What the other goodfella has been up to

Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci have been earning a lot of praise this fall leading into winter (leading into summer in Australia), but there’s one goodfella who has been flying a bit under the radar.

Ray Liotta does not appear in The Irishman, but he does appear in Netflix’s other big awards contender released within the past month, Marriage Story. And I’d argue that what he’s doing here may be more interesting than what they’re doing there.

I’m sure if Martin Scorsese had written a part in The Irishman for Liotta (Harvey Keitel’s?), he would have gladly accepted it. A commitment to Marriage Story would not have prevented him. But if not being in The Irishman did, in some way, allow him to be in Noah Baumbach’s film, I’m grateful for it.

See, De Niro and Pesci are doing things they’ve done before. Many times before. That’s kind of the point. And to their credit, they are both playing significantly less hot-headed versions of their prior incarnations of these characters, in a way that particularly surprised me in Pesci's case.

Ray Liotta? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him be a lawyer before.

There are a lot of credits on Liotta’s IMDB page – 116, to be exact – and I can’t possibly know what all those roles were, especially as some of them were in movies that no one saw. But a cursory scan of the titles, coupled with the ones I’ve already seen, tells me it’s very unlikely that he’s ever played an attorney.

And even if he has, it has probably been a shady attorney, one indistinguishable from the mobster rolls that have been his bread and butter ever since Goodfellas made him famous. If not actual mobsters, then criminals, lowlifes and other rapscallions.

But in Marriage Story, he’s the best divorce lawyer money can buy – which I don’t suppose rules out the concept of him being shady. In fact, at $850/hour, maybe he’s even more shady. But he’s clearly respectable, as only people who can afford it pay for him.

And he’s really good in the role. It may have less than ten minutes of screen time in total over only two or possibly three scenes, but Liotta makes that character truly believable, an able sparring partner for superlative Laura Dern on the other side of the aisle. I believe that Liotta could argue for his client like a shark going after chum, and not just because he’s a sleazebag familiar with all the tricks. It’s because he’s an actually competent lawyer playing a kill-or-be-killed game.

Seeing Ray Liotta as a respectable lawyer tells me Liotta is not done reinventing himself as an actor. As for Pesci and De Niro, they are both paying homage to, and possibly suggesting they have nowhere still to go from, the roles that made them famous. Pesci had to come out of actual retirement to play the role, as a matter of fact. 

Now granted, there’s a bit of an age gap here. Liotta is “only” 65, while the other two both turn 77 in 2020. That’s enough of a gap, at that age, that it means the difference between still going strong and starting to wind down.

But when I saw that Scorsese had “rejected” having Liotta in his movie – not that his calculation was probably anything like that – it kind of made me wonder why Liotta didn’t get to take part in the fun.

And I’m happy with the answer “He’s still got too many new surprises left in him.”

Film criticism and the purity of ignorance

That may sound like an alternate subtitle to Birdman, but I'm actually thinking about the ignorance of the viewer, rather than the creator, today.

Spoilers for The Irishman to follow.

I have long assumed that one of the keys to being a good film critic is preparation. That's not to say that I prioritize being prepared, as I have never been someone who particularly thrived on research. But I aspire to being prepared. If there's a prominent adaptation of a literary classic, I at least think about whether my review would be improved if I read that classic first. And at times I've actually done so. Then there's the type of preparation that just comes from being well-watched, meaning you can draw on the influences of similar films in the filmmaker's or others' filmographies.

But watching The Irishman prompted me to wonder whether it's not best just to know nothing.

I only learned that The Irishman was based on a true story maybe last week, when I learned that one of the people involved -- it was either Martin Scorsese or Robert De Niro, but the internet refuses to confirm for me -- had met Frank Sheeran and was "moved" by his story. (Having seen the film I wonder if I'm also misremembering the part about him being moved.)

Suffice it to say that I had no idea that this was the story of how Jimmy Hoffa allegedly died, or that he was even a character in the film.

Now, most critics would know this. They would do their due diligence by gobbling up all the material they could get on the new Scorsese film. And they're not wrong to accord Scorsese that kind of respect.

As it happens, I didn't. So when it only seemed possible that the story was leading toward an actual portrayal of the death of Hoffa -- played in this film by Al Pacino -- I wondered if Scorsese was engaging in Quentin Tarantino's brand of alternate history.

I still figured the film would just leave a hole in the story, at which point Hoffa/Pacino would disappear, with only theories to explain his disappearance. So qualify it as a genuine surprise when I saw De Niro take Pacino into an empty house, in a clear echo of Tommy DeVito's death in Goodfellas, and pop caps in the back of his head.

I think I might have literally sat up and said "What???"

In a quick google, I found that Sheeran confessed to having killed Hoffa shortly before his 2003 death, and the book on which The Irishman is based, I Hear You Paint Houses, is the dramatic portrayal of the story Sheeran told. (An account which is disputed, by the way.)

I might be the only guy who went into the movie not knowing this, but it allowed that scene to give me a true jolt. It was a delightful twist in a movie that had been kind of plodding along, not disagreeably, but not in a way that fully engaged me either.

I might have given the movie a half-star more just as a result of the surprise of that scene. Whereas if you knew going in that Sheeran confessed to Hoffa's murder, the actual staging of this scene might qualify as bit of an anti-climax.

So yeah, maybe sometimes it's better just to know nuthin'.

In terms of film criticism, I think my point is that you are trying to put yourselves in the shoes of a potential viewer, who probably also would not have researched The Irishman and known it was about Jimmy Hoffa. A less engaged viewer, anyway. And I think ideally, it's the less engaged viewer you are trying to reach when you write reviews. Engaged viewers probably don't need your opinion anyway, since they've already used other factors to determine whether they're going to see the movie or not.

(It's an academic argument anyway as I am not actually reviewing The Irishman for my site.)

All five hours of The Irishman

I managed to get through the movie better than I would have thought I would. My concern about the length of this movie was the basis for an entire post, which you can read here.

I talked in that post about coming up with a strategy to watch the three-hour-and-29-minute movie during the daytime. In the end, I just picked a random Thursday night -- and not even one where I'd had a good night's sleep the night before. I did the math between now and Christmas and calculated that this was my best opportunity to watch it before then, an important matter particularly because I'm recording a best of the year podcast next Friday night. (A podcast that will be premature by a few weeks, but I'll discuss my best at that juncture, anyway, and maybe ask you not to listen until I've posted the final list here.)

Anyway, I got started soon after eight ... and didn't finish until 12:47 a.m.

Did I fall asleep? No. Well, yes. Twice. But each time for less than two minutes, and pausing both times.

Did I take long breaks? Again, no. I stopped for two or three minutes a couple times to get something for my wife, who is recovering from having wisdom teeth removed.

What really did me in was that in the last hour of the film, my shitty internet decided to remind me of how shitty it is.

When it comes to its own technology, Neflix is a great streaming service, almost never buffering when all else is equal. All else is not equal, though, when your internet is shit.

The weird thing is, we're talking the hours between 11:30 p.m. and 12:45 a.m. I'd expect the internet to be bad during peak viewing hours, but not after most of my competition had packed it in for the night.

And yet, for the last hour of this movie, it would stop about every two minutes, and the spinning wheel would climb toward 100%, a value it would reach after maybe 45 seconds. No way to watch what is already the longest movie I will watch this year, and probably the only one to cross the three-hour mark. (If Avengers: Endgame crosses it, it's only by a minute or so.)

The point is, the screening is now behind me, at long last. And I'm proud of how I did.

I'm even more proud because the movie did not enthrall me. I ended up coming out positive on it, but only after struggling to find the "there" there. I didn't like the lighting, I thought Thelma Schoonmaker's editing was notably lacking in certain scenes, and I thought the whole thing felt a bit "elderly," for want of a better word. (A notion Scorsese drives home in an admittedly very clever scene at the beginning, where his camera travels through a retirement home in the way it once traveled through the Copacabana.)

So I'm saying Scorsese made better films when he was 49 than he does at age 77? What a shock!

My strategy for tackling The Irishman

Martin Scorsese's latest isn't a film you watch. It's a film you tackle.

And it's not a quarterback or running back rushing over the line of scrimmage. Those guys can be lighter as they tend to be fleeter of foot. No, it's a defensive linesman rushing at your own quarterback, all 300 pounds of him, that you have to tackle.

If you haven't heard, The Irishman is three hours and 29 minutes long. That gets it over the Everest-like 200 minute mark, at 209 minutes.

I hadn't heard, at least not until this week when I actually looked into it. I mean, I figured it would be over two hours, as nearly every Scorsese movie is, even those that shouldn't be (like Hugo).

But three hours and 29 minutes? That's longer than damn Seven Samurai.

If I'd seen it in the theater, as I'd dabbled with doing, I surely would have discovered the running time before sitting down. It's rare that I don't check out the running time in that scenario, if only so I can be sure how many snacks or drinks I need to bring to stimulate me in an environment where I can't pause.

Well, I can pause at home, now that the movie is on Netflix, but pausing only makes the problem more difficult.

And that problem is: How to get through this movie in one night?

You can always split up the viewing of a movie, if you have to. When I finally watched Ben-Hur a number of years back, which bests The Irishman by only three minutes, I watched it over four nights -- a premeditated choice. I could certainly have done it in two, but I decided to make it like a miniseries, a week-long event.

But I don't think that's a good approach for The Irishman, mostly because a friend who saw it in the theater told me it isn't. When I asked him if I should "try very hard to watch it in one sitting," he responded, "Yep. It's a Scorsese flick."

Nuff said.

Now, the math is not impossible to watch it one night. You start at eight, you finish before midnight, or realistically, around midnight, as you're going to have to pause it a couple times for one reason or another. And there are certainly plenty of nights when the combination of things I watch totals more than three hours and 29 minutes.

But having natural break points, and continuing only because you've decided you have the stamina to do so, factors into being able to consume that much content in one evening. You can plan a double feature and then bail on the second movie if you're too tired. But if you've started a movie you've decided you must watch all in one sitting, you're pot committed, and the knowledge of the number of minutes you have remaining weighs on you like the rocks piled on the back of an accused witch. (Random reference. I will leave it in.) It also weighs on your eyelids.

So, afternoon?

That's the best strategy I can think of, though it's not something I can accomplish without outside help. I can only watch a movie in the afternoon on a weekend, and I can only watch a weekend afternoon movie if my kids are otherwise occupied. That scenario does arise when they go for a sleepover at my sister-in-law's house. That would also potentially allow my wife to watch it with me, as she's said she wants to.

But I've done the math there as well, and there are just not enough weekends, or not the right weekends, before my ranking deadline to accomplish this. The next two after this one have conflicts that would prevent that kind of thing, and then the following weekend leads right into Christmas, when we are seeing her as well as my kids' grandmother in Tasmania. It's possible some weekend after that could work out, but that's leaving it too late. And besides, all this hinges on my sister-in-law actually getting the idea to invite them over. That's not something we ever suggest on our own, because come on, they're a real handful.

There's one golden opportunity that sits out there, but I don't know about the practicalities of it, and I don't know again if I want to wait that long to watch The Irishman.

Although my wife and kids are flying to Tasmania for Christmas, I am not. I am doing something I've wanted to do for quite some time, though some people think it's a horrible experience. I am taking a ferry with our car. It's a trip that takes like ten hours. I guess if you're not good at sea, it could be miserable, but I'm pretty good at sea. I may be overly romanticizing it, but to me it's a bit like taking an overnight train somewhere -- a fun adventure that is increasingly old-fashioned and difficult to experience in our modern age.

The ferry ride there will be overnight, starting at 10:30. I'll surely watch something on that trip, but I'll want it to be no longer than 90 minutes and probably over by 1 a.m. so I can try to get some sleep.

The ferry ride back is when my opportunity could arise. I leave in the morning on that trip and ride for the better part of the day. An easy opportunity to see a 209-minute movie, right?

Yes and no. For one, it'll mean having to watch it on my laptop screen. If I missed this in the theater, the least I'll want to do is it see it on my smart TV.

Then there's the issue of whether the boat has WiFi, and if it doesn't, whether I can download it or not. On a device where I can get Netflix as an app, like my phone, the answer is yes. On my laptop, I believe the answer is still no. And if I don't want to watch it on my laptop, I certainly don't want to watch it on my phone.

So I guess the answer is, I still don't have a strategy for tackling The Irishman, one that I'm sure will serve the movie the best. I think I will have to take a wait and see approach. Who knows, maybe I will have to stay home sick from work at some point in the next couple weeks. Which, again, is not an ideal viewing scenario.

The good news is, I have already seen one three-hour movie in 2019 and it was a breeze.

When I watched Avengers: Endgame, it went by much more quickly than its 181 minutes. Which is a reminder that the content of a movie plays a role in how easy it is to sit through it. If it's action-packed and breezes along like an Avengers movie -- and I recognize the irony of comparing Martin Scorsese to the MCU given his comments on it -- then The Irishman may overcome my concerns and be easily digestible in a single night, even if I don't start it at 8 p.m. If it involves a lot of extended talking scenes like the other recent behemoth I thought of in this context -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 196-minute Winter Sleep -- then it's going to defeat me. (For the record, I stayed awake during my theatrical viewing of Winter Sleep, to the best of my knowledge, but I was in a kind of fugue state that made it difficult to distinguish sleeping from waking.) Even if it is like that, at least The Irishman will be in English.

Watch this space.

Hot off the festivals

Netflix is not only trying to change the paradigm for film distribution. It's trying to take the old paradigm for distribution and wipe it from our memories.

First it was news that the dramatic Grand Jury Prize winner at this year's Sundance, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, is not only coming straight to Netflix, it's already here. In fact, we watched it last night.

Then it's news that Netflix is paying nine figures -- you read that right -- to control distribution of the newest Martin Scorsese film, which reteams the director and three acting stars of Goodfellas. Reports are circulating that it cost Netflix $105 million to secure distribution rights.

It's truly bizarre to think that a new Martin Scorsese film might not even get theatrical distribution. I mean, it probably will because Netflix is surely interested in getting in on that same Oscar prestige enjoyed by Amazon when its film Manchester by the Sea was nominated for multiple Oscars. And Netflix also gave Beasts of No Nation a brief theatrical run, a move that paid off with a Golden Globe nomination, if not an Oscar nod. But still.

What's next? Will Christopher Nolan's next film after Dunkirk debut on your TV screen?

It's not outside the realm of possibility to think it might. I mean, I imagine Nolan himself would resist such a thing, since he's been one of the biggest holdouts on shootings his films digitally. It stands to reason that a "nostalgic fondness" for going to the movies in an actual theater would go hand in hand with that. But I might have thought the same of Scorsese. One can only hold out on the money -- especially if it gives you greater freedom to make the kind of film you want to make -- for so long. (I'm not entirely clear if any of the money Netflix is ponying up will assist with finishing the film -- I guess not?)

So it was indeed pretty weird to see one of the most buzzed about films at Sundance only a month after the end of Sundance. Only as recently as two years ago, one of the hot Sundance films (The Witch) took more than a year to be seen by American audiences outside of festivals. We're accustomed to Sundance hits entering into long gestation periods before we get to see them.

Not anymore. And while there are probably good things about that -- I was glad to add it to my fledgling 2017 rankings, which thus far only included Split and The Great Wall -- I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that some of the magic is lost.

I like that period when I am anticipating something that might blow my mind, that might rock my word. I like the gradual increase of excitement about a movie until it reaches a fever pitch. I like that period in which I imagine that any movie I haven't seen could be one of my new favorite movies of all time.

But I suppose it's a logical development in an instant gratification world. No one waits for anything anymore. Paradoxically, though, this is also an age where we get flooded with casting news for blockbusters that aren't even scheduled for release for three more years. That's followed by a steady diet of set photos, rumors, teaser trailers, and all sorts of other ephemera until we're sick of the damn thing.

I guess the internet can either give us short waits or create the conditions for an epic wait, depending on what the thing is.

I suppose capitalizing on the Sundance buzz might goose the viewership right out of the gate, though Netflix has always been coy about releasing statistics on views. There won't be an Oscar campaign for it without that theatrical release, but Netflix correctly concluded that this is not the type of film that earns Oscars.

But boy is it good.

As you might expect from director Macon Blair, a collaborator of Jeremy Saulnier who appears in both Blue Ruin and Green Room, it certainly recalls Saulnier's work. But Saulnier hasn't made a movie this good yet. And I like both of the above-mentioned films quite a bit.

It's another story of ordinary people getting in over their heads when they try to take matters into their own hands (Blue Ruin), although some amount of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is also there (Green Room). Only this time the lead is a woman, Melanie Lynskey, and Blair has a sense for black comedy that Saulnier hasn't figured out yet. This is a funny movie, though at times, also an intense one.

That's all I really want to say about it for now. I'll wait for a few more of you to see it before I got into more details.

Which should be soon, since it's featured right there in a prominent spot on your Netflix home page.

The times, they are a-changin.'