It was on a lot of top ten lists.
So what did other people see that I missed? Did the problems I experienced not bother other people?
When I finished watching this movie, I got on IMDB and reassured myself that Scorsese was working on new projects. I didn’t want to think that this might be the movie he would decide to retire on.
Re: a few earlier comments, I have no problem with Robert De Niro playing an Irish character, because it turns out his ancestry is significantly more Irish than Italian. The Italian contribution was patrilineal, though, hence the surname.
Another cite: 7 things you never knew about Robert De Niro’s surprising Irish roots | The Irish Post
How about the airplane flight?
Russ brought Frank into the coffee shop and gave him his orders. He told Frank they were going to the airport and Frank was going to fly up and kill Hoffa. And he explained why it had to be Frank.
It was legit exposition. It was one character giving another character needed information in a way that also told the audience. So many directors mess up exposition and have characters telling each other things that they already know. But this was good filmmaking.
What followed was bad filmmaking. We had saw Russ and Frank driving in a car. We saw them park at the airport. We saw Frank get out of the car and walk to the plane. We saw Frank get into the plane. We saw the pilot get into the plane. We saw the pilot close the plane’s door. We saw the plane taxi to the runway. We saw the plane going down the runway. We saw the plane take off. We saw the plane flying along. We saw the plane land. We saw Frank get out of the plane. We saw Frank walk to the car. We saw Frank get in the car. We saw Frank find the keys and the gun in the car. We saw Frank drive off.
That was all wasted time. We already had been told Frank was going to take a flight. We didn’t need to see any of it happen.
There were plenty of other scenes like that that served no purpose. If you know a character is going somewhere, you don’t need to see them driving a car or walking down the street. Those kind of unnecessary scenes are what kill the pace of a movie. Show what matters and throw out the rest.
I saw it a few months ago at the beginning of the pandemic. I was really looking forward to it.
What a disappointment. I thought it was absolutely terrible, almost a parody of previous Scorsese films. It was completely miscast, with the leads unable to convincingly play younger versions of themselves. They should have gotten younger actors to fill those roles.
And the film was horribly bloated with pacing that just plodded along. Half the film should have been left on the cutting-room floor.
And what was the overall point of the film, anyway? Basically it sucks getting old, and if you act like a dick your whole life, you’ll die alone and unloved.
I think The Irishman is one of my top three favorite Scorsese movies of all time. The thing I loved most about it is how the performances of Pesci and De Niro were informed by their previous performances in movies like Goodfellas and Raging Bull. There’s one scene in particular; Pesci’s character, Russell Bufalino, is disrespected by another boss and, when Pesci and De Niro’s character, Frank Sheeran, are alone together, Bufalino orders Sheeran to kill the other boss. He doesn’t use words. He doesn’t even use gestures. He just stares impassively at Sheeran, and Scorcese keeps the camera on him for a fraction of a second too long. That’s all it takes. We get the message, in part, because we know what it means when Pesci gives De Niro a look like that, and we know it from our experience of watching previous Scorsese films.
The movie is full of wonderful little moments like that. That’s why I think that, despite the movie’s length, its storytelling is tremendously economical. I can’t think of a single scene, maybe not even a single line which, if it were removed, wouldn’t make the story poorer in some way. I think it’s a perfect coda to Scorsese’s career in the mafia movie genre.
If this were even true, it would be an awful reason to use it in the movie.
I must disagree. Part of what makes The Irishman so powerful is that, aside from telling a terrific story, it functions as a meditation on the social impact of Scorsese’s previous work. In a way, it can be understood as Scorsese’s attempt to “correct the record” of his previous films. While movies like Goodfellas and Casino glamorized the mafia lifestyle, The Irishman exposes it as hollow and artificial. The men involved in it are so busy aspiring to a distorted vision of manliness that they lose the things a real man should value.
The scene I described above is one of the ways Scorsese gets us to think about the impact his films have had in the real world. Pesci looks at De Nero; says nothing, does nothing. There’s no clever editing, no musical sting, nothing. On the surface, it’s a wholly unremarkable shot. But somehow we know that Pesci just ordered De Niro to commit murder. Scorsese counts on our knowledge of his earlier works to draw out the subtext of that shot. If you’ve never seen a Scorsese movie, it doesn’t matter, because Pesci’s intentions are made clear in the next scene. But if you are familiar with Goodfellas and the rest, you’re left wondering “How did I know that was what he meant?” At least I was.
Once we’re aware that Scorsese wants us to think, not just about this movie, but all his other mafia movies as well, The Irishman becomes more than just another gangster movie. It becomes a kind of apology for all the misconceptions Scorsese’s previous movies may have encouraged about what it’s like to be a mafioso and, by extension, a “real” man.
This was my exact reaction, too. The scene where “younger” DeNiro is beating up the guy in front of the store for insulting his daughter was laughable. He moved like an 80-year-old. But the whole movie seemed pointless. At least we got to see Pesci doing a great, understated acting job.