It’s another very long one. And I can’t say I enjoyed it an awful lot.
The story is suitably epic in nature, spanning the demise and rise of the Dead Rabbits gang of Irish immigrant New Yorkers in the 1860s. We have poor troubled Leonardo di Caprio butting heads with Daniel Day Lewis’ ’the butcher’ - an unrelentingly nasty, greasy, sneering gang leader. The period look and the grimy feel are done incredibly well, and it’s getting bits of the geography of New York filtered through the lens of mid-19th century rioters.
But? Well its long. Very long. And those impressively nasty, grimy characters? They just keep on being so. And on. And on. Whereas last week’s film tag, Cloud Atlas packed story after story into its nearly-three-hours, here Scorsese really only has one story to tell. I like a good bit of bloody violence and gratuitous cruelty, but was pretty tired of this by the time the end rolled around.
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This is an ambitious one. I feel like I’d have hated it in the cinema but did actually quite enjoy it at home.
In David Mitchell’s novel, which I remember really enjoying, the parallel stories are told in a pyramid-fashion: you start with the oldest, moving forwards in time and then it all cascades backwards again, until you finish up with the end of the oldest story. Someone decided (probably correctly) that this would feel a bit weird in film - too much like an anthology of separate stories - and instead has jumbled the stories all together. We cut from colonial-era shipping to future revolutions in New Seoul and back again. It’s a little disorientating but if you sit back and let it was over you its quite fun. The recurring cast, popping up again and again with face-altering prosthetics is great fun.
This was the Wachowskis’ next major project after the Matrix sequels and writing the screenplay for V for Vendetta, so I can sort of imagine how this felt a bit flat. It’s epic in scale but never really quite goes anywhere. I suspect this is something that a book handles much better - the sense that the journey was more important than the destination - but at the end of 3 hours of film you’re sort of left wondering what the point of it all was.
So yeah, ambitious, quite good fun, lots of silly costumes. Not bad.
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I’m not sure this one was worth digging out to watch. It’s a light-hearted rom-com-with-mafia-boss-parents. I can just about imagine enjoying it on a listless afternoon at the cinema with a massive tub of popcorn. Or a post-pub video rental, which you mostly tak through…
Huge Grunt is a well-to-do auctioneer. His partner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, is a schoolteacher. But her dad? James Caan is a mob boss. And whilst the family (or, rather, The Family) welcome Hugh with open arms, they’re pretty soon getting him mixed up in all sorts of mob capers.
It’s a bit thin. Coming hot on the heels of The Godfather it was always going to be. But even so… eeesh.
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It’s a classic. I’d never seen it. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
First things, it’s a pretty enjoyable story that rattles along at a fair pace. It’s a long film but it doesn’t really feel like it, which is impressive. The first half (two-thirds?) is great. Marlon Brando’s weary Godfather, and then the tensions between cool-headed Tommy and angry Sonny are all gripping. Al Pacino’s return to assume the family throne lost me a bit though - the last chunk was still decent but never really grabbed me in the same way.
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This was more enjoyable than it felt like it ought to be. The accents were grating, the characters mostly rich and unlikeable but … it had a certain charm. The first half, where we follow Adam Driver and Lady Gaga’s ascent into the Gucci business is much better than the messy second half which races through time increasingly quickly. Not that it should have been any longer.
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