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.

The remake that shouldn't have

They really shouldn't have made a remake of Ben-Hur.

Not because the material is so sacrosanct that it should never be remade. As a matter of fact, the Ben-Hur you think of as BEN-HUR -- the 1959 version directed by William Wyler -- is actually the third version, after a short in 1907 and a feature in 1925. I'd say the weirder thing, within the spectrum of film history, is how long it took to make another version, except there was actually a 2003 version, and also a miniseries in 2010. I guess the Hur-less period between 1959 and 2003 was the really weird period.

No, it shouldn't have been remade just because it just doesn't feel all that relevant to today.

We don't need to get into a discussion of religion. I'll concede that any story in which Christ appears as a character has a kind of eternal timeliness. There's always a way to tie in the themes to things happening today.

Rather, it just feels like a bit of a cinematic outlier. Like, "Where the hell did this new version of Ben-Hur come from?"

Learning that Timur Bekmambetov was the director, I had high hopes. Or rather, I knew there was at least a possibility there would be something cartoonishly stupendous about it. Bekmambetov's cartoonish stupendousness cuts both ways, but when it's on, it's on. It's not on in Wanted, but boy is it ever on in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

So that was the most disappointing thing about this new Ben-Hur. It actually doesn't have a lot of the outrageous awesomeness of AL: VH. In fact, it's played completely straight.

The next most disappointing thing?

Not a lot, actually.

If you want me to complete the thought in the subject of this post, it would be "The remake that shouldn't have ... worked. But somehow did."

That's right, I actually sort of liked this movie, and not even for the only reasons I figured I could like it.

Is it necessary? Hardly. Is it memorable? No, not really.

Is it sort of fun in the moment, and sort of poignant, and sort of good?

Yes, all those things.

The natural resistances anyone would feel toward a 2016 version of Ben-Hur kind of fell away as I was watching it, and I found myself liking the performances, and the grandiose production design, and the story itself.

I even liked Morgan Freeman and his awesome/ridiculous dreadlocks.

One nice thing about Ben-Hur was that it was not obviously the product of someone's digital playground. I'm sure there were plenty of digital effects in it -- one doesn't make a period appropriate epic set in the Roman Empire without some digital help -- but they were pretty seamless. And part of that comes from the fact that there was not some monstrous hydra or other creature that escaped from Clash of the Titans and into this movie. It was just a fairly straightforward telling of the story, with some changes to the plot to give it a happier ending. (But, spoiler alert: Jesus still dies.)

I don't know, maybe there's no good reason to like this movie. But I did sort of like it. And I don't really see a reason to talk myself out of that.

Does that mean you should go out and see it?

Nah.

What do I have to be embarrassed about?

I'm sure there are many questions I'd like to ask Roger Ebert, but one has always interested me more than the others -- not because it would produce the most profound answer, but because I bet he doesn't get asked it very often, and it would be really interesting to hear what his answer was. That question is:

"What's the most prominent film you haven't seen?"

Or, phrased in a way that would seem slightly more judgmental, so I probably wouldn't ask it this way:

"What are you most embarrassed about never having seen?"

I've made it a point to always have an answer to this question myself. For the longest time, the answer was Casablanca. Then I finally saw Casablanca about five years ago, removing that shame from my movie-watching record. In fact, I considered it such a big deal to finally be seeing Casablanca that I scheduled it as the 2,000th movie I'd ever seen.

It's been a busy five years, and I am now up over 3,000. In that time I also saw The Godfather Part II, which next took over the mantle of "most prominent film I haven't seen." That viewing came to fruition in June of 2008, again as a "special occasion" -- my wife and I had a Godfather weekend in which we watched The Godfather on Friday night, and she made an Italian dinner; The Godfather Part II on Saturday night, and I made an Italian dinner; and The Godfather Part III on Sunday night, when we just ordered a pizza. Fun weekend, and somehow we also managed to sandwich in a yard sale Saturday morning. Just thinking about that now exhausts me.

So then it was Ben-Hur. But I saw Ben-Hur last month.

I'm having a bit of trouble choosing the next one in line, so I need your help.

I've dug up ten potential candidates to be the next classic I'm most embarrassed about never having seen. I scanned my Flickchart list of the top 500 movies I haven't seen to come up with these results, so I hope they're the best ten. You'd think it should just be the first ten movies on that list, but the term "best" is determined by what the users have ranked the highest. And it just so happens Flickchart has a lot of young users who must think that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best movie ever made, because that tops the list. Needless to say, I skipped over that. In fact, I'm going to limit this list to films that are at least 20 years old, in part because age helps determine a film's status as a classic, and in part because I probably have seen the most important movies to come out in the last 20 years.

So I'll list these ten in alphabetical order, so as not to bias you, and include a short comment with each. The one that gets the most votes in my comments section will officially become the new holder of this title.

I don't usually specifically ask for audience participation from you guys, but I'd really love it now. So if you're reading this, please chime in.

Okay, they are:

1) Gandhi (1982, Richard Attenborough). I know I've seen part of Gandhi, but it was such a short part that it certainly doesn't qualify. I am certainly looking forward to seeing it, especially as I continue to tick movies off the list of best picture winners I haven't seen. But carving out the 195 minutes to see it seems hard.

2) The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci). Yikes. This one's actually 225 minutes. But this film has always seemed iconic to me because it came out right around the time I was really getting interested in the Oscars, and I remember being impressed that it won all nine statues for which it was nominated. (Actually, the 225-minute version is the TV miniseries that was later released. The theatrical version, which is the one I'd undoubtedly want to see, was actually only 160.)

3) Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson). I guess I didn't have any Mary Poppins lovers in my life when I was growing up, because of the two Julie Andrews musical classics, The Sound of Music was the one I saw -- at least twice. I'd love to see this because as I was watching, I bet I'd be surprised at how many songs there were that I didn't realize were from this movie/show.

4) My Fair Lady (1964, George Cukor). Wow, this came out the same year as Mary Poppins? What the hell was I doing in 1964? (Answer: Waiting another nine years to be born.) Like in Poppins, this film contains a number of songs I would either not know or forget were from this movie. Maybe I need to have a Mary Poppins/My Fair Lady double feature some day. (Funnily enough, Poppins' Julie Andrews originated the role of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, but the producers thought she wasn't bankable enough for the film version because she wasn't known beyond Broadway at the time.)

5) Platoon (1986, Oliver Stone). So this makes four best picture winners of the five listed so far. I know I've seen parts of Platoon, and I once had an internal debate with myself about whether I'd seen the whole thing. The side that thought I hadn't seen the whole thing won out.

6) Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen). This may be the oddest one on this list because Rocky III was one of the movies I watched most when I was a kid -- I've probably seen it ten times. I've seen every Rocky movie that came out since then, even Rocky Balboa (which was actually good), but I still haven't seen the original Rocky, or Rocky II for that matter. You'd think I would have sought them out at some point, but when I was at that age, I must have thought Rocky looked really dated, and besides, it didn't have either Mr. T or Hulk Hogan in it. (Five out of six best picture winners.)

7) Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick). How is it that I don't consciously know that Stanley Kubrick directed Spartacus? Talk about embarrassing ... Anyway, I always thought that Spartacus was in the same category as Ben-Hur, so this would be an appropriate successor in that sense. Gotta see that scene where everybody claims to be Spartacus -- it's iconic.

8) Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder). I should have seen this for the classic quotes alone: "Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." I absolutely love All About Eve, and I think of this movie in the same category, so yeah, I bet I'll like it.

9) The Ten Commandments (1956, Cecil DeMille). Speaking of Mr. DeMille ... This has a Ben-Hur connection also in the sense that it stars Charlton Heston, in one of his three most iconic roles (along with Hur and Planet of the Apes). At 219 minutes, though, The Ten Commandments could take me ten days to finish.

10) West Side Story (1961, Robert Wise). And that makes six best picture winners out of the ten. I should have a special fondness for West Side Story, since it was the show my high school put on when I was still in junior high, which got me excited about doing high school drama. (Strangely enough, I decided to do basketball my freshman year, which conflicted with the musical, thereby missing my chance to be in Fiddler on the Roof, which holds a similar dear place in my heart and which I also have not seen in its movie form. The musicals I did do my sophomore, junior and senior years were nowhere near as iconic -- Once Upon a Mattress, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Good Woman of Setzuan.)

So which one is it? I'm awaiting your responses with bated breath.

So go ahead -- embarrass me.

The 1950s: Loose tiles, juvenile delinquents and a second helping of Sidney Poitier

And so we rollerskate on in to the 1950s.

This is the fifth monthly piece in a six-month project called Decades, in which I've charged myself with watching three movies per month from a particular decade that's underrepresented in my overall collection. Concentrating on the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, I've been choosing the decades randomly since I first started in July, and have already hit the 1970s, the 1960s, the 1920s and the 1930s. In November, the 1950s had their month in the sun, which leaves only the 1940s for December, before I debut a new monthly project in 2011.

I knew I had an ambitious first choice for the 1950s, and without any further ado, let's begin discussing it ...

Ben-Hur (1959, William Wyler). Watched: Monday, November 15th through Thursday, November 18th

I had gotten to this point in my life without ever seeing Ben-Hur, and I decided that this project was the perfect opportunity to rectify that. After all, I had informally considered Ben-Hur the movie I was most embarrassed about never having seen, and identifying that movie is the first step toward removing that designation from it as soon as possible. The second step, at least in the case of Ben-Hur, is finding a 3-hour-and-32-minute block of time to watch the damn thing. Not an easy task when you've got a three-month-old on the scene.

So I decided to start on Monday the 15th and designate that week as "Hur Week." I would watch the movie in chunks lasting from 45 minutes to an hour, each night after my wife went to bed, with Thursday intended as the final night. Is that any way to watch one of the classic spectacles in cinematic history? Perhaps not, but I'd rather watch it that way than not at all. With a movie like Ben-Hur, you're already sacrificing something by not watching it on the big screen. Watching it in segments isn't going to drastically reduce your experience further, especially because the movie comes with its own intermission built in.

It surprised me how much I didn't know about Ben-Hur. For starters, I didn't know that it involved Jesus Christ in any way, shape or form, and am still a bit mystified why the novel it's based on is called Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Yes, JC does show up a couple times -- you never see his face -- but the story is not primarily about him, and his affect on the story is not particularly important until he cures Judah Ben-Hur's wife and sister of leprosy in the very end. (Oops, spoiler alert -- in case there are any others out there who haven't seen the movie.) One thing I thought I knew, but it turns out it's just a myth, is that you can see the characters wearing wrist watches in the chariot scene. I scanned the wrists of every actor on screen and didn't find a single such anachronism. My wife was actually awake when I had the chariot scene on, and though she thought she'd seen the offending timepieces during previous viewings, she looked it up online and found out that it's an old wives' tale. Apparently, the quality control on the set of Ben-Hur has gotten a bad rap over the years.

What I did know, and was reminded of during this viewing, was that Judah Ben-Hur's tumultuous journey begins with loose tiles on the roof of his home. His daughter (I think it was her) leans over the edge of the rooftop to get a better look at a passing parade of horses below, and she dislodges a couple tiles that land on an important Roman dignitary, injuring him. When Ben-Hur takes the blame, the previously affluent Jew is indentured into slavery aboard a Roman vessel that gets attacked at sea. (I don't know why I'm doing a plot synopsis for you -- you obviously know the story of Ben-Hur.) Having first learned about this tile mishap some two decades ago, I had always been fascinated by it and was interested to finally see it on screen.

I really enjoyed Ben-Hur, and was incredibly impressed by a number of scenes in particular, in chronological order: 1) The scene in which Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd (as Messala) throw spears into a target in Ben-Hur's hallway, to demonstrate their competitive spirit and respective prowess. There doesn't seem to be any trickery in the scene, so I can't figure out how they taught both actors to throw a spear with such accuracy; 2) The rowing scene, which seems to go on forever and really places the viewer in the sandals of these horribly abused slaves, Ben-Hur being one of them; 3) The ensuing sea battle, which must have been the most spectacular and sophisticated ever committed to film at the time; and 4) The chariot scene, which is simply one of the most awesome feats of logistics I have ever seen in a film, shot with a kineticism that must have thrilled contemporary audiences, and featuring some of the most dazzling stunt work that had probably ever been attempted.

I did, however, think Ben-Hur could have benefited from the strict hand of an editor. I'm not sure that William Wyler couldn't have produced an equally great film in just three hours. That said, there aren't any patches that seem particularly slow, and I was amazed that as much time had actually passed, except that I'd just sat through four lengthy viewing sessions to finish it.

Blackboard Jungle (1955, Richard Brooks). Watched: Saturday, November 20th

Blackboard Jungle came into my life completely at random. I was scouring the library shelves for a 1950s movie to watch, during the first weekend in ages in which we had nothing planned. Going alphabetically and grabbing potential contenders as they struck my fancy, I picked up Blackboard Jungle -- I'd seen the title but didn't know much about it, other than that it seemed to be about the educational system -- and kept moving. However, I'd arrived at the library within 20 minutes of closing time, so I didn't get further than the Gs. Therefore, any 1950s film that would have more perfectly fit my needs got excluded in a time crunch.

Blackboard Jungle basically laid the groundwork for every movie you've ever seen in which a teacher tries to get through to a bunch of unwilling and/or dangerous students, such as Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver. Because of the originality of its subject matter, it can be forgiven a certain broadness that rears its head in the handling of that particular subject. One problem was that I didn't know if I could take 1955 juvenile delinquents very seriously. Would I see them as threatening, or just dated? I'm glad to say that they actually did carry a certain weight, at least one of them -- Vic Morrow, possibly better known to you as the guy who got decapitated by a helicopter while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie. Nearly 30 years earlier he made a pretty menacing young thug, the film's primary antagonist.

The protagonist is teacher Richard Dadier, played by Glenn Ford, an actor I've heard of but am not very familiar with. I'd certainly heard of the film's other biggest name, or who would go on to become the biggest name: Sidney Poitier. I was rather amazed that he was already on the scene in 1955, but here he was, serving as the apparent antagonist who is actually on the teacher's side, once they find their common ground. But the common ground is not initially easy to find, and I was surprised to see where Richard Brooks' film went in terms of depicting the dormant racism of its protagonist -- a place the modern movies inspired by Blackboard Jungle would never have the courage to go. For reasons that are not at first clear, Dadier is angling for Poitier's Gregory Miller, and though Gregory is ultimately good, he can also give as good as he gets when on the receiving end of unprovoked attention. In a moment of frustration, Dadier says to him "Why you black --" and stops himself. He immediately apologizes, but in that moment we realize that Blackboard Jungle is not soft-pedaling it -- not for 1955, not even for now. How rare is it to see a movie in which the good guy has racist tendencies he hasn't acknowledged to himself? It's clear Dadier is a good person and is immediately ashamed of his unexpected outburst, and by allowing the main character to be tainted like this, Blackboard Jungle is perhaps more honest than most movies have the courage to be. Or ... it could just be that it was 1955, and movies weren't quite so worried about the stigmas potentially attached to a racist character.

Blackboard Jungle has a number of good scenes -- the one where the ruffian students destroy a teacher's entire record collection stands out -- and it ultimately rises above what I expected from its standard-issue opening minutes. And besides, can I really call them standard-issue if the movie was such a thematic trailblazer?

Edge of the City (1957, Martin Ritt). Watched: Saturday, November 27th

I have one of my readers entirely to thank for the third November movie. Theis, who has been diligently keeping up with my Decades series (thank you Theis!), suggested Edge of the City in the comments of my previous entry on the 1930s, when I previewed the next decade up to bat. And it was a good suggestion. In fact, it gave me an unexpected second helping of the aforementioned Sidney Poitier. Guess it shows how wrong I was when I thought he didn't really become a star until the mid- to late-1960s. Or, you could say that Blackboard Jungle was the unexpected second helping, watched first, because I already had Edge of the City in my Netflix queue at the time I selected Blackboard Jungle from the library.

Martin Ritt's film is a clear thematic cousin of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, without the same level of fanfare. Like On the Waterfront, it deals with stevedores (I love that word) who are ensnared in dock politics and are under pressure not to become stool pigeons. Edge of the City is a minor film compared to Kazan's classic, filmed three years earlier, and it doesn't have Marlon Brando. But it does have a young John Cassavetes, better known to most of us as the iconoclastic director and father of modern director Nick Cassavetes, and the aforementioned Mr. Poitier. I am not particularly acquainted with Cassavetes' acting work -- I saw him as a doctor in Whose Life Is it Anyway? but cannot immediately think of another role I've seen him in -- and I found him to be very capable of playing the role of a working class man who's disguising his name (calling himself Axel North rather than Axel Nordmann) because he's an army deserter. Couple his desertion with a tragedy in his family history and he's one unhappy character. Which makes it all the more shocking that Poitier's character -- whose different race is slightly less of a thematic issue than it was in Blackboard Jungle -- is able to reach out to him and restore some of his joie de vivre. Temporarily, at least.

It's easy to imagine how a movie like Edge of the City would have planted the seed for how Cassavetes wanted to spend his directing career. Cassavetes' movies were famously about real working class people and low-life criminals, and were notable for their lack of artifice and grungy stylings. Edge of the City has more of a sheen than Cassavetes would have approved of as a director, and its score sometimes veers off toward the melodramatic, which is perfectly in keeping with the prevailing trends of the time. But this is a pretty grungy movie for 1957, with some real drama and some very satisfying character development. It has an intensely satisfying climax, which works both on a literal level and a metaphorical one, mirroring the film's larger issues. I won't tell you too much about what happens because Edge of the City is worth seeing, and most of you probably haven't seen it. In addition to the strong performances by Poitier and Cassavetes, Jack Warden does excellent work as the antagonist, and it was a real treat to see a young Ruby Dee (talk about people who have been around for awhile) as the wife of Poitier's character.

Oh, and perhaps because of the titular similarity (and the pinch of soul thrown in by the presence of Poitier), this movie left me with a really big appetite to listen to Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City." Unfortunately, I was disappointed to discover that the one Stevie Wonder album I own doesn't have this song on it, even though I thought it did -- in fact, I thought that was one of the reasons I bought it. This was 20 years ago and I must have just been confused.

So, there's just one more stop on this train, just as there's only one more month in 2010. In December, I will be watching movies from the 1940s -- no random selections necessary.

Check back here in late December or early January for the final installment of Decades.