So, you want to be a 'wise-guy', huh? Fuggedaboutit.
BTW, this new movie by Scorsese is a Mob epic (wow...3hrs, 30min), but stars Academy Award Winners Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci w/ appearances by Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano and other veterans of the screen will be playing at a movie theater near you this November 1, 2019 (can't wait for it to start showing in my locale).
By Owen Gleiberman - Varity - 27 Sept 19
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.
Scorsese, working from a script by Steven Zaillian (who adapted the 2004 memoir “I Heard You Paint Houses”), tells the true story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and unassuming truck driver who, in the 1950s, finds himself drawn into the orbit of Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), the elegant and sinister boss of the Pennsylvania-based Bufalino crime family.
Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) [L] & Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) [R] in "The Irishman"
Sheeran, who became a trusted Mob soldier and hitman, had many assignments, and one of them was to go to work for Jimmy Hoffa (played, in the film’s most extraordinary performance, by Al Pacino), whose Teamsters Union was mired in underworld connections. For years, Sheeran served as Hoffa’s right-hand thug, and then, according to Sheeran, he was the one given the order to whack Hoffa (though the labor leader’s sudden disappearance in 1975 has never been officially solved).
Scorsese turns this saga into a vast American canvas of greed, violence, ambition, politics, and corruption. The backroom string-pulling, the casual executions, the murderous muscle flexed with a terse euphemism (“I’m a little bit concerned…”) — we’ve seen much of this before. But Scorsese’s 1990 landmark “GoodFellas” was a Mob diary staged to feel like a party; without falsifying what it showed us (if anything, the film made it look more genuine than it had ever looked in the movies before), “GoodFellas” asked us to revel in the thrilling amorality of easy money, fast pleasure, and quicker brutality, even as we confronted the sometimes horrific consequences". [...]
Read More: The Irishman - a Review
"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet". Orson Welles
BTW, this new movie by Scorsese is a Mob epic (wow...3hrs, 30min), but stars Academy Award Winners Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci w/ appearances by Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano and other veterans of the screen will be playing at a movie theater near you this November 1, 2019 (can't wait for it to start showing in my locale).
By Owen Gleiberman - Varity - 27 Sept 19
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.
Scorsese, working from a script by Steven Zaillian (who adapted the 2004 memoir “I Heard You Paint Houses”), tells the true story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and unassuming truck driver who, in the 1950s, finds himself drawn into the orbit of Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), the elegant and sinister boss of the Pennsylvania-based Bufalino crime family.
Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) [L] & Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) [R] in "The Irishman"
Scorsese turns this saga into a vast American canvas of greed, violence, ambition, politics, and corruption. The backroom string-pulling, the casual executions, the murderous muscle flexed with a terse euphemism (“I’m a little bit concerned…”) — we’ve seen much of this before. But Scorsese’s 1990 landmark “GoodFellas” was a Mob diary staged to feel like a party; without falsifying what it showed us (if anything, the film made it look more genuine than it had ever looked in the movies before), “GoodFellas” asked us to revel in the thrilling amorality of easy money, fast pleasure, and quicker brutality, even as we confronted the sometimes horrific consequences". [...]
Read More: The Irishman - a Review
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