Revisiting Killers of the Flower Moon - Thoughts on a Second Viewing

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!*** THIS IS A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!!****

As you may or may not remember, I wrote a review of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, back in November after having watched it in the theatre.

I found the film to be pretty middling and said as much in my review - I gave it 2.5 stars out of 5, but with a giant caveat. The caveat was this…the theatre in which I saw the film, an RC theatre here in flyover country, is just dreadful. The digital projectors are awful, the sound muddled and for some inane reason they refuse to turn the lights all the way off, which makes it seem like you’re watching a movie at a drive-in during the day.

In my review, I said I’d have to hold off with my final evaluation until I saw the film in a better environment, namely at home. Well…Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I watched it again, this time in darkness with decent sound.

Here are a few things that jump out at me upon further review.

First…I liked Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance much more the second time around than the first. I still don’t think it’s award worthy or great, just that it isn’t as mannered and empty as I found it to be on my initial watch.

In contrast, I was less impressed by Lily Gladstone’s performance. I don’t think she’s bad at all, it’s just a bit less impressive on second watch. The most notable thing about her performance is that she is able to unflinchingly share the screen with DiCaprio…which is no small thing…but beyond that the performance thins substantially the more you see it.

On the other hand, Robert DeNiro’s performance is even more impressive on second viewing. As William “King” Hale, DeNiro gives a remarkably skillful performance. It is invigorating to see this acting icon bring his formidable, yet subtle, “A” game, something which has been sorely lacking in the last few decades of his career, to the film. It is no surprise that it's his old collaborator Scorsese that is the director who has coaxed the two very best DeNiro performances of the latter stage of his career with The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon.

As for Killers of the Flower Moon in totality, I still, unfortunately, found it to be greatly lacking.

A second viewing should make the sprawling narrative more coherent since you know the players and the story arc, but it still feels very unfocused and discombobulated.

The length isn’t a problem (at least for me), but the lack of narrative and dramatic focus is. There’s an emotional and theatrical incoherence to the film that, much to my chagrin, does not disappear upon second viewing.

I’ve watched The Irishman, Scorsese’s previous film, which also ran well over three hours, numerous times in the past few years, but The Irishman, despite its long run time, is a taut piece of filmmaking that never loses its drive or its focus.

The truth is that Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t lose its narrative drive and dramatic focus either, but that’s only because it never has them to begin with.

While I am disappointed in Killers of the Flower Moon, the movie is now on Apple TV +, so if you have the streaming service and haven’t seen the movie, why not give it a watch and decide for yourself? It’ll only cost you three-and-a-half hours and the usual Apple TV+ subscription rate.

If you don’t have Apple TV+ but want to give Killers of the Flower Moon a shot, here’s my advice. Sign up for a month or try and get a free month…but wait until February to do so. Then you can watch both Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which should be available for free on the service mid-February. I’ve not seen Napoleon yet so I’m not recommending it, just that if you’re going to dip your toe into the Apple TV + pool, might as well get as much as you can out of it, because frankly, there’s not a whole lot over there that’s worthwhile.

As for Killers of the Flower Moon, I really wished I liked it, as its subject matter is near and dear to my heart and Martin Scorsese is among my Mount Rushmore of filmmakers. But unfortunately, the film just doesn’t work, and feels like a missed opportunity.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Killers of the Flower Moon: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Disappointing (with caveats elucidated below). Wait to watch it when it hits streaming.

To say I was excited to see Killers of the Flower Moon, the new film from iconic director Martin Scorsese, would be a terrible understatement. Scorsese is, along with Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa, among the most pivotal filmmakers in developing my incurable cinephilia, and when a film of his is released, it’s a major event in my life.

As a teenager, when I discovered Scorsese’s masterpieces Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (years after they were initially released) it was a holy experience that converted me into a true believer in the church of cinema.

Ever since that time I’ve been an ardent admirer and devout fan of Scorsese. That doesn’t mean I’ve loved all of his films…because I haven’t, but it does mean that I’ve always taken them very seriously and treated them with the deep respect they deserve having come from a master filmmaker.

Killers of the Flower Moon, which is directed and co-written by Scorsese and is based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, premiered in theaters on October 20th. Unfortunately, due to circumstances well beyond my control, I was unable to see the film until this past weekend. My nearly month long wait to see the film was excruciating as I had to quarantine myself and avoid any and all mentions of the film in the media/internet in order to stay clear of reviews and opinions. See, I don’t care what anyone else thinks of Scorsese’s films, I only care what I think.

I finally trekked out to the cineplex here in flyover country to see the three-and-a-half-hour-long film on Sunday, and the context of my viewing is a crucial caveat to my opinion on the movie.

Here in flyover country the local RC Theater is a fucking shithole, but it’s the only fucking shithole theater in town. The theater has shitty digital projectors, egregiously awful sound, refuses to turn the lights all the way off in the theater, and doesn’t have screens big enough to accommodate certain aspect ratios. So, I watched Killers of the Flower Moon with a projector that froze seven times, sound that rendered much dialogue inaudible and ambient sound injuriously loud, a condensed screen that cut off heads and compressed expansive vistas, staff members talking loudly in the projector room, and lights on at the top and sides of the theater that made it feel like I was watching a movie at an old drive-in during an especially sunny day.

Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? To be fair, I’m not sure how, or even if, me or Mrs. Lincoln can answer that question.

The reality is that upon viewing the film under these frustrating and infuriating circumstances, I thought Killers of the Flower Moon simply didn’t work, but I feel like I need to see it again under better circumstances before I can truly say. It is quite an indictment of our theater system that I will need to wait until the movie becomes available to stream at home before I can properly view and review it.

With that context in place, let’s dive into my thoughts on Scorsese’s 26th feature film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Lily Gladstone, tells the story of a vast criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Whites against the Native American population living on the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s. I will avoid any more in-depth discussion of the plot in order to avoid spoilers.

I have not read the book so the plot was a mystery to me before seeing the movie. The story is unquestionably an important one, but the film lacks a cohesive storytelling approach and the narrative is at times barely coherent.

I am someone who actually prefers long movies (hell…I thought The Gangs of New York and Silence should have been LONGER), and Killers of the Flower Moon runs a daunting two hundred and six minutes long, but unfortunately it doesn’t earn that arduous run time. Despite so much screen time with which to work, the characters are under developed, the plot muddled and the drama neutered.

A major issue with the film is that its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, is horribly miscast. DiCaprio plays the dim-witted Ernest Burkhart, who sports an atrocious haircut, a perpetual frown and some fake, 1920’s idiot teeth. DiCaprio’s Ernest looks like he is the long-lost uncle of Sling Blade and the surly twin brother of Ben Stiller’s retarded character Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder.

Yes, there are the usual DiCaprio histrionics in Killers of the Flower Moon, as he weeps and wails and rends his garments like a toddler in a tantrum, but it all seems terribly vacant and dramatically ridiculous.

DiCaprio’s standing as the “greatest actor of his generation” has always felt slightly unearned to me as he often gives performances that are sub-par but which are filled with enough hyper-emoting to convince the uninitiated into believing he’s some great artiste. He’s much more an unabashed movie star than he is a great actor. That’s not to say he hasn’t given good and even great performances, because he certainly has (and these are all of them…What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Catch Me If You Can, Inception, Django Unchained, The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), but often times, especially with Scorsese, he doesn’t.

This is DiCaprio’s sixth film with Scorsese and in most of them he has been at the very least outshined by his cast mates, and in some of them actively awful.

For example, in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio gives a relentlessly hollow performance and is absolutely blown off the screen by Daniel Day Lewis doing Daniel Day Lewis things. In The Aviator he seems like a little kid playing dress up as Howard Hughes. In The Departed, he gives a solid performance, but which at times feels forced and is definitely overshadowed by Matt Damon. Shutter Island is a mess of a movie and his performance is middling at best. The one exception is The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leo brings all of his star power and acting ability to bear and hits it out of the park.

I was hoping DiCaprio brought that Wolf of Wall Street level of acting to Killers of the Flower Moon…but he doesn’t. He is simply too bright-eyed to play such a dead-eyed dolt like Ernest, and his attempts to energize his performance with dramatic histrionics rings horribly hollow.

Robert DeNiro does very solid work as William King Hale, the local leader of questionable intent. DeNiro’s last two outings with Scorsese, this and The Irishman, have been the best work of the last two decades, and it’s nice to see him flex his considerable acting muscles once again.

Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, Ernest’s Osage wife, eclipses her more famous co-star DiCaprio by giving a simple and subtle performance that radiates with charisma. Gladstone speaks volumes with a simple look and never over emotes or feels the need to press like DiCaprio does. She lets her compelling (and gorgeous) face tell the story.

The supporting cast features some truly dreadful performances, most notably, and unfortunately, by the Native American actresses. I will not name names but will say that there are some super cringy moments where a certain actress gives such an amateurish performance that it actually hurts to watch.  

Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer on the film and while there are some notable sequences, such as a burning farm sequence, the rest seems very ordinary. To be fair, as explained earlier my viewing experience was not ideal so maybe I was just not able to appreciate Prieto’s genius (and he is undoubtedly a fantastic cinematographer), but what I did see underwhelmed. For instance, early in the film there is a bunch of black and white Newsreel footage that gives the history of the setting and story that looks like a cheap flashback sequence in a bad tv show.

Then there is the ending, which I will refrain from giving specifics, only to say that this coda is, in the context of my viewing, gut-punchingly bad, especially when combined with the film opening with Scorsese reading a statement to camera that looks like a hostage video and sounds like it was written by the terrorists in the human resources department at Apple Corp.

Overall, I found Killers of the Flower Moon to be a terrible disappointment because my expectations were so high. It isn’t a great movie, but it isn’t awful either. That said, I really do reserve the right to change my opinion once I get to see it at home under better technical circumstances. I hope the film gets better upon my second viewing (which according to reports will probably be in late December or early January) because the story it tells is a vitally important one, and the director telling it is among the greatest to ever make a movie. But for now, it pains me to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is simply not worth seeing the theater…which may have more to do with how awful the theater experience has become than it does with the film…we’ll see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Bardo, False Chroncile of a Handful of Truths: A Review - Inarritu's Head Up Inarritu's Ass

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent…not to mention pretentious, piece of crap.

In case you’d forgotten, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has won two Best Director Academy Awards – for Birdman and The Revenant, which puts him in some very rarified air. To put into context, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have one Best Directing Oscar each, and Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman have none.

I readily admit that I enjoyed Birdman (2014) and thought it was clever, and in hindsight its critique of superhero culture was spot-on and before its time, but I also thought the film badly bungled its ending.

I thought The Revenant (2015) was a flawed film but was deeper than it appeared on the surface and became much more interesting when seen through Jungian dream analysis rather than through the pop culture lens.

Except for those two films, Inarritu’s filmography is littered with some truly abysmal and pretentious pieces of work. For example, Inarritu’s 2006 shlockfest Babel may be the worst ‘taken seriously’ movie of the 21st Century…and its main competition is another Inarritu movie, 2003’s 21 Grams.

Which brings us to Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Inarritu’s newest cinematic venture, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Bardo, which was a Netflix production and hit the streaming service October 27th, was written and directed by Inarritu and stars Daniel Giminez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

The movie, which describes itself as an epic black comedy-drama, is a fictional, pseudo-autobiographical story that chronicles Silverio Gama – a sort of stand in for Inarritu himself, as he navigates his life as a big-time journalist and documentarian who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Gama wrestles with his career success, his critics, his artistry, his family, his grief, and his past, as well as the past of Mexico and his guilt over having left the country of his birth. Of course, these are all the same things with which Inarritu grapples.

Bardo, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is another in a bevy of films this year made by auteurs examining their own lives in feature films. For example, I recently reviewed Armageddon Time, James Gray’s dismal autobiographical effort, and I’ve yet to see Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light.

I will say this about The Fabelmans and Empire of Light…it is absolutely impossible for them to be worse than Bardo. Bardo is bad-o. Really bad-o. Like excruciatingly bad-o. Like so bad it makes the awful Armageddon Time feel like Citizen Kane.

Bardo, which has a grueling two-hour and forty-minute run time, is somewhat remarkable as it’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent.

The problem with Bardo is not cinematic incompetence on the part of Inarritu. If Inarritu is anything it’s competent. He knows how to shoot a film and make beautiful images – and he’s aided in this effort by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who…curiously, also shot Armageddon Time – poor bastard). What Inarritu doesn’t know how to do is turn off his ego and turn down his adolescent maudlin impulses in order to tell a coherent and compelling story.

Bardo is supposed to be infused with magical realism but is devoid of magic and allergic to realism. In their stead Inarritu injects an extraordinary lack of subtlety and pronounced heavy-handedness as well as a steaming hot serving of middlebrow bourgeois bullshit philosophy.

This movie is, without exaggeration, literally a director bitching about how persecuted he is by critics, how envied he is by jealous less successful people, and imagining how devastated everyone will be when he dies. This is more akin to something a petulant teenager would dream up as they cry in their bedroom after their parents refused to buy them a sports car for their sixteenth birthday than something an adult filmmaker should put in a feature.

To give you an indication of what an absolute shitshow Bardo is, consider this…the film features a graphic scene where a baby is literally pushed back into a vagina, and another scene where Gama’s adult face is CGI’d onto a little kid as he has a discussion with his father in a sort of dream like sequence. Did I mention it was heavy-handed? Yikes!

In addition to all of that self-serving navel gazing, Inarritu also throws colonialism and anti-Mexican racism shit against the wall to see if any of it sticks…and none of it does.

Then there’s the virtuoso filmmaking stuff, like the extended, one-shot dance scene, which I was supposed to be impressed by but which I wasn’t impressed by.

What’s astonishing about Bardo is that Inarritu has made himself the hero of the story but only succeeds in exposing himself as being relentlessly unlikable. The Inarritu character Gama is one of the most punchable people to have graced the silver screen this year, and maybe this decade.

Even the film’s more interesting visual sequences, like when people start dropping dead in Mexico City, is derivative. I saw the same sequence done better in a Radiohead music video nearly thirty years ago.

Speaking of derivative, it seems to me that with Bardo Inarritu was trying to copy/emulate his fellow Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s film Roma (2018), and maybe even Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Roma is a brilliant, magical realist, autobiographical story about growing up in Mexico, and Knight of Cups is, in my opinion, a dreamlike masterpiece about navigating the hell of Hollywood and moviemaking.

The problem though is that Inarritu is no Cuaron and no Malick. He lacks their deftness, their depth and their profundity. Inarritu is an artistic poseur. A pretentious pretender who thinks cinematically pouting and preening is equivalent to being profound.

What is bothersome about Inarritu’s failure on Bardo is that we are witnessing the end of the auteur era at Netflix. The streaming giant in recent years made the decision to throw money at auteurs and let them do what they want. In the case of Cuaron, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, that decision was cinematically fruitful as it gave us Roma, Mank and The Irishman. This year the two auteurs blessed by Netflix’s desire for prestige were Noah Baumbach and Inarritu, and they delivered the excrement filled dump-trucks that were White Noise and Bardo. It should not be a shock that Netflix announced this year that they will no longer throw money at auteurs…thanks Baumbach and Inarritu.

The bottom line is that Bardo may finally expose Inarritu for the philosophically trite filmmaking fraud that he is. His elevation to the heights of Hollywood success is more a testament to the buffoonery of the movie business than to the artistic genius of Inarritu.

Whatever one may think of Inarritu as a filmmaker, there is simply no denying that Bardo is an artistic catastrophe of epic proportions. This movie is nothing but a vacuous, vapid and vain exercise in cinematic masturbation. Avoid it at all costs.

©2023

Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

Harvey Weinstein has ruled Hollywood for the last three decades, harassing colleagues not only over sex, but also art; assaulting not only women, but also movies. His long and thuggish reign is finally over.

The first blockbuster that Harvey Weinstein produced was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In that movie there is a male rapist named Zed, who gets his comeuppance at the hands of one of his victims, crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Once Wallace escapes Zed’s clutches, with the help of Butch (Bruce Willis), he promises to extract revenge on Zed by getting “medieval on his ass”.

“Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead,” Butch tells his girlfriend Fabienne,  after he returns with Zed’s chopper as a trophy.

Zed is Harvey Weinstein…grotesque and vile…and about to get payback for his depravity.

Unlike Zed, Weinstein isn’t dead…but his iron grip on Hollywood certainly is. With Weinstein’s conviction today on one count of sexual assault and another on rape in the third degree, he is either going to prison or into exile, with any chance of a return to the film business he so dominated for the last thirty years, long gone.

As the Weinstein era officially comes to an end it is worth looking back on the good, the bad and the very ugly of it all.

It is sort of amusing that Harvey’s most notable accomplishment is that he was the unwitting father of the #MeToo movement. It was when his degenerate, lascivious and predatory behavior over the course of his remarkable career finally became public in 2017, that #MeToo was born.

Weinstein’s also culpable for instigating the relentless campaigning for Academy Awards, a nasty sport that began in the 90’s and continues to this day. His most striking victory at the Oscars came in 1998 when he willed Shakespeare in Love over the Best Picture finish line ahead of the odds-on favorite, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

In terms of cinema, Weinstein’s greatest legacy was that he was directly responsible for the glorious independent cinema movement of the 1990’s. The movie that started it all was, ironically, Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 Palme d’Or winning hit Sex, Lies and Videotape, produced by Weinstein.

Weinstein not only made the career of Oscar winner Soderbergh, but also 90’s cinema darlings and current Hollywood cornerstones Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow among many, many others.

Harvey’s business blue print was simple, he would take art house movies and market them aggressively. His brand was that of independent cinema with big bucks behind it…and it worked exceedingly well, especially in the 90’s.

Despite his success at elevating independent movies, Weinstein was also notorious for being a brutish bully and egotistical control freak when it came to the film’s he produced and distributed.

Weinstein was a pig in the china shop of cinema, and would often demand directors make enormous cuts to their films in order to get them to his preferred running time. He didn’t just do this with nobodies…he even strong armed cinematic masters like Martin Scorsese, whom he demanded cut 40 minutes off of Gangs of New York. Scorsese, like nearly everyone else in Weinstein world, acquiesced, and the movie and the art of cinema, suffered for it.

Like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn an Robert Evans before him, Weinstein was the archetypal over-stuffed movie mogul. But with Weinstein’s conviction, his time in Hollywood is thankfully over, and it seems the movie mogul era itself is waning in Hollywood.

Yes, there will still be perverts and predators among Hollywood’s most powerful, that is unavoidable, but at least women will no longer be silent about it. And in terms of artistic freedom and directors being forced by power hungry Hollywood big shots to take a hatchet to their films, those days too are receding very quickly.

The obsolescence of Weinstein world-view is highlighted by the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, who have a very different business model than the coarse and crass Weinstein approach.

These streaming services have very deep pockets and an insatiable hunger for new material, but unlike Weinstein, they offer artistic autonomy, not arrogant authoritarianism.

For instance, Netflix wanted to work with Martin Scorsese so they financed his last film The Irishman. That movie ran three hours and thirty minutes, and in the hands of Harvey Weinstein would have been, like Gangs of New York, butchered beyond recognition. Netflix, on the other hand, didn’t lay a glove on it, and let Scorsese do exactly what Scorsese does best…make the movie he wants to make…and the art of cinema was better for it.

The bottom line regarding Harvey Weinstein’s conviction is this…good riddance to bad rubbish. The women of Hollywood and the art of cinema are much safer today without Harvey Weinstein and his filthy hands pawing all over them.

Zed is dead, baby. Zed is dead. And we are all better off because of it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 57 seconds

This is an extended version of an article that was originally published on Friday, February 21, 2020, at RT.

TRUMP HATES PARASITE BECAUSE IT PREDICTS HIS ELECTION DEFEAT

Movies are a bellwether of public sentiment, and last year’s crop of class-conscious nominees, such as Best Picture winner Parasite, spell doom for Trump’s re-election.

Last night (Thursday February 20th) President Trump told a raucous rally crowd that he was not a fan of Parasite winning Best Picture at this year’s Oscars.

I think Trump despises Parasite, the South Korean film about class divisions and class struggle, because he unconsciously understands that it is a foreboding omen that foretells his electoral defeat come November.

As longtime readers know, I have developed a theory, named the Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory, that is meant to track trends in the collective unconscious through various data points. These data points are then turned into waves - such as historical waves, empire waves, generational waves, time waves, and culture/art waves.

The theory is rather complex and is simply too long and complicated to coherently boil down in a blog post. So for this article I have simply focused the lens of the theory down to the culture/art waves as a way to measure unconscious trends before, or as, they turn into public sentiment.

In terms of the McCaffrey Wave Theory’s (MWT) viability, it did accurately predict the last presidential election - the first in which it was used…which most prognosticators, political scientists and other theories did not. In fact, the MWT thought that Trump’s victory was glaringly obvious…which is why I was so puzzled when everyone else was so shocked by the result.

In regards to the culture/art wave of the MWT, the primary (and most easily digestible) data points are the top ten box office films and Oscar nominated films for the year previous and the year of a presidential election. There are other secondary data points as well, but box office/Oscars are the one that we will use in this article because those films are the ones that most resonated with the general public. (And it should also be noted, film is not always the primary art/culture data point, that changes through history as different art/culture forms take precedence over others.)

Artists…even those that work in corporate Hollywood, are like antennas attuned to the collective unconscious, and their art is the act of taking the unconscious and making it conscious. In other words, artists take dreams and put them into reality. These artists are not consciously predicting the future, they are just acting on whatever resonates with their own subconscious when they are choosing what stories to tell and how to tell them.

Due to the nature of the film business, it takes years for their work to come to fruition…which is why cinema can be a leading indicator of what comes next in public sentiment as the lag time between concept and fruition gives time for those sentiments to come closer to the surface of the collective consciousness.

According to the McCaffrey Wave Theory, the titles, narratives, themes, color palettes and archetypes present in the most popular (box office/awards) movies hold clues as to what lies ahead in terms of public political preference.

The basic premise regarding these pieces of information, is to consider them like a dream and interpret them through a Jungian perspective. Dreams come from the unconscious, and movies/art are collective dreams born of the collective unconscious. Jungian dream interpretation is used because it is the best way to try and decipher the language of symbols with which the unconscious (collective or personal) communicates.

With this in mind it is also worth remembering that Oscar nominated and Box Office winning films aren’t just about the movies, but the marketing around those movies. The messages of these movies are not confined to the two hour viewing experience or to just those who see the film, because marketing will put incessant advertisements, tv and radio commercials, magazine and newspaper coverage, and billboards and posters in front of the entire populace. This will have the effect of not only being a leading indicator of public sentiment by expressing the symbols of the collective unconscious, but, as Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays teaches us, also being somewhat of a driver of that sentiment.

With all of this background in mind…let’s take a look at recent electoral history using the MWT before we dive in what lay ahead for 2020.

2016 ELECTION

The box office and Oscars accurately foreshadowed Trump’s 2016 win as in 2015 both Spotlight and The Big Short, two stories about outsiders taking on a corrupt establishment – The Catholic Church and Wall Street respectively, won Oscars, with Spotlight winning Best Picture.

Three other nominees, The Revenant, The Martian and Mad Max: Fury Road, were about men overcoming long odds and surviving in the starkest of situations. These films also had very distinct color palettes, with Mad Max and The Martian having red as their primary color, and The Revenant having blue as its primary color. These films also had similar visual schemes as they frequently used wide panoramic shots of bleak and desolate landscapes.

Even the title, Mad Max: Fury Road, was a sign of what lay ahead, Mad, Max, Fury…these words are obviously pointing to a jolting amount of anger coming to a boil in the collective unconscious. In terms of Trump, he was Mad to the Max, and his road to the White House was paved with Fury -and in the wake of his election, Democrats were the ones at Maximum Mad and filled with Fury.

Symbolically, these films tapped into the archetype of the outsider taking on the corrupt establishment (Spotlight, The Big Short), and the individual man overcoming staggering odds to survive in the bleakest of environments. Trump followed suit as he ran as an outsider taking on Washington and survived bleak odds and the grueling gauntlet of a decidedly adversarial establishment media to win.

The 2015 box office also presaged Trump’s election, as the box office champ, The Force Awakens, could’ve been titled “The Populist Force Awakens”, as it foreshadowed a forceful awakening of something. That something was the populism that propelled Trump to the Republican nomination and elevated Bernie Sanders to be a threat in the Democratic primary.

Like The Revenant, The Martian and Fury Road, The Force Awakens also used similar wide shots of bleak environments as the previously mentioned Oscar nominees, and also had a clashing red and blue color scheme…most notably in its movie poster…where red (the color of Republicans) is superior to blue (the color of Democrats). (See visual aids below)

Another top ten box office film in 2015 was Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. The title “Hunger Games” is all about warfare and a lack of resources…people being hungry and there being winners and losers. This is the same theme that Trump ran so successfully on in both the party and general elections. In addition Trump’s favorite political tactic, “mocking”, is also prominently highlighted by the title.

Two other 2015 top ten box office winners signaling Trump’s victory were Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Minions. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation could be the title of Trump’s entire campaign and presidency…as his winning was deemed “impossible”, and the nation needed to go “rogue” to elect this “rogue” candidate. “Minions” is also an apt description of Trump’s devoutly loyal followers.

The word “rogue”, defined as “a dishonest or unprincipled man”, made a very large appearance in the 2016 box office as well when Rogue One was a big box office winner. This meant that the “rogue” was not only a symbol the collective unconscious was desperate to make conscious, but also one that was advertised and marketed to the American public from the Summer of 2015 through to the end of 2016.

The top ten of 2016’s box office was chock full of primal words that indicated a less civilized, animalistic, predatory nature…such as Zootopia (a utopia of madness), Jungle Book (a handbook for life in a jungle), and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (a road map to the beast).

2016 also brought us the very clear signs of the hellaciously contentious energy in both the party primaries and in the general election. The most glaring examples were Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman which both told stories of internecine warfare with blue (Captain America) versus red (the billionaire Iron Man) as the opposing colors. (See visual aids below)

Another comic book movie, Suicide Squad was a top ten box office earner and it astutely summed up the feelings of the anti-Trump establishment Republicans and the Democrats after Trump’s victory.

But the biggest box office clue to Trump’s impending victory was the astounding success of Deadpool, the red clad, wise-ass outsider superhero, who premiered on the big screen in February of 2016. Is there any more Trumpish a superhero than the irreverent, anti-establishment Deadpool?

Hell or High Water, a 2016 Oscar nominee about two brothers who rob the corrupt banks in Texas that robbed their family, was another movie with wide shots of bleak environments (with a bleak reddish color palette), that thematically was right in Trump’s wheelhouse.

2012 ELECTION

Looking at other elections through the MWT is enlightening as well.

In 2012 Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln, films about government accomplishing great things, were nominated and monopolized attention throughout the year leading to Obama’s re-election. These films told the narrative of government as effective and good…and obviously reflected a satisfaction with the status quo…which would mean an incumbent’s re-election.

Silver Linings Playbook was another Oscar nominee that year and its title is one of optimism (silver lining) and planning (a playbook)…which sums up Obama’s re-election message.

2012 also saw Django Unchained get Oscar nominations and do very well at the box office. The film is about a black man, Django - played by Jamie Foxx, getting revenge upon racist Southerners and slave owners. Of course, this archetype of the empowered black man in a racist America, was attached to Obama during his presidency.

2011’s Oscar nominees had two films that pointed towards Obama’s impending victory, the first was The Descendants, a movie set in Hawaii, the state of Obama’s birth, and The Help, a film about working class black women dealing with racism in the Deep South.

2008 ELECTION

Obama’s election in 2008 is also apparent when seen through the MWT perspective.

In 2007, No Country for Old Men won Best Picture and could have been a bumper sticker for Obama’s campaign against his older opponents Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain.

Other nominees from that year were Michael Clayton, a story about a lone man taking on a corrupt corporate establishment, and Atonement. Obama ran as the archetypal fighter against corporate malfeasance…and his election would symbolize, among many voters, an atonement for the sin of slavery and Jim Crow.

2007’s box office also gave indication of a major shift occurring in the collective. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix were the top two movies that year. At World’s End symbolizes the ending of something, and the title Order of the Phoenix is a cry to rise like a Phoenix from the ashes (of the Bush administration, Wall Street collapse etc.) and restore “order”…which was the narrative and archetype Obama embraced.

Another top ten box office film was Legend, which starred Will Smith and told the story of a black man surviving a pandemic and working to find a cure. Once again, the archetype of the black savior is perfectly embodied by Obama.

In 2008, the box office was dominated by Hancock, a story of a black superhero, and The Dark Knight, both metaphors for Obama (a black man as a white knight, hence the dark knight) as the man to save America from the disastrous chaos of the Bush reign.

Other 2008 box office winners signaled pro-Obama sentiment as well, with Madagascar: Escape to Africa 2 and Narnia: Prince Caspian landing in the top ten for the year. Escape to Africa has the word “Africa” in the title, which is significant in an election where there is an African-American candidate…and “Prince Caspian” once again indicates preference for the younger - “prince”.

Although these film’s were not released until right after the election, both 2008 Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire and nominee Milk, pointed to Obama winning. Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a poor Indian boy (who is brown skinned and born into poverty), overcoming great odds and making it big, while Milk is about a first…the first openly gay politician elected to public office. Obama, of course, would become the first black man elected to be president.

2004 ELECTION

Bush’s re-election in 2004 is also found in the MWT data.

In 2003, The Return of the King, a title that is an incumbent’s wet dream, won both the box office and Best Picture Oscar. Another Oscar nominee was Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, which is a powerful title in an election involving a “commander” in chief waging two wars on the “far side of the world”.

A plethora of sequels in the top ten box office of both 2003 and 2004, such as Matrix Reloaded, X2, Bad Boys 2, Spider Man 2, Shrek 2, Meet the Parents 2 and Ocean’s 12, all foresaw Bush’s reelection as he was going for a sequel in the form of a second term.

2004’s Oscar winner, Million Dollar Baby, could have been a moniker hung on Bush, as he was labeled by his critics as an entitled, petulant, silver spooned child born into enormous wealth, power and privilege. Another nominee, Sideways, indicated not a moving forward but rather a perpendicular movement…thus re-election.

2020 ELECTION

Which finally brings us to 2020.

Purely as a political observer I have long felt Trump was going to win re-election in 2020, and 2/3rds of the American public feel the same way. The MWT has also pointed, ever so slightly, in that same direction…until very recently. It was on Oscar night, when Parasite, the ultimate outsider (a foreign film with subtitles), beat out 1917, the status quo nominee, that I noticed a pronounced shift in the waves.

Parasite’s Best Picture win is a very clear signal that the economic populism of 2020 is an even more vibrant energy in the collective unconscious than it was in 2016.

Further proof of this is that in 2019, of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, a staggering six of them deal specifically with issues of class. Parasite, Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman and Little Women all tell varying tales of class warfare and struggle. This is as strong an indicator of a single sentiment as we have ever seen in the art/culture wave of the MWT in recent memory.

The box office indicates a dramatic change coming as well, with Endgame (the highest grossing film of all-time) - which signifies a definitive ending, and Rise of Skywalker - indicating something rising, dominating, as did the overtly revolutionary populist Joker.

It is also noteworthy that both Endgame and Rise of Skywalker are the end of the respective story arcs of two record-breaking, blockbuster franchises. This Star Wars narrative arc is a cultural cornerstone and is over forty years old, and Marvel’s narrative arc has monopolized the culture for well over a decade. Both of these iconic stories ending in the same year is an extraordinarily compelling piece of evidence that the end of an era is upon us.

Rise of Skywalker is not only significant for these reasons, but also because of its color scheme. In the movie’s poster, the dominant color is now blue, whereas in 2016’s The Force Awakens, red dominating blue was the color scheme.

Endgame too has a color scheme of a purple-ish blue completely dominating red in its posters which is fascinating. The off-blue-ish color is striking because it is so unusual…and portends that not only is red waning but that it is not business as usual on the blue side of the divide.

These symbols in the art/cutlure wave could not be more clearly telling us that the thing ending is Trump’s presidency, and the thing rising is Bernie Sander’s class-fueled populist revolution.

Here are some more pieces of evidence to back up that assertion. Aladdin, the tale of a blue (Democrat) genie who grants wishes, was a top ten big box office winner last year. The symbolism is obvious as, fair or not, Bernie Sanders is being labeled as someone “giving away free stuff” by his critics in the establishment.

Another sign is much more esoteric, and that is the film Jumanji:The Next Level. The film was in the top ten of the box office last year and on its surface seems quite benign, but when you dig into it, things become pretty fascinating. Let me preface this by saying once again that this is Jungian dream interpretation, and you may find this interpretation to be a bridge too far. But here it is…

When you break the word Jumanji down into what it sounds like….it becomes “jew” + “manji”. Of course, the word “Jew” in the consciousness is striking in a year with the potentially the first Jewish presidential candidate.

The other part of this equation is even more subtle, but potentially much more powerful. The word “manji” is a Japanese word for a symbol…the symbol being the left facing swastika - as opposed to the right facing swastika used by the Nazis. To interpret this data from a Jungian perspective, that would mean that “Jew” + “manji” could be interpreted as a Jew who reverses the swastika/Nazism. I am not calling Trump a Nazi, but there is a strong sentiment in the culture that does attach him to the Nazi archetype. The conclusion to draw from this is that Jumanji symbolically means the current right (Republican) facing swastika will be reversed into a left (Democratic) facing manji. It might also signify Bernie Sanders, potentially the first Jewish candidate for President, will reverse the gains of the archetypal “Nazi”, Trump. (Again…I am not calling Trump a Nazi, only that he has been branded with the Nazi/“not-see” archetype in the public consciousness)

Another vital point is that like Trump in 2016, Sanders is running as the archetypal outsider. For instance, the media keep saying that Bernie is a joke and he can’t win the nomination or the general election, but remember, the media once said the same thing about Trump, and treated him with the same contempt.

Sanders is running against the establishment of both Washington AND the Democratic party. Also like Trump, he is despised by the mainstream media, who, like establishment politicians, belittle, dismiss and denigrate him every chance they get.

On a purely political and psychological level, it is obvious that the public viscerally loathes Washington and the media more than anything, which means that just like Trump in 2016, Sanders has the right enemies…and this will be a key to his success.

In conclusion, there is certainly a chance that the data that makes up the History, Empire, Generation, Time and Art/Culture waves, will shift in the crucial coming months, and the waves will obviously reflect, and I will report, that shift. But with that said, as currently configured, the Isaiah McCaffrey Wave Theory, most notably but not exclusively the art/culture wave, clearly indicates that Bernie Sanders is going to be the next President of the United States.

©2020

VISUAL AIDS

The blue-ish purple of 2019 Endgame surrounding red.

2019’s Rise of Skywalker has blue dominated red…in contrast to the color scheme of 2016’s The Force Awakens.

Blue once again taking up a larger percentage of the frame than red in 2019’s Rise of Skywalker.

2016 - The Force Awakens has red front and center over blue.

2016 The Force Awakens with its protagonist having the appearance of holding red…the color which dominates the frame over blue.

Red v Blue in 2016’s Civil War.

Red v Blue in Batman v Superman…notice that red wins.

Deadpool…the Trumpiest of superheroes…being snakry and wearing red in 2016.

A Hidden Life: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT IF YOU LOVE MALICK. This is a deeply profound film but director Terrence Malick can be impenetrable to those with more conventional tastes…so act accordingly.

A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick, is the true story of Franz Jaggerstater, a Catholic farmer in rural Austria during World War II who must choose between his faith and pledging allegiance to Hitler. The film stars August Diehl as Jagerstatter, with supporting turns from Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqivst, Matthias Shoenaerts, Bruno Ganz and Franz Rogowski.

2019 may be the greatest year for cinema of my entire adult life. After a bumpy start to the year, we’ve had masterpieces from major auteurs, like Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, The Irishman, and Parasite, and we even had the down and dirty genius of the best comic book movie ever made, Joker, brought to us by Todd Phillips of all unlikely people. 2019 even had two stellar, art house science fiction films, Ad Astra and High Life, as well as a bevy of great foreign films, including Transit, Rojo and Bird of Passage. So with the year in cinema going so well I was thrilled to see that one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Terrence Malick, was throwing his hat into the crowded ring of 2019 before the end of the year.

Terrence Malick has long been one of my favorite film makers. His use of religious symbolism and philosophical themes, along with his unorthodox and impressionist visual and narrative style, have made Malick films must see cinema for me. Malick’s work over the last decade in particular, which included films such as Knight of Cups, Song to Song and his epic masterpiece The Tree of Life, has resonated deeply with me due to its intimate and spiritual nature. Maybe it is because I am one of the rarest of creatures in that I am Catholic and a cinephile, that Malick’s work seems to be so perfectly calibrated to my unique interests that it feels like he is making movies just for me.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I headed out to see A Hidden Life. The little I had heard of the film was that it was a return to a more linear narrative structure and was more akin to his magnum opus The Tree of Life than his recent allegedly autobiographical, experimental trilogy (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song). I consider The Tree of Life to be the greatest film of the last decade, and maybe of all-time, so my expectations for A Hidden Life were pretty high.

After seeing the film, I can report that A Hidden Life is not The Tree of Life, but it is a great film that is easily the most profound movie of the year. What makes the movie so profound is that it mediates upon the spiritual struggle inherent when living in an empire. Jagerstatter’s greatest choice was not between his soul and the Third Reich, but rather between choosing to decide or choosing not to decide and thus ignore reality. This is the same struggle Americans face…will we simply accept American empire and all the evils that accompany it, or will we put down our flags, our party affiliations, our identity politics, and instead fix our loyalty to truth above all else?

As for the particulars of the movie, after having seen it by myself I had a conversation with a “lady friend” who was interested in the movie. She asked me “how was it?” and my reply was, “it is very Malick”. Now as previously stated, “very Malick” is right in my wheelhouse…but for others, the more Malick a movie is, the harder it is for them to digest.

By “very Malick” what I mean is that the film is impressionistic in style and meditative in nature. A Hidden Life is definitely linear in structure as it follows a character from point A to point B, but it doesn’t go in a conventional straight line between those two points. The film has a near three hour run time and no doubt less adventurous movie goers will struggle with the film’s meandering pace and unorthodox approach, but if viewers can turn off their conditioning and simply let the film wash over them, it is a deeply moving experience.

Part of what makes Malick such a remarkable auteur is that no other film maker is able to capture the exquisite beauty, the fleeting profundity and suffocating existential angst of life itself. Malick’s masterpiece, The Tree of Life is the pinnacle of this experience, where life and death meet and spirit and soul collide and we are forced to confront and wrestle with our own mortality as we scream into the abyss hoping for an answer. In A Hidden Life as in all of his films, the weight of life and thought are conjured by Malick’s dancing camera and natural light. Jagerstatter is not so much the protagonist of the film as he is a projection of our dreams and a player in our spiritual nightmares.

The cast of A Hidden Life are a who’s who of European acting talent. August Diehl plays Franz Jagerstatter with a very German/Austrian control and stoicism. Diehl is a fine actor (he is spectacularly evil as an SS officer in Inglorious Basterds) but there were times when I felt that he may have been slightly miscast in the role of Jagerstatter, especially in a Malick movie. In Malick films actors must rely on their innate characteristics in order to survive and/or thrive. What that means is that a lot of scenes lack dialogue, or are improvised and are spliced together with perspective shifting cuts, and so the actor’s energy, their physical ease, and their face play big parts in telling the story. Diehl is gifted/cursed with a handsome but somewhat subdued face, which makes his performance at times less empathetic than I wanted it to be.

Franz Rogowski plays a small role as one of Franz’s military friends and I actually thought he would have been perfect in the lead role. Rogowski is like a German Joaquin Phoenix, they actually look quite similar, and he has a inherently empathetic face that is filled with emotion and meaning even when he isn’t speaking or emoting. Rogowski was fantastic in Transit this year, a film I highly recommend, and I think he would have been equally terrific as Franz Jagerstatter.

Other actors of note in the film are the late Bruno Ganz and the late Michael Nyqvist, both of whom have small roles but do spectacular work in them. Ganz and Nyqvist bring an emotional gravitas and fragility to their work in A Hidden Life that is a fitting epitaph for their brilliant careers.

Valerie Pachner plays Franziska Jagerstatter, Franz’s wife, and brings a vitality and earthy charisma to her work. Pachner is both strong and beautiful and her performance is both delicate and complex and gives A Hidden Life an emotional multi-dimensionality.

One of the things I most enjoy about Malick films is the cinematography. For A Hidden Life, Malick’s usual cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who is one of the greatest cinematographers in the business and maybe of all-time, was absent, replaced by his longtime steadicam operator Jorg Widmer. Widmer is considered by many to be the best steadicam operator in the film industry, and he has worked with Malick in that capacity many times. I wasn’t aware that Lubezski wasn’t working on A Hidden Life going into it, but I immediately noticed that something was ever so slightly off about the cinematography. To be clear, the film is beautifully shot, and is gorgeous to behold, but as I watched it i just noticed things were a bit…different…than when Lubezki shoots a Malick film. Widmer’s cinematography was well-done but it lacked a bit of Lubizski’s precision and power.

The music in the film, by James Newton Howard, is haunting, extremely effective and deeply moving, as is the editing by Rehman Nizar Ali, Joe Gleason and Sebastian Jones.

The story of Franz Jagerstatter is the story of all of us living in the Eden of empire. We may enjoy our time in paradise but eventually, the corruption and spiritually corrosive nature of empire will seep into our Eden, and will soil it and spoil it. Then we will be faced with a choice…we can either decide to tell the Truth, or we can continue to lie, most notably, to ourselves. The road to Golgotha begins in Eden, with a stopover in Gethsemane, and we all eventually make that journey whether we want to or not. The difference between Franz Jagerstatter and the rest of us, is that he maintained his integrity and his humanity while he made that excruciating trip to judgement day. As the film ponders the “comfortable Christ”, a bourgeois creature created by the capitalists class that populates and animates American empire, that gives permission to the masses to live a soft and spiritually lazy existence, I couldn’t help but think to my own slovenly spirituality and its permissive banality. My flaccid Catholic education and the spiritually barren, co-opted by empire, Church that indoctrinated me with it, did not prepare me to live as profoundly and courageously as Franz Jagerstatter, never mind as Christ, so I have no doubt I would fail the same test he faced if put to it.

In conclusion, A Hidden Life, despite its few minor flaws, is must see for cinephiles, cinematically literate Catholics and Malick fans. For those with more conventional tastes, A Hidden Life is probably a bridge too far. I wish everyone would see this movie and could understand this movie as it speaks so insightfully to the time in which we live, but I am self-aware enough to understand that the cinematic language Malick speaks can be impenetrable to many, but glorious to those that can decipher it.

©2019

The Irishman: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

The Irishman, written by Steve Zaillian (based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt) and directed by Martin Scorsese, is the alleged true story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a truck driver out of Philadelphia who becomes a trusted member of the Italian mafia. The film stars Robert DeNiro as Sheeran, with supporting turns from Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.

Martin Scorsese is one of the true masters of American cinema, and so when he releases a new film cinephiles take notice. Scorsese’s newest project, The Irishman, is a Netflix film, which means it will have a very limited release in theatres in November before it settles in for the long haul on the streaming service at the end of the month.

Being the obnoxious purist that I am, I wanted to catch The Irishman in theatres so I decided to see the first show at 10:45 on Tuesday morning. I assumed the theatre would be just how I like it…sparsely populated. I mean who, besides a loser like me, goes to a movie on a Tuesday morning? Well…apparently there are a lot of losers in Los Angeles. I was stunned to see that my screening of The Irishman was jam-packed and nearly sold out, with only the first two rows of the theatre with empty seats. The film is supposedly only playing in two theatres here in Los Angeles, and luckily for me one of the two is my regular hang out. My screening was bursting with an interesting cross-section of people, from hipsters to the elderly to elderly hipsters.

What surprised me the most about such a large crowd was that the film runs three hours and thirty minutes, which makes it a prime candidate to watch in the comfort of your home where you can hit the pause button to take bathroom breaks and not miss any of the action. Such is the draw of Scorsese that audiences would put their bladders to the test and shell out money to see a film they could essentially see for free with unlimited bathroom breaks just a few weeks from now.

The Irishman is not so much a genre defining film as it is a genre closing film. Like Clint Eastwood’s eloquent tombstone on the grave of the western, Unforgiven, Scorsese gives us the mob movie that makes mob movies dramatically obsolete with The Irishman. Both Unforgiven and The Irishman burst the archetype and myth that animate them and replace it with the awkward, unwieldy and soul-crushing reality of the consequences of that myth.

Unlike its energetic and exuberant predecessor Goodfellas,The Irishman is a melancholy meditation, a profound existential prayer whispered into the abyss. Scorsese’s makeshift mob trilogy, which began with Goodfellas and continued with Casino, finds its weighty final chapter with the contemplative epic The Irishman, and reveals an introspective auteur coming to grips with mortality. The Irishman is a film obsessed with mortality, as death looms over every scene like an ominous storm cloud containing the relentlessly inevitable deluge of both physical and spiritual destruction and disintegration.

In Goodfellas and Casino, Scorsese sees the mob world as morally corrupt, but does so through a nostalgic lens…these guys may be bad but they are “good guys”, good-fellas. In The Irishman, as physical action turns to spiritual consequences, nostalgia is replaced with a plaintive reflection, so profound as to be akin to a sacramental confession.

The performances in The Irishman magnificently give life to Scorsese’s artistic contemplation, with Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci doing some of their very best work, and easily the best work of the last three decades of their careers.

DeNiro, with the assistance of a “de-aging” special effects technology, plays Frank Sheeran from his young adulthood into old age. DeNiro has not been this engaged, this sharp or this magnetic for a quarter of a century. DeNiro and Scorsese give Frank time and space, with which he is able to be still and contemplate his choices both in the moment and in hindsight. DeNiro sublimely fills these moments with a consequential aching, and his character with an acutely unconscious wound that gives Sheeran a complexity and profundity he is unable to grasp. DeNiro is now 76 and this performance may very well be his last hurrah as an actor, and it is a fitting monument to his colossal talent and extraordinary career.

Al Pacino has a supporting role and is absolutely fantastic. Caustically funny and desperately combustible, Pacino’s character (I won’t tell you his name so as not to spoil it) is a force of nature. Pacino imbues his character with a compulsion for control and a pulsating pride that make a toxic combination and undeniably dynamic viewing.

Joe Pesci is sublimely superb as the restrained and deliberate mob boss, Russ Buffalino. Pesci made his name playing frantically unhinged characters, but in The Irishman he shows off his mastery of craft. Pesci’s Buffalino is quiet and still, and yet because he fills his stillness and silence with an undeniable intentionality, he radiates an unnerving power. Pesci rightfully won the Best Supporting Actor for his work in Goodfellas, but his performance in The Irishman, while not as showy, is even better, as it is as layered and complex a piece of acting as you’ll find.

The de-aging technology used on DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci can be a little disorienting at first, and it takes some getting used to, but after the first few minutes you never even think of it. The one thing that is sort of odd about it is that the technology only de-ages their faces and not their bodies. So when a young and fresh faced DeNiro is beating the crap out of a guy on a sidewalk, he moves like a 76 year old man…like he is underwater…which is very strange to see.

The Irishman is epic is scope and scale, and it covers some 40 or 50 years of time. As previously stated, the film has a run time of three hours and thirty minutes, and I can tell you that the film is so engrossing and captivating, that not once during that three hours and thirty minutes did I mentally or physically check out. The same was true of the other people in my screening as bathroom breaks were minimal and phone checking was non-existent…which is extremely rare nowadays.

The long running time is a good sign because it means that this is Scorsese’s film, untouched by the filthy hands of studio execs or money people. Piece of Shit Hall of Famer Harvey Weinstein once famously demanded that Scorsese cut 45 minutes off of Gangs of New York and the film was immensely harmed by those cuts. The same is true of Silence, which Paramount demanded be cut for time, and also seriously suffered because of it. When studios meddle they always and every time fuck it up, this is why Netflix matters, because unlike other studios they don’t meddle and they don’t chase the short-end money of box office bravado, they let artists be artists.

Netflix is important too because without them The Irishman never gets made. The other studios passed on the film and its hefty price tag of $160 million, and so Netflix was the studio of last resort. Scorsese would no doubt prefer to have a long theatrical run with his film, but I bet he is quite pleased he made the trade-off of reduced theatrical run in exchange for Netflix letting him make the movie he wanted to make. Just more proof that the studios and theatres are fucked…they have no vision and no balls…and they will deservedly go down in flames.

The real question regarding The Irishman is not whether you should see it, you obviously should as it is one of the very best films of the year, but where you should see it. For cinephiles, I do recommend you make the effort to see it in the theatre, as it is beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese’s cinematographer on The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence, with a subdued color palette, exquisite framing and deliriously gorgeous but subtle cameras movement. The film is also expertly edited by Thelma Schoonmakert who seamlessly keeps the film’s dramatic pacing on target while also allowing it to breathe. But for regular folks who are not as concerned about those things as I am…I think they can avoid the theatrical gauntlet and wait until The Irishman hits Netflix at the end of November and watch the movie at their leisure with the pause button at the ready when nature calls.

The Irishman is a powerful film that is the very best work of the second half of Scorsese’s career. While it is difficult to predict what the always erratic Academy Awards will do, I think it is a safe bet to say that The Irishman will at least garner a plethora of nominations. I think it will be nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (both Pesci and Pacino), Best Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), and Best Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker). In my opinion the film is certainly worthy of all of those awards…but there are other worthy films this year too, so we will see.

In conclusion, I have not revealed much about The Irishman’s plot or characters because I knew little about them when I saw the film and thought that enhanced my viewing experience. I have a lot of thoughts on the movie, its politics (oh boy do I have thoughts!!), its sub-text and its symbolism, but I will hold off on sharing those thoughts for now because they are potential spoilers. Once I have seen the film again and it is running on Netflix, I’ll write more in depth about it.

The bottom line regarding The Irishman is this…it is a phenomenal film well worth the time commitment to see. If you have the time and the bladder control, see it in a theatre, if not wait until you can watch it at home come November 27. Regardless of when or where you see it, see it, and enjoy one of the greatest film makers of all time as he wrestles with his legacy and his mortality.

©2019

Martin Scorsese - Top Five Films

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 57 seconds

Despite an abysmal winter, spring and most of the summer, 2019 is actually shaping up to be a good year for cinema. The first ray of sunshine came in the form of Quentin Tarantino’s wish fulfillment ode to Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Then the cultural hurricane known as Joker came along and sent the woke brigade and the impotent cuckolds in the establishment media into a full blown panic before most ever even saw it. When the Joker finally made landfall it was an insightful and electrifying artistic nuclear explosion at the center of the comic book genre that has dominated the box office and the culture wars.

Now that Halloween has come and gone, cinematic master Martin Scorsese has a new film, The Irishman, hitting theatres, and shortly thereafter hitting Netflix, that is generating massive Oscar buzz. This will be followed by another enigmatic auteur, Terrence Malick, who has a new film, A Hidden Life, coming out this December.

With Tarantino, Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick in the mix, it is a good time time be a cinephile…and since Scorsese’s new film came out last Friday and I haven’t seen it yet, it is also a good time for me to rank his top five films.

Scorsese is the most important film maker of his generation and maybe the most important American film maker of all time. Unlike Spielberg and his popcorn movies, Scorsese hasn’t padded his wallet with his work but instead advanced the art of cinema. Nearly every single film and filmmaker of note over the last 40 years has used Scorsese’s artistic palette to paint their own works. His use of dynamic camera movement, popular music and unorthodox storytelling structures and styles have become requisite and foundational film making skills. Scorsese didn’t invent cinema, but he did invent a new style of it that did not exist prior to his rise to prominence in the 1970’s, and that is why he is the most unique of auteurs.

Scorsese’s filmography can be split in two, with 1997’s Kundun being the end of the first half of his film making career, and 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead being the beginning of the latter part of his career. The first half of his career is staggeringly impressive, as he jumped genres with ease. Films as diverse as the gritty Taxi Driver, the musical New York, New York, the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, the remake of Cape Fear, the enigmatic sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money, and his biography of the Dalai Lama, Kundun, showcase Scorsese’s cinematic versatility.

The second half of his career has shown Scorsese to have lost a few miles per hour off his fastball and to have been brow beaten by the studios into making more mainstream fare. 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead was awful, most notably because Scorsese fell under the then popular spell of acting charlatan Nicholas Cage. Gangs of New York had similarly bad casting decisions, such as Cameron Diaz, no doubt encouraged by meddling money people…like Harvey Weinstein, who also took a gigantic shit on Scorsese’s vision of the film by demanding he cut 45 minutes off the running time. Other notable films from this period are The Aviator, Shutter Island and Hugo, all of which are less Scorsese films than they are studio films made by Scorsese.

Scorsese’s lone Academy Award win for Best Director came during this period with the film The Departed. The Departed is an ok movie, but it definitely feels more like a knock-off of a Scorsese film than an actual Scorsese film. It also feels like it could have been directed by anybody, which is more an indictment of the movie than and endorsement of the movie making.

The first half of Scorsese’s career is highlighted by his frequent collaborations with Robert DeNiro, and the second half by his frequent collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio. If you’re looking for any greater piece of evidence that Scorsese is no longer at his peak, look no further than that fact. DiCaprio is a fine actor, but he is no Robert DeNiro, as DeNiro in his heyday was as good an actor as we have ever seen.

That said, Scorsese has made some great films in the second half of his career…as my list will attest…and who knows, maybe The Irishman will be worthy of inclusion. I am definitely looking forward to seeing it.

Now without further delay…onto the the list of Martin Scorsese’s “five” best films!

5C - Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Wolf of Wall Street sneaks onto the list because it is uproariously funny while also being socially and politically insightful. In the face of the grotesque corruption so evident on Wall Street and in Washington, it was nice to see Scorsese focus his talents on the decadence and depravity that are the soul of American capitalism. It also helps that this is the only time the DiCaprio collaboration works, as Leo does the best work of his career as Jordan Belfort.

5B - Casino (1995) - Casino is an often often overlooked gem in Scorsese’s filmography. The film may have suffered from “Scorsese fatigue” as it appeared to tread on the same “mob” ground his recent masterpiece Goodfellas (1991). Casino is an indulgent masterwork in its own right, as Scorsese tells the story of how the west was won, and lost, by the Italian mafia, who were replaced by the corporate mafia. The film showcases some stellar performances from DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.

5A - Silence (2016) - Silence is the very best film of the second half of his career…so far. Scorsese has always carried a Catholic cross bearing a tortured Christ on it throughout most of his films, and Silence is a tantalizing glimpse at the muse that has haunted Scorsese his entire artistic life. Silence is an ambitious film, and it doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions, but it still is great. One thing that I felt hampered the film was that it also was the victim of cuts for time, which is frustrating as Silence is a rare film in that it runs 160 minutes but deserved, and needed, to run at least another 45 minutes. Secondly, Scorsese once again falls for artistic fool’s gold by casting this generations Nicholas Cage, the mystifyinly popular Adam Driver.

4. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)- Speaking of Scorsese’s Catholicism…The Last Temptation of Christ hit theatres while I was attending Catholic high school, and you would’ve thought that Satan himself had put the movie out. Students were read a statement by the diocese imploring us not to see the movie because it was blasphemous and viewing it would guarantee a one-way trip to eternal damnation. Obviously, I responded to this warning by rushing out and seeing the film as quickly as I could…and I am glad I did (and I’m still Catholic!). The Catholic Church’s fear over this film was so absurd as to be laughable, and this is only heightened by the fact that the film is the most spiritually vibrant and resonant depiction of Christ ever captured on film.

3. The Age of Innocence (1993) - The Age of Innocence is the most un-Scorsese of Scorsese films, as it tackles romantic intrigue among the austere world of Edith Wharton’s 1870’s New York. In many ways The Age of Innocence is a massive cinematic flex by Scorsese as he shows off his directorial versatility and exquisite film making skill. While the casting of Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer were hurdles to overcome, Scorsese does so and in magnificent fashion as The Age of Innocence is an exercise in dramatic and cinematic precision.

2. The King of Comedy (1982)- The King of Comedy is a piece of cinematic gold that accurately and insightfully diagnoses America’s star-fueled, delusional culture. The film is highlighted by Robert DeNiro, who gives an unnervingly committed and forceful performance as Rupert Pupkin, the celebrity obsessed comic wannabe who tries to get his big break by any means necessary.

The King of Comedy crackles because Scorsese creates a palpable sense of claustrophobic desperation that permeates every scene in the movie. The film is genuinely funny but uncomfortably unsettling and undeniably brilliant.

1C - Raging Bull (1980) - The top three films here could be in any order as all of them are undeniable masterpieces and the height of cinematic achievement. Raging Bull, the black and white look at former Middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, is a tour-de-force from not only the film’s star Robert DeNiro, who won a Best Actor Oscar, but from Martin Scorsese, who brings all of his cinematic skills to bear on the most cinematic of sports, boxing.

Scorsese uses LaMotta’s story to explore the meaning of masculinity, its incessant fragility and its inherent volatility. While Scorsese does masterful work bringing LaMotta’s battles inside the ring to exquisite life, his most brilliant film making achievement is in illuminating LaMotta’s most imposing fight, the one raging inside of himself.

1B - Taxi Driver - Taxi Driver once again shows both Scorsese and DeNiro at the very top of their game. The film perfectly captures the madness of New York City in the 1970’s, and the spiraling madness of a delusional loner who is the modern day everyman.

Scorsese’s camera rides along a taxi cab as it ventures through the gritty streets and bares witness to the sick and venal society that produces pimps, whores and politicians, and we get to know Travis Bickle, who is the rain that will wash these filthy streets clean.

A simply astonishing film in every respect. Not just one of Scorsese’s greatest films, but one of the greatest films of all-time.

1A - Goodfellas - Goodfellas is a not only a monumental cinematic achievement, it is also a fantastically entertaining and eminently rewatchable masterpiece. Over the last thirty years, whenever I have stumbled across Goodfellas playing on cable, I will always and everytime stop and watch whatever scene is on, and 9 times out of 10, will end up watching the rest of the movie.

A terrific cast that boasts superb performances from Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, turns this film about New York gangsters, into a familiar and familial tale that everyone can relate to in one way or another. The New York of Goodfellas, is the New York of my youth, and those populating that world are my Irish family…all of them. In my family there’s a Paulie, a Henry, a Jimmy and everyone knows a Tommy. These guys are my uncles and their friends and cousins, and their wives are my aunts. Watching Goodfellas is like watching a home movie for me.

The film teems with iconic scenes and sequences, from entering the Copa to the “Layla” dead bodies sequence to “hoof” to “go get your shine box” to “what do you want fucko?” to “funny how? I mean, funny like a clown? I amuse you?” I can’t get enough of Goodfellas, as I’ve probably seen the movie at least 100 times, and I’ve discovered something new every time I’ve seen it.

Scorsese has made many masterpieces, but Goodfellas is his most entertaining masterpiece, and is a testament and monument to his greatness.

More proof of Scorsese’s genius is that I had many, many films that I love sit just on the outside of my top “five”…such as Mean Streets, The Color of Money, Cape Fear and Kundun, and they stand up to most other makers very best work.

And thus concludes my Scorsese top “five”…which is really a top nine, because Scorsese, the consummate rule breaking director, deserves a list that breaks the rules. So go forth and watch as much Scorsese as you can, and let’s hope that The Irishmen lives up to the hype!

©2019