Scorsese And Gangster Cinema Collided For The First Time On Mean Streets

With The Irishman dropping on Netflix streaming this coming Wednesday, now seems like a fine time to look back at the very first time Martin Scorsese directed a gangster picture. Granted, his second feature film, Boxcar Bertha, had heavy crime movie elements to it too, but that was a romantic drama first and foremost. Mean Streets is 110% a gangster crime vehicle, the kind of movie Scorsese would go back to multiple times in his career. Despite being a recurring genre stop for him, Scorsese manages to make sure each of his crime films are different from one another, The Departed is not the exact same movie as Casino, for example.

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.

Heat's Character Scenes Are Only OK But Its Heist Sequences Are Sublime

Before they worked together on The Irishman and Righteous Kill, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro's first big post-Godfather: Part II collaboration was the Michael Mann feature Heat. There's a reason pairing these two up together for a movie holds a lot of appeal beyond just tying into residual nostalgia for the second Godfather movie, these are two of the most acclaimed American actors of all-time, who wouldn't want to see them join forces for a motion picture? It's like asking if you want Kacey Musgraves and Carley Rae Jepsen to collaborate on a track, the answer is an obvious yes. The pairing of De Niro and Pacino in Heat specifically adds another industry titan into the mix in the form of director Michael Mann.

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.

With A Story And Cast This Good, No Wonder Jackie Brown Is So Thoroughly Entertaining

We all know how much Quentin Tarantino loves making movies that extensively pay homage to genres of cinema that proved highly influential to him while also putting his own spin on said genres, it's his own trademark as a filmmaker. While I've heard Jackie Brown frequently referred to as Tarantino doing a homage to blaxploitation cinema of the 1970's, I wouldn't quite classify it as occupying that specific region of filmmaking beyond the font used for the title and of course the casting of Pam Grier in the titular lead role. Like another 1990's movie I reviewed recently, Miller's Crossing, Jackie Brown actually skews closer to 1940's movies like The Big Sleep involving a lead character of questionable morals trying to keep their head above water among numerous intersecting storylines.

Stardust Is A Good Old Fashioned Fantasy Romp And A Highly Entertaining One At That!

Among his numerous hallmarks as a director, Matthew Vaughn loves to play fast and loose with the comic books and graphic novels he adapts into movies. More often than not, Vaughn will basically just run with the core concept of what he's adapting into a film to better suit his own interests and desires most notably in turning Mark Millar's grim Kingsman graphic novel into a breezy Bond homage. Even X-Men: First Class, his feature most faithful to its source material, took liberties with what it was adapting and this tendency of Vaughn's is on full display in his first ever directorial effort, Stardust, an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman graphic novel that's far more family-friendly than its source material.

Two Acting Legends Can't Salvage The Disastrous Crime Thriller Righteous Kill

Let's not beat around the bush here, in the 21st century, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have both been known to star in some crummy movies. That can be mostly chalked up to how, when you work as an actor consistently for over four decades, you're bound to show up in some dud movies, that's just the law of averages at work, but it can also be attributed to how both Pacino and especially De Niro have taken a lot of roles in subpar movies looking to either lampoon or ride the coattails of the duo's groundbreaking work in the 1970s, work so exquisite that even a billion movies as bad as Righteous Kill couldn't dilute their quality, though this 2008 disaster that unites Pacino and De Niro certainly tries its hardest to do just that.

Few Sequels Are As Amazing As The Captivating The Godfather: Part II

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #38
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #31 (Tied witb Taxi Driver)   

For years, I've heard the usual picks of when people say best sequels; The Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, and of course, The Godfather: Part II. That 1974 Francis Ford Coppola has been held up as the paragon of sequel filmmaking for decades now and getting to actually watch it for the first time totally made me realize why The Godfather: Part II is held up in such high stature in discussions of cinema. This thing not only manages to surpass the quality of its already incredible predecessor but it also does a remarkable job of enhancing the world established by the first movie by lending a sweeping mythic quality to the Corleone crime syndicate.

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.

Martin Scorsese's Next Film Is Going To Netflix!

Yes, you read that headline right! Martin Scorsese, the filmmaker behind some of the most influential American films of the last 40 years, will have his next film, The Irishman (which stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino) debut straight to Netflix, as it appears Paramount Pictures, which is in the middle of an upheaval, has decided not to take the major risk of simply distributing the film domestically. Thus, Netflix is in the process of securing worldwide rights to the title, with this pairing offering a paradigm shift for Hollywood.

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.

Joy Review

Now that Jennifer Lawrence is free of her Hunger Games and  X-Men commitments, I'm super curious to see what projects she undertakes next. She apparently wants to try her hand at directing (following in the footsteps of other A-list actors who go behind the camera like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie Pitt and Clint Eastwood), but I do hope her future efforts have more substance to them than her latest starring vehicle, Joy, a noble but ultimately underwhelming film devoid of energy and personality.

The Intern Review

To say me and The Intern got off on the wrong foot is a gross understatement. For the first few minutes of this movie, I was pretty much certain I would despite this feature, mainly because the only thing the film was serving up in these early scenes were vapid jokes about the age disparity between the titular intern, Ben, played by Robert De Niro, and his far, far younger co-workers. The moment Ben told his 20-something interviewer he used to work for a phone book printing company, I knew just what the tired as hell punchline was and please Lord, get me out of this movie.