The Irishman Is Like No Other Gangster Movie Scorsese Has Ever Made

Early on in The Irishman, the film's titular lead character, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), recounts a story about his time serving in World War II where he held two enemy soldiers at gunpoint while they dug their own graves. Sheeran, while telling this tale, puzzles over why the two soldiers were doing this task. "Did they think that, if they did a good enough job, they would be let go?" he ponders. Whatever drove them to dig those graves, it really didn't matter in the end, they ended up as corpses in the ground. Such a tale ends up being a parallel for the overarching story of Martin Scorsese's epic crime saga The Irishman, which is all about gangsters like Sheeran digging their own graves while ignoring the inevitable doom that awaits them.

Casino Is More Than Just Another Scorsese Gangster Movie

While I've already penned up some thoughts on Martin Scorsese's Casino over on TheSpool as part of the website's Martin Scorsese Month (hey, that's promotion!), there's so much to say about this motion picture that my response to it cannot be contained to just one article. Over here on Land of the Nerds, let's turn our gaze back to Casino, a movie that was widely declared at the time of its release to be merely the reheated leftover pizza to Goodfellas' fresh-out-of-the-wooden-oven pizza. True, Casino is no Goodfellas, but then, what is? Goodfellas is a massively high bar to clear, and even other Scorsese gangster movies shouldn't be held exclusively to measuring up to that one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

Raging Bull Refuses To Box Its Character Into Conventional Sports Movie Narratives

My favorite part about Martin Scrosese's work is how much is bubbling underneath the surface of his works. Taxi Driver captures the post-Vietnam angst of an entire generation looking for a hero in an incredibly dangerous and psychotic way while The Wolf Of Wall Street provides an unflinching look at 21st century corruption. Something like Silence could fill multiple essays with its subtext and underlying ideas. For Raging Bull, there's admittedly not quite as much going on beneath the surface (it's very much a typical "Career victory leads to personal destruction" tale) but it's still quite the riveting tale, no doubt about that.

Goodfellas Is A 145 Minute Reminder Of Why Martin Scorsese Is A Cinematic Legend

There was this odd phenomenon when The Wolf Of Wall Street came out three years ago regarding many commentators feeling that the movie was explicitly endorsing the various nasty deeds its lead character commits. Art is subjective and all that, so if that's your takeaway from the film, that's fair. Personally though, I'd say The Wolf Of Wall Street very much makes it clear that Jordan Belfort is a very bad man, one that the movie wants you to gawk at while seeing how much this real-life guy was able to get away with in his time of swindling and debauchery. Scorsese's whole point with that 2013 effort is for the viewer to come away with how delusional Belfort was as a human being; despite all the Quaallades and obvious wrongdoings he was committing, he still saw himself as untouchable, above the common world.

Home Alone Is Mildly Inconsistent, But Surprisingly Effective Yuletide Cinema

Welcome to 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

I see a lot of people talking about how movies were better "back in the day", which always makes my eyes roll. People have always wanted good storytelling when they go to the cinema, that's never changed. Frankly, I'd actually say the years top movies are indeed better than they used to be. The past few years top features have included The Avengers, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Dark Knight and Toy Story 3, all excellent films. Bizarrely, the biggest movie of 1990 was not Goodfellas or Awakenings, but rather Home Alone.