Hacker Cinema
The Irishman
2019 · Film · 209 min
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Pennsylvania, 1956. Frank Sheeran, a war veteran of Irish origin who works as a truck driver, accidentally meets mobster Russell Bufalino. Once Frank becomes his trusted man, Bufalino sends him to Chicago with the task of helping Jimmy Hoffa, a powerful union leader related to organized crime, with whom Frank will maintain a close friendship for nearly twenty years.
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45 comments on Hacker News
> I struggle to remember hardly anything memorable from Netflix, especially their movies
For me there have been a few movies, off the top of my head:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_the_Dark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraction_(2020_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Thinking_of_Ending_Things
In addition the first seasons of The Witcher and Altered Carbon, and the show Dark.
I canceled my subscription around 2020 though, got so fed up by the UX, so haven't watched much since.
Hard disagree about declarative "X is Y". It's a failure of weakening attention span. There are plenty of excellent long movies:
- Once Upon a Time in America (1984) 3:49
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 3:47
- The Irishman (2019) 3:29
- Malcolm X (1992) 3:22
- The Godfather Part II (1974) 3:22
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 3:21
- Schindler's List (1992) 3:15
- Gandhi (1982) 3:11
- The Green Mile (1999) 3:09
- The Deer Hunter (1978) 3:03
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) 2:59
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 2:58
- Casino (1995) 2:58
- Braveheart (1995) 2:58
- The Godfather (1972) 2:55
- Django Unchained (2012) 2:45
What I most object to is lazy storytelling for lazy, second-screen audiences lacking in style and subtlety having a robotic, spoon-fed, infantile, unnatural, expository narration quality in every character like it's a commercial for an antacid.
>>It makes me wonder if people today (especially younger people) would be able to watch a movie like the Godfather? I have doubts.
Last time I watched the movie 'The Irishman' with family, they all seem pretty tuned out by 15 mins.
It does feel like like addiction to reels/tiktok does have its toll. For that matter, due to Twitter exposure, I do have problems reading books.
When I probed ChatGPT a little, it tells me writing with a real pen and paper is now a super power as it lets you move slowly, pause, think etc.
This is kind of a cute thing that wanna-be-rebels may enjoy trying on, much like some hipster who buys a leather jacket. But you don't. Believe me. You don't.
But for fun, go pay for a legit ticket to watch a movie like "The Godfather" or "The Irishman." Count the dead bodies.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
Really. You've watched Ed Wood sometime within the last 10 years? The Last Seduction? Wolf? Red Rock West? That's just from the top 10 in that list.
I don't know what the point of your second list is. It's never been the case that streamers or cable channels (their nearest antecedent) were big producers of movies. But streamers --- unlike cable channels --- did manage to produce CODA, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Irishman, Buster Scruggs, Roma, Dolemite, and Glass Onion.
I think the article phrased it sloppily. I think what’s happening is that the studios write off the cost of the production as a loss and they can only do that if they don’t have them available to stream where they could in theory generate revenue in the future. The phrase about “the company’s value” is just sloppy/mistaken here.
The reason it makes sense for the studios to remove these shows for the minimal benefit represented by a lowered tax burden is that the shows generate shockingly little viewership let alone revenue. The mechanism for the relationship between those things is pretty fuzzy in a subscription-based world in the first place, Did a single viewer signup for Netflix or decide not to cancel their subscription because of The Irishman, for example? That movie cost Netflix something upwards of $160 million. It made $8 million in its theatrical release. Is there any world where the remaining cost was made up for by new or retained streaming customers? I highly doubt it.
This is why the whole streaming industry is moving to ad-supported and low cost reality content. And why the services are fighting the WGA demands to release streaming viewership numbers as part of paying writers residuals. It’s not the cost of the residuals. It’s the numbers. If streaming viewership numbers were public Netflix stock would go to 0 the next day.
Ever since Hollywood started using the more modern but still manual "de-aging" tech, as seen in "The Irishman" - I've kept thinking: Consumer-grade deep turned out better. I remember when deep fakes became mainstream, some youtube hobbyist showcased his deep fake de-aging of Robert DeNiro, compared to what the movie makers did - and the deep fake looked better.
One problem was that DeNiro - while still a fine actor - was a man in his mid 70s trying to portray a man in his 20s/30s, as seen in the somewhat cringy fight scene.
So why not just do this: Get some cheap no-name actor / double do the acting, and let DeNiro license his face to the movie.
FWIW, I don't like that idea - but it seems to make sense? Especially with actors that are long gone. That's already been done. Speech synthesis is also becoming pretty remarkable, so you can also provide voice.
In fact, I'm surprised this tech hasn't completely taken over dubbing yet. Both the deep fake tech to get the right mouth movement, and speech synthesis to match the voice.
Anyway, I think that in 5-10 years this will be case. Unless SAG-AFTRA is powerful enough the curb that kind of use of tech.
Martin's Scorsese's last film, The Irishman, cost over $175 million (not including marketing)...which actually puts it over the budget of most Marvel movies.
Hated it. I was apparently not alone; it did poorly at the box office. I'm also generally not a fan of religious films.
Also hated (and could not finish) the utterly turgid THE IRISHMAN. WOLF OF WALL STREET had its moments, but I'm honestly not sure why the film existed -- I mean, it's the same sort of story as GOODFELLAS.
SHUTTER ISLAND was crap. THE DEPARTED was maybe ok. The last one I loved was THE AVIATOR.
Given how awful THE IRISHMAN was, and the trendline I see with his work, I have no plans to see the adaptation of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.
I feel similarly. There are long movies where I don’t even notice (Carlito’s Way, Gangs of New York) and movies where I definitely notice (The Irishman) and short movies where I check the clock to see when it ends (Lego Movie 2).
Even most of his mobster movies aren't really about being depressed or Italian.
Casino's main character is Jewish. Gangs of New York is about Irish Catholics and American Protestants. The Departed is about Irishes. The Wolf of Wall Street may be about depression (haven't seen it), but is not about violence nor about Italians. The Irishman certainly has a lot of depression, and certainly violence and Italians, but even then.....it's called the "Irishman".
Goodfellas is probably the one prime example that is certainly about violence and Italians, and I'm not sure that's that depressed.
new movie out -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman
100% agree with this. TV has allowed writers to take more time with their characters, develop them more, give more time to other storylines and plots, and write more complex and interesting tales. People are also starting to expect more story and plotlines in their content, which I think is another reason movies are getting so much longer, since more time is needed to meet those expectations(see The Irishman). In the end, it's hard for movies to match the potential of a good TV series, just because a TV series has more time available to explore the universe of the series.
I like some of Netflix's content but always have the impression that Netflix casts it net very wide - perhaps too wide? Their library stretches from low-quality reality shows to expensive high-end drama. It's a strange mix - trying to be all things to all people?
To be fair to Netflix, they have invested in a lot in non-US content globally - probably more than other production/streaming services. They have also given some highly-regarded directors creative freedom and financed their films e.g Martin Scorcese (The Irishman) and Bong Joon-ho (Okja).
Whether Netflix is 'crisis' mode or I don't know, but it will be interesting how Netflix changes (if at all) in the coming months.
Yes, they have a quality problem. Part of the problem with the subscriber model is that these companies have to produce content to justify the monthly fees. This has led to overly long shows and movies. Stories that could have been told in 1.5 hours are now taking much much longer than needed.
A perfect example is Scorsese's "The Irishman." That movie could have easily been 2-2.5 hours yet it came in at over 3 hours. It was a detriment to the movie rather than a positive. Yet, I bet Netflix loved the extra content even though it was not a good thing for the movie.
Roma? The Irishman? The Two Popes? Marriage Story? Mank? Beasts of No Nation? Power of the Dog? Tick Tick Boom?
Can't really take a comment seriously that puts Apple's film output over this. Besides Coda has Apple produced or even just distributed anything of comparable quality?
IMDB shows The Irishman budget as a 159 million.
I would suspect it did not make that money back. The studios are in the movie business and not the lighting money on fire business.
I think we have just seen a fundamental shift in the tastes of the 18-35 demographic and what kind of movies they want to see. Quality fast food type movies as opposed to a full sit down multiple course meal type movie.
I love Coppola but I wouldn't want to invest in this project either at this point.
The middle-ground movies like "Good Will Hunting" are, unfortunately, pretty much dead in the water right now, they have been since before the pandemic (I'd say since the early 2010s). Some directors and producers in France (because the same thing has been happening there, at another level) tried to do something about it by staging some protests around 2012-2013 if I'm not mistaken, this interview [1] (in French) from 2013 with Pascale Ferran, one of the main persons behind the movement, will add more details. Of course that nothing came out of the whole protest movement.
There is some (I think) temporary help from streaming and especially from Netflix when it comes to this type of movies ("The Irishman" is just one example), but, again and imo, I think this is just temporary and that in the long term Netflix and its kin will also give up on this type of movies. And, of course, you could say (like Scorsese himself sort of did) that watching movies on a TV screen is not really "watching movies", and I'm with Scorsese on that.
[1] https://www.afcinema.com/Pascale-Ferran-Je-m-inquiete-pour-les-films-du-milieu.html?lang=fr
Roma, Unforgivable, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Dont Look Up, Bird Box, The Irishman, lots of good movies, few of them are greatbut some are good.
High Flying Bird was a Netflix movie shot on iPhones. Granted, that was Soderbergh, so he probably gets a lot more pull than most other filmmakers. It was a movie where they bought the distribution rights and didn't produce, so maybe that stuff is different. I'm pretty unclear on what really constitutes a "Netflix Original" — lots of stuff that gets label is really just distributed by them.
Pretty sure some of their other original stuff was shot on film too, which obviously wouldn't meet these requirements. At least, I know the non de-aged scenes for The Irishman were done on film. But again, maybe the big guys get more leeway here.
> How is it so popular?
Setting expectations? I have low expectations for most action films, so I always tend to enjoy them more. I suppose watching the Matrix sequels without knowing the first film even existed, might have meant more people enjoyed it, but knowing the first film existed, everyone had high expectations for the sequels.
Apropos of nothing - saw "The Irishman" on there, which I confused with the "The Foreigner" - that is worth a watch. I'd say it has Jackie Chan's best English language performance. FWIW the original book is "The Chinaman" by Stephen Leather which is a good pulpy read.
I believe that more auteur movies that challenges and surprise you still being made, but one problem is that superhero/franchises movies are eating big part of the attention on many cultures, and many people, specially young people, get the idea that this are movies.
In 2000-2010 I think the attention was more distributed, and in the 60s-90s was all over the place, the New Hollywood of the 60s with things like Easy Rider; Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese and Spielberg in the 70-80s, and the edginess of Tarantino in the 90s.
And of course, much more weird and experimental movies where more mainstream, see David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, John Waters, even europeans/asians directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Scorsese talk about that:
>Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.
>So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.
>That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html
The book and movie the Irishman comes to mind when I think about people who got away. They never really can keep their mouth shut.
It’s in our nature to tell others who we are and everything we do. It’s why we have social media. It’s our nature.
Lucasfilm's subsidiary Industrial Lights and Magic is known for leading visual effects on actors's appearances to help make films that cannot be realized without such technology. For instance, Martin Scorsese entrusted them to "youthen" the leading actors in "The Irishman" so that Robert Deniro et al can play their characters at a younger age without wearing a red-ball "clown-nose" tracker. "Star Wars: Rouge One" practically reanimates Peter Cushing to continue and expand the involvement of Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars saga. These processes are painstaking, and artists sweat over details on a frame-by-frame basis to negate the "uncanny valley" of artificial human likenesses.
Obviously, the labor-intensive nature of today's CGI techniques drive up production costs. Meanwhile, the deepfakes on YouTube provide a convincing enough rendition of likenesses without actual actors, all produced on consumer-level GPUs. This presents a huge potential to save costs and the benefits are clearly enticing to film productions.
As Hollywood gravitates towards blockbuster franchises, productions will want to bring the same ensemble of actors (or at least their likenesses) as long as possible. While moviegoers may be unsettled by seeing "reanimated" dead actors like in Rouge One, they still may hope to see franchise actors to look consistently youthful or attractive on screen. Deepfakes may be more relied upon to provide that effect.
I disagree. There are quite a few interesting movies out there. From 2019 alone: Uncut gems, Marriage Story, the Irishman, Us, 1917, Jojo Rabbit and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. All of those are good movies depending on the preference. In fact, they are innovative and creative. The main problem with judging now vs past, is the survivorship bias of the good movies, the bad ones are forgotten and lost.
Two of those are netflix movies - Irishman and Marriage Story, I don't see them any more synthetic than 1980's RAMBO 2-5? or God Father 2,3 etc. Movies were always based on the popularity, the difference being the better data.
> bad comic adaptations, getting their rating from wide fan base
The amount of haters and lovers might not offset each other perfectly, yet it should not matter after the hype dwindles. Besides, the top rated comic books adaptations are quite good - Joker?
Netflix just made a 3 hour movie about this - The Irishman.
I had to keep pausing and checking if something was real as I couldn't believe how bad things got
>it's a Netflix movie, not a X director movie on Netflix
The Irishman and Da 5 Bloods are very much a Scorsese film and a Spike Lee joint.
"JFK and the Unspeakable" suggests that JFK had signaled his intentions to scale down the Cold War, withdraw from Vietnam, and reign in or disband the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and was killed by rogue elements in the CIA, probably in concert with military-industrial business interests and organized crime organizations who didn't like the Kennedys shining a light on their own misdeeds either.
There's a reference to this in Scorcese's recent movie "The Irishman": "if they can get a president, they can get a president of a union."
> The movie : "The Irishman" used a lot of the technology successfully to take years off the cast.
Personally, I did not find the use of the "technology" to be "successful." Like so many other ridiculous gimmicks used in movies to attract the attention of the press and the Academy, it may have at times achieved its very singular visual goals, but that doesn't matter one bit. Because you can't make Al Pacino and Robert De Niro - both in their 70s now - act like 30 year-olds.
Without the massive press push about this technology, the film would have likely suffered a lot more ridicule about this "de-aging" tactic. Hollywood will not be able to convince me that they have actually achieved something good here, until they are able to prove this is not just technology meant to expand the lifetime value generated from their beloved aging actors, for whom they have no true planned replacements.
> I think it would be a better idea to educate people about these things
This argument is nonsense an innefective. Try and explain to your elders about what a deep fake is, and how to identify one.
The movie : "The Irishman" used a lot of the technology successfully to take years off the cast.
Applying labels to known false media is not the same as an opinion based 'fact' or alternative facts.
So don't come with this absolute strawman point of : "Ooo where is the line." - The line is at fake. Always has been. Whats been blurred is the idea that Facts are not Facts.
They are. An opinion is not a fact. A deepFake is Fake. Hence the name. And its about time people grew up and used their intelligence to realise whats a FACT and whats not a FACT. Whats real and whats fake.
It's a shame its up to companies like Twitter to do this for everyone, but clearly too many people believe everything they see & hear without question.
My wild speculation is that the longer time people spend in the menu the more likely they are to close the app, and the more likely they are to cancel a subscription next month. The streaming services are all about reducing churn.
So for daily content. Show ends, you go back to the menu. Do you pick the next thing to watch? I don't know - but they've tried a number of "daily" or "weekly" shows before, and they haven't appeared to be successful. I suspect it's because they didn't improve metrics. Versus say releasing a show all at once - people binge for 3-4 hours and come back the next night to do the same thing.
I think going with amateur youtubers who produce lots of cheap, short content would be smart for like, Snap or Instagram but very bad for Netflix. Netflix's original content hit it off in terms of quality, long form narratives with dramas like House of Cards, while syndicating shows after air gave them second life (Breaking Bad, the Office, Friends) and absolutely crushing it with "must see" films (recently, the Irishman, Marriage Story, but also in the past stuff like Beasts of No Nation).
Conversely, their cheap shows from nobodies tend to die in the womb, and I don't think Netflix does that without good data to make such a decision.
> The goal is typically less about art (e.g. The Irishman) or even editorial vision (e.g. Black Panther as part of the MCU), and more about creating an environment that audiences never want to leave ... everything is about the player, not the storyteller. > One can debate how this orientation limits the artistic potential of the category.
The video game interaction model, which emphasizes freedom for the user within an environment, is at odds with storytelling, in which the framing, tone, pacing, and narrative have to be tightly controlled. But more practically, the artistic and narrative potential is limited because art and good storytelling aren't really what the gaming audience demands.
Before gaming "takes over" attention from storytelling media, it will need to somehow gain the narrative power of movies, TV, podcasts, and similar media, because human beings love storytelling - as we have for millenia.
Even "reality" TV, whatever one may think of its artistic merit, has a relatable narrative substructure that exceeds that of video games by a long shot.
At the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the director of The Irishman praised Netflix for giving him the resources to make the emotional gangster epic, but then he said companies like that could be harming moviegoers by force-feeding them too much of what they’ve already seen.
Oh, the irony in that... he is not self-conscious about The Irishman. Also he's right of course and it's exactly the reason why Netflix picked up The Irishman.
I completely agree with you. I do think China is becoming more and more the example people are looking at how to make progress. Politics aside the growth in wealth and it's distribution over the last 30 years have been magic.
Most people living outside the USA are very negative about the United States because this president is a very "bad guy". I'm not under such a opinion but I find it increasingly hard to have a normal conversation about the USA and it's form of the human experiment without hitting a wall of generalised criticism that ends up in stalemate.
Considering what we know what the CIA has done in the past. What kind of shadow government is functioning without consent of the people. The media institutions that suppose to keep that power in check never really informed the public on these developments. And on top the revelation of the catholic church being the biggest pedofile network that hitted the American society probably a lot harder than Europe because of stronger religious sentiments. All things combined for me it is not strange an anti establishment campaign won the presidency.
Friends, family, people that have watched movies like the Irishman, Spotlight, the Good Shepherd are not really open to adjust their point of view on the States. Iran, China and Russia are however topics where nuanced opinion still is expressed.
Agreed.
Recently I watched The Irishman (3.5 hours) at the theatre. Since the reviews mentioned the sombre mood of the film (unlike Scorcese's other gangter films), I was fully expecting to fidget around after some time.
I had no trouble with my attention span throughout the film so full credits to Scorcese and Thelma Schoonmaker for superb pacing. The audience was quite sparse and mostly film fans so I was able to watch it in a quiet atmosphere with occasional applause. In other words, the perfect movie watching experience.
If not at the theatre, I would have caught this at home. I would have taken more than 5 hours to complete the film. Numerous pauses throughout the film for bathroom breaks, googling names and trivia, simply getting distracted etc.
Now sometimes, you watch a movie that has a mind blowing twist, or something happens in the film that makes you go WTF and pause. Even then, you have to admit that watching the same film in the theatre (where you cannot just pause and take it in), with an audience who are going through the same thing, will probably be a better experience.
I just wrote this, in reply to an essay about The Irishman https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to-unlearn-carbon-capture-and-storage-status-and-signaling-and-more :
“The lonesome Irishman.” On the movie The Irishman; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I’ve seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there’s not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures.
We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.
This is a very wrong understanding over how unions work these days.
Union "bosses" don't control raises, promotions, or hours, and haven't for several decades. Union bosses simply don't have the power they used to have (and for some reason, are still portrayed as having in TV or movies). The Irishman, for example, is based on a decades-old perception of union bosses that was only ever true of the NY-based unions...decades ago.
"Superstore" on NBC is actually a pretty accurate portrayal of how unions work in real life: pretty mundane, and not all that different from being non-unionized.
I did wonder how two such mediocre long and boring films The Irishman & Marriage Story got such rave reviews. I’m annoyed with myself, having been swayed by the the critics, so wasting over 5 hours of my life - watching these in the vain hope that some excitement or entertainment would emerge - thoroughly disappointed.
it has become mental for me at this point. i tend to skip anything done by netflix studios... it has to do with the rate at which they are pumping out movies, shows & documentaries. most of them are not very good.
but netflix has some of the best standup comedies ever and that sandra bullock movie wasn't too bad.
even though it's scorcese, i am not interested in irishman at all...
This is not a great argument, since (1) The Irishman is based on what experts seem to believe is a work of total fiction (its subject claims to have been instrumental in the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate, the killing of Jimmy Hoffa, and the killing of Joe Gallo), and (2) the industries that were mobbed up when unions were ascendant remain mobbed up now; of course the unions were infiltrated, you couldn't engage with those industries without engaging with their unions.
It's a good movie and all. I just wouldn't draw a lot of public policy lessons from it.
> They are and have always been about changing workplaces from top-down, authoritarian models to ones where workers have a say in their company’s work and overall direction. They’re about acknowledging that none of these structures function or accomplish anything without labor and shifting their relations of power to reflect this reality.
I’d encourage younger folks who have an idealized view of American unions to check Scorcese’s new movie the Irishman about the Teamsters and Hoffa.
So it's not necessarily that there were 20+ MCU movies in the span of 10 years (and from what I understand the majority were at least good and some great), it's that during that time period the MCU movies became a dominant slice of the overall movie pie instead of the entire pie growing bigger. That, overall, seems to be Scorsese's gripe, because Avengers Endgame and DC's Justice League and Joker, etc... suck up so much oxygen Scorsese couldn't find a studio to back The Irishman so now he had go with Netflix. Now I'm starting to diverge a lot from where Scorsese and Moore intersect and it becomes more about Scorsese and a matter of sour grapes.
You could even make the point that the movies and shows that these services produce are becoming more perishable. When Netflix first came out with House of Cards it was talked about for months. Maybe it was just the quality of House of Cards but no new in recent years (besides GOT) has drawn this much attention. People seem to just watch the same shows over and over again until something new comes onto the service. The Irishman is the next test for this idea, but I don't see this movie being talked about till the end of the year even. We have so much on these services constantly coming out that the movies and T.V. don't have the same lifetime that they used too.
The Netflix movie The Irishman is about a labor union organizer/mob hitman [1] who claims to have assisted in JFKs assassination at the behest of the mob/ Jimmy Hoffa.
You can literally spin a wheel of different motivations for groups who wanted JFK dead and they all have their own convincing reasons. Except hackjack's little conspiracy here, which seems to be missing a final paragraph about why we need to switch to using Bitcoin as our standard currency.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sheeran