There is so much good stuff in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman that one wants to root for it all the way the way through. But at about the three-quarter mark of this three-and-a-half-hour movie, its confidence dribbles away, and it comes sadly close to resembling a shaggy-dog story.
The movie highlights Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro), a meat-packing delivery driver who eventually rubs shoulders with Philadelphia’s crime family, headed by Russell Bufalino. (As amazing as DeNiro is age 75, he is matched in grace and subtlety by Joe Pesci, who delivers his best-ever movie performance as Bufalino.)
After Sheeran dutifully does Bufalino’s bidding on several assignments, he is introduced to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the mercurial head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Hoffa constantly refers to the Teamsters as “my union” and gets very nasty when any of his peers tries to convince him otherwise. Hoffa needs someone to make him seem less threatening in public, and he hires Sheeran to be that someone.
Anyone who saw the 1992 Jack Nicholson saga Hoffa — not to mention most of Martin Scorsese’s filmography — won’t be surprised at this movie’s familiar themes (e.g., hotheads with big guns and bigger senses of entitlement). But for a change, Scorsese explores those themes (and their ramifications) in a fairly low-key manner.
Sheeran is a good guy at heart, but his in-your-face method of problem resolution ends up alienating his family over the years. And whereas Hoffa’s bombastic style seemed unique in his time, it now seems to have served as a template for modern politics.
All of this is fascinating, up to a point. Unfortunately, the movie’s resolution of the Hoffa subplot is laboriously drawn-out, and the movie seems to go on forever from there. At length and in style, the movie is obviously aiming for Godfather-like greatness, but its story doesn’t have nearly as much depth or power.
Savor The Irishman‘s many good points, but beware its many changes in tone.
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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