Watched this last night and gotta say...3 hours and 30 minutes was WAY too short. Never felt slow and dragging, I was absolutely mesmerized by De Niro, Pesci and Pacino. All on top of their game, as Scorsese was too. I know they would have never agreed to do something like this, but would have been fantastic if they made this a 10-episode miniseries or something. I honestly didn't want it to end, never looked at the time or anything. Devastates me that this is probably the last great thing we will get from all four.
One of the things about this movie that's stuck with me the most is the scene where De Niro and Pesci are eating bread dipped in grape juice in the prison. I know it's supposed to parallel the earlier scene where they're dipping bread in wine, but I also couldn't help but feel like it was a distorted echo of the prison scene in Goodfellas, where they're cooking gourmet Italian dinners with razor-sliced garlic and fresh loaves of bread. The bleakness of the prison scenes in this movie was so much more affecting when remembering that context.
It is number one. We are fortunate that all of these people lived healthy enough lives to still be around to produce something like it. That type of filmmaking might never be seen again.
Both this and Once Upon A Time are movies where I think I appreciate them as artistic achievements more than I actually enjoy watching them
this is kinda where i'm at. could see this being #1 for me in another year, but with the films we have, it's closer to 4-6 for me.
I still haven't seen a few big ones from last year (Parasite, The Lighthouse, High Life, Ad Astra, and more), but The Irishman remains the best movie of 2019 that I saw, easily.
I still need to see Little Women, Ad Astra and Knives out but it seems like this will be hard to beat so far
Parasite is my favorite of the year and I’d put Little Women slightly above this. That being said I’ve seen them all only once. Everything could change with a second viewing.
I have a basically a huge list of top movies for 2019 that I can’t pick between for the top spot, at least five or six clumped together for sure. This is one of those.
Most directors seem really unlikable but Scorsese's passion for movies and general kindness is very rare. He is the @iCarly Rae Jepsen of directors.
seen it a number of times now and the duration really rewards repeated viewings as it feels like a reckoning, I love what reverse shot wrote about it: "Its duration sculpts a textural purgatory: he and Thelma Schoonmaker make its running time both a narrative thrill and a spiritual reckoning"