Sad to read some of this.

First off, fuck Deniro’s politics. Why anyone lets an actor, athlete, or reality star get their tits twisted is beyond me. I never listen to any of them and certainly don’t read it either.

This was Bobby De Niro’s best role since Heat. First half is lower key. The second half is superb. The hard as nails tight lipped character that he is playing finally shows some depth and emotion. It’s the character he is playing and he played it about as good as anyone has ever played a character. Stunning work from him. The last 15-20 years have not been good. He needed Marty to pull him out of those shit roles. The back half of this film is De Niro at his finest. One of his best films of his entire character.

Joe Pesci played the role of his life. He’s been gone from acting for like 20 years or something, only doing 3 films, including this one, since 1998. I’m a hardcore film buff and Pesci in this role really blew my hair back. If he doesn’t get one of those golden statues for this, then fuck the Oscars. One of the best performances I have ever seen in any film, like ever.

This was a swan song for Marin Scorsese. Stunning work. May be the best film of his career. They’ll be talking about this film for the next 50 years. The length, the amount of material he covered, and he is the only living director that could do such a thing. When he quits making film, especially period pieces such as this...the score, the soundtrack and songs he picked, from the 50’s, 60’s, etc, well if you are still alive you are going to really miss it. 90+% of films will be SJW, or superho’s in tights. And if you get subtlety Marty takes some big digs at the current SJW fest. “Meet the fairy, his name is Ferry.” And my favorite character in the film, some kind of mob boss, or captain in Chicago who says “fuck” and “cocksucker” as good or better than any man playing an Italian mafiaso in any film, ever.....says and I’m paraphrasing here as I will watch this a few times before my month’s subscription is up and I cancel it “Paul Hill is trying to hire the cab drivers we wanna fuckin’ hire. And I don’t know fuckin’ why, most of these cab drivers are a bunch of fuckin’ lesbians.” Then he does some crazy shit with a watermelon.
Scorsese is a true genius. Just like Pesci, if he doesn’t get the best director award, fuck ‘em. That’s the best performance from a director I have seen in the last 2 decades.

This film was a masterpiece. 10/10, 5 full stars. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a total masterpiece. I’ve seen films that were the best to me in recent years, Good Time, Phantom Thread, but Marty just whipped his dick out and then some. Mind blowing film. To hold that for 3 hours and 30 minutes is just insane skill, insane mastery, that takes an old man with more experience than just about anyone to pull off. And the subject matter he is a sme on, and then some. Take everything he has done in his career, and roll all that up into a film, and this is it. I’ve been waiting on this for so long, over a year, and it did not disappoint in any way. If anything Pacino was the weakest link in the chain, he just got outclasses by Bobby and Joe. Joe’s performance was for the ages. The ensemble was masterful. Even Sebastian Maniscalco nailed the dismount. He was damn good. Even the actor that I think was playing Don Rickles knocked it out of the park. Bo Dietl, the actor I mentioned above, I must have rewatched the bath house scene with him going off on the lesbians 5 times I was laughing so hard. No one can say “fuck” or “cocksucker” like an Italian, nobody. The firearm tossing was hilarious. Even Keitel, with just a few words of dialogue in the entire film, was classic Keitel. It was like the Wolf was back, even for just a few sentences. This film displays so much acting without words it’s disgusting. Just looks, going back and forth, no words, and you know every thing they are thinking and saying without saying a word. That takes some grade a top notch, old guys, with a whole career spanning many many decades, each, to act without words. So say so little spoken word, but speak volumes or mountains with such few words or none at all.

Thanks Marty. I caught the big fuck you to the current films, the sjw idiots. I caught it all and absorbed every frame like a sponge. Can’t wait to watch it again. 3 and a half hours. Shit man I was pushing the urine out as fast as I could to get back into my home theater and press play. The cgi to make them look younger was done as well as it could be. Mind blowing film. Everyone should be a little concerned how good this was, in a sea of shit films in 2019. This is like a big bright star in the sky and everything else is an old nearly worn our fluorescent bulb. Just no comparison to anything this year, this decade or last. Now it makes sense, Marty’s recent dig at superho films not being cinema. He is right and now I know why. He just flipped off that entire genre then knocked a gram slam to win the World Series after pointing his finger in the press. Reminds me of Bill Belichick. You just might want to get past the political bullshit of Bobby and cut all that shit out or you are going to mess a gem, one of the best gems you’ll ever see. Just take breaks when you need to. It is damn long. In awe.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
<post>

Thank you for putting into words what I was thinking, but could not articulate nearly as well as you.

I watched the entire 3 1/2 hours of The Irishman last evening without even pausing to piss. As a point of reference, I can't sit through the original Godfather without becoming somewhat fidgety. If this film doesn't earn some statuettes, well . . . "then fuck the Oscars" as they say.

Watched this last night.

If you like the whole Scorsese mob movie genre then you will love this. I almost passed because of DeNiro's rampant douchbaggery, but I am already paying for Netflix, so whether I watched it or not they have my money.

Very enjoyable, even if some of the facts may be in question.

Someone needs to tell Scorsese that NYC doesn't look like South Philly and all the CGI in the world can't make a guy in his seventies move and fight like a thirty year old.

I did enjoy it though.

-Tom

quote:

Originally posted by Replacement Tommel:
Someone needs to tell Scorsese that NYC doesn't look like South Philly and all the CGI in the world can't make a guy in his seventies move and fight like a thirty year old.

I did enjoy it though.

-Tom

I’m 30 minutes in and I haven’t see anything Philadelphia lol.

Plus, NO ONE can ever get the Philly accent right, not that they were even trying. I’m glad they didn’t attempt it actually.

Well, I finished watching it and my opinion remains unchanged: meh.

Three hours and twenty-nine minutes. Easily an hour too long. As it is, I found the movie boring, pointless and all too often, preening, as if Scorsese was saying, "Hey, look: Nobody makes mobster movies like I do." Sadly, I found my attention wandering often, as the dialog was meandering, the characters vacuous, and way too many irrelevant scenes that added little to the overall plot. But then again, there really wasn't much of plot to begin with, so Scorsese had to stretch this disaster out for almost three and a half hours to disguise that fact.

From what I can tell, the moviegoing public gave it a pretty good yawn, too. It cost an approximate $159M and took in only $167,920. If that's a typo, it isn't mine; that's the figure given on IMDB. Oh sure, some of the "art crowd" gave it recognition, and Al Pacino is, in my book, one of the best actors living today. But overall, Scorsese gave me nothing to hang my hat on, and at the end I shrugged my shoulders and went, "That's it???"

No, I won't be watching it again.

*** SPOILER ALERT - Don't read further if you haven't seen it, yet ***

P.S. I'm surprised that on a gun forum, no one has pointed out the egregious goof: When they show Hoffa being laid out in his cardboard box, his face is unmarked. I mean, two shots to the back of the head at point-blank range, and there's no visible damage? In reality, there wouldn't be much of a face left if that were the case.

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
<post>

Thank you for putting into words what I was thinking, but could not articulate nearly as well as you.

Just finished the film. Bang on, on all points. I wasn't twenty minutes into it and I was thinking "when Scorsese passes, nobody else is going to make authentic period films set in the 20's-50's. Just isn't gonna happen the same way."

I was going to say more, and then it autoplayed onto "The Irishman: In Conversation," which is a roundtable discussion with the four wiseguys: Scorsese, DeNiro, and Pesci being interviewed by Pacino, while PESCI IS SITTING A GOOD NINE INCHES TALLER THAN EVERYONE ELSE IN THE BOOTH. Jesus Christ, Joe, you're how old? You've been famous for being short longer than I've been a unitized set of fucking chromosomes. Joe, you're fucking short! It's ok! Wear lifts in your shoes if it makes you feel good, but don't sit in a toddler's booster seat or sit on a stack of phone books and hang your arms over the back of the booth like you're the big guy in the group. My. God. Lose the Napoleon shit, just own being the little Italian badass. You worked too hard at it for too long to look that fucking ridiculous. It was as if DeNiro threw down the gauntlet with his political shit and Pesci got juuuuust slippy enough at the end of the night to say "wait, you fuckers, I'm still bigger than all of you!"



That said, it's Scorsese, and I'm gonna watch it easily a half dozen times. The CGI aging effects were jarring to me, and there wasn't one person in the film called "kid" that didn't have heavy lines in their face and were obviously decades or so past what would be appropriate to call someone a "kid," and that was... odd. If they could have made DeNiro look like he looked in Heat, I could've bought the age difference, but he looks like he's at least 50 immediately post-war. I respect that they did what they were capable of, but it wasn't perfect, and it often took me out of the film when an unaffected medium shot with practical makeup would have just done fine. I feel like DeNiro often looked like a weird CGI blend of himself and a young John Wayne to boot. The CGI blue eyes didn't look at all realistic to me, it reminded me of Dune. Yes, CGI effects that old. The scene where he beats up the daughter's boss at the grocery store looked like it was straight out of a videogame cutscene, and Scorsese will probably eventually take a lot of criticism for it, and regret that scene as it was released in the long run. It looks fake and ridiculous.

Those are my gripes.

I enjoyed it, I'll watch it again. I'll probably grow to enjoy it more in time. Every film has its flaws and some of the best pieces of artwork are the absolute hardest to really get into and process at first. Some of my favorite albums are ones I hated at first and had to listen to once or twice before they clicked. Many films also.

Overall I enjoyed it, but was a bit let down by the anticlimactic ending. It IS LONG at 3.5 hours.

I had to stop after 2.5 hours and finish the last hour the next evening.

Overall worth a watch.

We finished that and I'll admit to being burdened by my own preconceptions. It's a Scorsese crime film but one few would have imagined. As such I have to say, yes, epic but on the back side of an epic arch.

Given that a movie is the sum of its parts, I wonder how this film would be received without its stable of gigantic known players in the major roles. I'll just leave that thought there.

In my midway-through post I wondered how this film would dig itself out of the hole its digging not knowing that hole was the point. "The Irishman" is going to bubble around in my head for some time, well done Martin Scorsese and thank you.

quote:

Originally posted by KevinCW:
Overall I enjoyed it, but was a bit let down by the anticlimactic ending. It IS LONG at 3.5 hours.

I had to stop after 2.5 hours and finish the last hour the next evening.

Overall worth a watch.

There's easily another 45 minutes of denoument after the climax. That's the problem.

Plus, you also broke the film up. I watched it one sitting, and came away with a moderately different feeling about it. Yes, the film is long, but for all that, I didn't feel like it dragged on. There was still a lot of stuff left to unpack and wrap up after the climax. After all, these are the remembrances of a hit man about a hit recalled decades later.

And speaking to that point, this is the version of the hit I'd heard about that made way more sense than the nonsense in "Hoffa." Heck, the entire film makes a lot more sense than that one did.

I'm starting my second viewing. It's worth at least two viewings if you've ever liked a mob film, or a Scorsese film. Also: this type of film making, film creation, whatever you want to call it... It needs to survive beyond Scorsese. Telling a story this way has value. At least, to me. All the mob stuff aside.


ETA - Yep, this is one of those you have to watch several times. I'm already liking it better on the second viewing.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:


I enjoyed it, I'll watch it again. I'll probably grow to enjoy it more in time. Every film has its flaws and some of the best pieces of artwork are the absolute hardest to really get into and process at first. Some of my favorite albums are ones I hated at first and had to listen to once or twice before they clicked. Many films also.

Some of us catch the quality the first go round.

Spielberg, when he first saw Kubrick’s 2001, didn’t like it, at all. Years later, re-viewing, changed his mind drastically.

Marty has done mob pieces before, but the bulk of his films have not been mob films, contrary to popular belief. In this day and age people pick apart everything to hell. I find it funny. The Marvel stuff, that Scorsese said recently wasn’t cinema (he’s fucking right), made like what 29 films of that bullshit? Billion dollar profits each time which is why the damn studios are so hell bent on making 29 more of them. This director does his 5th mob film and people are up in arms. Never mind the Marvel films all have the same actors in all of them. Mind blowing.

I just watched it.
I didn't feel it was that good at all.

Glad some of you enjoyed it.

I guess I'm a Neanderthal when it comes to "art".

I don't analyze movies based on cast, directors, producers, lighting, production values etc ad nauseam. I watch them. The results fall into three categories:

A. LOVED IT, will watch it multiple times.
B. It was okay, don't begrudge the time spent.
C. My GAWD that was awful. Couldn't slog through it.

This movie was a solid "B" on my planet. A lot of the soundtrack music brought back fond memories.

Good critique PHPaul. Exactly how I feel. I enjoyed watching it but I won't be buying it when it comes out on DVD.

A solid B on the PHPaul scale above.

I also thought it was a B on the PHPAUL scale. Honestly, they could've easily shortened the movie 30 minutes and it would've been better. It was interesting, but seemed to drag on a little bit.

I also watched half an hour and stopped

Partially because my wife said “oh my god please turn it off”

Both of us really struggled with the CGI. I’d rather you find another actor.

I’ll probably try and watch it again by myself at some point

I watched it for about 1.5 hrs tonight. It was entertaining but too much like everyother work the producer has done.

What really bugged me was the adanced age of the cast. I'm old but dont like being pandered to by the producers trying to make me believe old people can carry that heavy life out for real. Those old farts struggle to walk briskly when they yell cut.

Really felt odd and awkward.

quote:

Originally posted by Jim Shugart:
I just finished watching it. Pulicords stole my post.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!