(Content Warning: Watching awkward sex scenes with my mom and mild spoilers of Martin Scorsese movies.)
Thirteen years. Thirteen long fucking years is how long I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out.
I love movies, LOVE THEM. Like many kids, and especially kids in shitty households, the TV was an escape for me. I would jump around, punching the air while Bruce Lee was kicking ass. I’d put on all my Power Ranger rings during the final fight scene in Robocop 3. My friends and I would motion like we were spinning the shotgun like Arnold did in Terminator 2. Sitting down to watch a movie is still one of my absolute favorite activities. When I develop a really close relationship with someone, I have to start showing them all the movies and TV shows that are important to me. It’s like learning some of my language since I make references to them so often. All my girlfriends have had to suffer from me quoting Terminator 2 literally every day ever. “2:14 am Eastuhn time, August 29th.”
I “critically” discovered film in 2005 when I was 15. This was around the time my grandfather got me a subscription to the New York Times and I started reading the film reviews by critics like Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, and Stephen Holden. Amazon had “Listmanias” where people would curate a list of products and write about them. There were some great lists of film on there. That’s where I discovered Requiem for a Dream and Akira (“The Citizen Kane of anime” as one reviewer put it). I soon had the insight that directors were a thing, and that if you liked a movie a lot it was probably worth exploring that director’s other work. (Profound, I know.)
I would stay with my grandparents in Berkeley where there were some great movie and record stores with huge collections of DVDs for me to choose from. My friend Charles also loved film and would make recommendations and wax about them. Locally, the best place to shop for DVDs of more artsy films was Borders. Walmart was cheaper, but they mostly had normie movies and trash.
I don’t remember how I first came across Goodfellas. My earliest memory of it is stumbling upon my mom watching it late at night, only to be shooed out during an illicit scene, which I now recognize as the coke scene with Henry and his sidepiece towards the end of the movie. I remember having to special order it and being so excited when it finally arrived. I put it on my little TV in my room and was absolutely blown away.
Marty did many movies with Robert de Niro. (I watched Taxi Driver in my room with my mom, and boy was that an awkward mistake. Not fun to watch scenes with child sex workers and Marty himself talking about what a .44 magnum would do to a woman’s pussy.) He did three movies with Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci: Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino. Raging Bull is such a deep, beautiful movie that really spoke to me, showing how a man’s internal conflict can manifest as external violence. Now Casino…you could write a whole essay on every minute in Casino and someday I hope to snag a good editor and make a video review of it. Casino is my favorite movie of all time and that’s saying something. I’m not one of those people who hem and haw when you ask them their favorite movie and then struggle to name one. I have tiered, annotated lists of my favorite movies. My second favorite movie of all time is Goodfellas, and I get why people like Goodfellas more. Goodfellas is probably the best overall movie ever made EVER as far as the combination of “art” and entertainment.
When I was sixteen, I moved out of my house and moved in with my best friend John Brasher and his family. John and I had been friends since freshman year and I was very close with his mom, dad, and sister. They were kind enough to take me in. John and his mom and I would talk about movies a lot. I introduced John to Goodfellas and we became Marty super fans together.
One of the reasons I loved movies like these so much was the violence. Inheriting the alleles I did, growing up in a chaotic environment, and dealing with traumatic things as a young teen, I had so much anger and hatred as a kid. Anyone who knew me and my stabbing pen “Felipe” in high school can attest to this. Seeing violent scenes in movies was cathartic. I must have watched the Billy Batts scene over 300 times.
I became known for loving these types of movies. John’s mom got me the Godfather I and II on DVD the Christmas they took me in to live with them. I had my own personal backpack Blockbuster where I’d bring friends mafia and gang movies for them to take home and watch. I still remember Jose Mendez’s reaction to A Clockwork Orange and how we used to call each other “Little Puppet” from American Me.
The Departed came out in 2006 (saw it twice in the theaters) and this was around when we first learned that The Irishman might be in the making.
By now you can see why I wanted this movie so bad. I love mafia movies. I love Martin Scorsese movies. I love Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci. Now combine all these and I’m OBSESSED. All three of the movies they’ve done together are masterpieces and two of them are my favorite favorite movies of all time. And they hadn’t made one since Casino in 1995, 24 years ago.
I would religiously check IMDB to see if there were any updates. “He’s making a Frank Sinatra biopic?! WTF? You and the boys aren’t getting any younger, Marty!” (This was later scrapped due to Sinatra’s estate not agreeing. Actually, now that I’m reading about here, it sounds like it would have been pretty cool…)
Finally it seemed like he was going to do it next and then he did Silence instead…
Thoughts would pop into my head about how if something happened to me like I died or lost my vision and hearing, I would never experience it. (Coincidentally, Goodfellas is one of the blind movie reviewer Tommy Edison’s fav movies.) Or Marty or Bob or Joe would die before actually making it.
Finally, FINALLY, it was in production. They were actually making it, hallelujah!
I really wanted to see it in the theater. I like watching movies at home but it felt wrong for this one. Because Netflix was the only studio who would pony up the huge budget, it complicated the theater screening plan. The big chains refused to show it because they wanted a longer exclusive window where it would only be shown in theaters and not streamed, but they couldn’t settle it with Netflix. I kept checking over and over seeing if they had released the list of theaters that were showing it.
John and I had a “friend break-up” about two years ago and haven’t talked since February 2017. I thought about the logistics of going back to the Central Valley and offering a special “one time only” experience reuniting with John and seeing it together. I didn’t end up going through with it, but he has a movie review channel now with a friend of his and I’ve kept checking it to hear what his thoughts were but he hasn’t made a review yet.
I even considered whether I could afford to blow a bunch of money getting plane tickets and lodging in NYC, where the Belasco Theatre on Broadway would be screening a movie “for the first time in its 112-year history” *just* for The Irishman.
Luckily, the local artsy theater we love in Ann Arbor was playing it, but it looked like they only had showtimes before Thanksgiving. I wanted to see it with Adri but she was on a rough rotation.
Adri had heard me talking about this movie the whole duration of our eight year relationship. Kelsey was in town. My new special lady friend (The Big Lebowski reference) Laura was still here before she left to go to New Zealand. The stars were aligning and it all started coming together. Finally, Wednesday, November 27th, 2019, “8:15 pm Eastuhn time”, after thirteen years of waiting, I saw it.
There are certain moments that “should” be profound but we don’t really feel it in the moment. Let’s say I’m graduating and walking the stage but I really need to pee or the wind is in my face or I’m self-conscious about if I have pit stains or not. Or I’m staring at the Mona Lisa, one of the most famous images of all time, and I’m able to see something that’s hundreds and hundreds of years old created by one of the most interesting people of all time, but I’m distracted about the huge crowd I’m in and everyone clamoring around. Or I’m sitting in the theater, watching a movie I’ve been waiting for for thirteen years, but I’m wondering if the people behind us in the theater are going to keep talking after the trailers end. The point is, these moments can still be important and we can still feel the profoundness in reflection, but we don’t always have the luxury of feeling it in the moment. Thankfully, this wasn’t one of those moments (even though there were people behind us making dumb jokes about every trailer).
Sitting in the living room sized theater, with my hands being held on either side of me, surrounded by loved ones, I felt it. The weight of everything that had happened in those thirteen years. The trauma, the anger and hate, the catharsis of violence, my long friendship with John and its end, all my relationships, loving and being loved. With the opening dolly shot moving forward into the nursing home, with the realization that it was finally here and I was seeing it, I started to cry.
Mafia movies always show a rise and an inevitable downfall. A typical mafia movie starts out with a kid who sees mobsters making money and getting respect. Then the kid starts making money, he acquires wealth and respect, he gets a status symbol like a Cadillac or a fur coat for his woman. And then there’s the downfall: the cops bust him or he gets killed or something. Yes, mafia movies always show a downfall, but the downfall is not usually given the same length as the rise up, and I don’t think anyone walks away from a mafia movie without feeling intoxicated by the glamor and power of the world the first three hours of the movie worked so hard to create. The Irishman is different in that respect. It’s about the less glamorous and less sexy saga that comes after all the romanticized epic things depicted in Goodfellas and Casino. It’s like if you took the end of Casino where the bosses are in wheelchairs breathing through oxygen masks, and Robert de Niro has his giant glasses and is reading some newspaper, and you showed the whole journey in between that they skipped over.
My one cool professor in college didn’t have word count requirements for his essays. He thought the argument should be as long as it needs. If that’s a paragraph, so be it. If it’s 300 pages, then bully for you. I think the same thing about the length of a movie. There’s no such thing as a movie that’s too long, if it doesn’t drag. Some movies are only 90 minutes but drag. Some movies are three hours and, while it feels like I’ve been on a long, epic journey, I enjoyed every minute of it and it didn’t end too late. I think there’s no maximum length that a movie should be under. Some movies, you think: “How much is left?” The best ones are: “I hope it’s not anywhere close to being over.”
One measure for how truly entertaining a movie is, is how entertaining the “downtime” scenes are where crazy, iconic things aren’t happening. Some movies are just vehicles for certain scenes like epic fights or car chases or “T&A” (tits and ass, kids), and the rest is just filler to get to those. The best movies aren’t like that. There is literally no scene that drags in Goodfellas. Every scene is like pure entertainment concentrate.
Goodfellas starts in the middle of the story. In the commentary, Marty talks about how he started Goodfellas in medias res to get people hooked right away. (And this is in the most entertaining movie of all time. It’d be like if you were about to go to an Oscars party at Studio 54 and they were like, “We want the guests to have some Quaaludes and a blowjob right from the start, that way they aren’t bored…”)
The Irishman isn’t quite like this, though I’m not sure what I would cut or what I would have done differently. I don’t think I’d go so far as to say anything *drags*, but some of it is less entertaining than other parts.
Rewatchability is a big factor for me in ranking and critiquing movies. Sure, a movie can be fine to watch once, but if you never want to see it again, how good can it be? The Irishman isn’t a movie that I’ll want to rewatch over and over the way Marty’s best movies are.
Another point is that some things that seemed like they would be important or turn into something didn’t, such as the relationship between de Niro’s daughter and Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci is very affectionate with and aware of de Niro’s daughter Peggy, from the time she is a young teenager, but nothing comes of it. I get that it might have stoked tension between him and Pacino’s Hoffa — that she liked Hoffa and not him — but still, they seemed to linger on it without it developing into something more. This reminds me of Chekhov’s gun, where you don’t put a gun in the story if it’s not going to go off.
The cast is great, even though some of the roles are quite subtle and seem like an excuse to fill the cast with common Scorsese collaborators like Harvey Keitel (I like callbacks, though, and don’t mind). Joe Pesci had famously retired and had to be constantly pestered by Bob and Marty before he would do the role. I’m glad they got him, but he isn’t the distinctive, hyper-violent hothead he classically plays in Scorsese’s earlier films. On the other hand, Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa is the most memorable character in the movie and I love a lot of his quirks, like being incensed when people are late. The other players like Ray Romano did a fine job. I appreciated the scene Action Bronson was in and thought he did great.
The CGI didn’t bother me. Adri and Kelsey didn’t like it. Film history wise, it’s good to be one of the first critically acclaimed films to utilize it so heavily. It’s definitely in that cusp where it gets away with it but isn’t seamless the way movies in the future will be (when they can just generate the actor and don’t even need them alive anymore — they are making a whole movie with a CGI James Dean).
Overall, The Irishman is extremely poignant, especially for someone so against the deterioration that comes with aging. The depiction of the inevitable decay and disintegration reminded me of the poem Ozymandias:
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Have you waited for a movie or TV show, video game, or album in a similar way? What did it mean to you and how did it feel when you finally experienced it?
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