The Untouchables (1987)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, Robert De Niro

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure*.

Did I Like It: I’ve been on a bit of a gangster movie kick as of late, having watched all of The Godfather films recently**, and Lora has taken to dismissing them as “Pacino De Niro Scarface movies.” I don’t know if I’d be willing to back up that assertion, but she came in and out of the room while I was watching the film, and eventually summed up her criticism of stray scenes by saying: “This film is kind of corny.”

Here, she might be on to something. Throw out a couple of truly tension-filled scenes (and even those are cribbed from Eisenstein; it’s not a vice to go watch a silent movie, folks) and there’s a movie occasionally fixated on being strangely old-fashioned. The question then becomes is that quality an earnest attempt to bring the movies back to something resembling a cop show from the 50s? Or is it a stealth commentary on that earnestness so present during those older days? I’m tempted to lean towards the latter. How could we not chuckle at a scene where Ness (Costner) and his wife (Patricia Clarkson, in her feature debut) muse about naming their new infant son after J. Edgar Hoover? Then again, how can we not collectively roll our eyes in any scene of domestic bliss when Morricone’s score positively groans under the weight of its sentimentality?

Then again, how could a movie—if even occasionally—screw up the use of a Morricone score? Is it possible I don’t like this movie… No. I do. I do.

I struggle mightily with expressing why I don’t mind all of those problems, but I don’t.

*I was definitely tempted at that moment to impart an anecdote where I once made a political speech based mostly on quotes from Sean Connery in this film. I won’t tell that story but will say: Don’t do that, but if you do, don’t worry about it. Hardly anyone will get it.

**Director’s cut on Part III, I’m not an animal.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons

Have I Seen it Before: nope, and as I type this, neither have you. I managed to finagle my way into a press screening on Wednesday. I even had a notion to finish the review before the film was officially released on Friday, but…

Did I Like It: I honestly needed a bit of time to really come to a reasonable opinion about the film. The phrase “this is Scorsese’s best movie since Goodfellas (1990)” (including the obligatory citation of the year of the film) kept wandering through my head. One does not want to lean to closely on hyperbole, but:

This is Scorsese’s best movie since Goodfellas (1990). I’ve liked everything he’s done, as he is the only guardian angel left of the movies, it seems. People like to turn their nose up at The Departed (2006), but I loved the hell out of that movie. I’d even be willing to watch the first two-thirds of New York Stories (1989) if the opportunity presented itself, I even enjoyed The Irishman (2019), despite violating the rules of how we were all supposed to take in the film as I watched it in pieces on my phones when I had the time.

Here, too, we are asked for something of a time commitment, as the film clocks in at 3 hours 45 minutes, but there’s not a moment where this feels like it is asking too much from us. The performances are pitch-perfect throughout, with Gladstone and Plemons being revelations. It is unflinching. It is upsetting. There is a stretch (largely after Plemons character enters the film) that it becomes one of film’s greatest absurdist tragicomedies. It all ends in a sequence you will likely never see coming, but from which you will come away thinking it was the absolute perfect way to drive the themes home and to wrap up the storylines.

It’s everything you could want from a Scorsese movie, and it manages to surprise you throughout. Go see it as soon as possible, and do so on the big screen. If for no other reason than there is very little of the year left, I can’t possibly fathom a scenario in which this is not my favorite film of the year.

Heat (1995)

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer

Have I Seen it Before: No.

Did I Like It: I think for the most part, sure. It is perhaps the seminal crime movie of its age, having an indelible influence on the works of Christopher Nolan, especially The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010)*. In a way that only filmmaker like Mann—and later Nolan—could, the film captures crime and law enforcement in a simultaneously epic and believable way. 

De Niro and Pacino have shown up to work in the film, and indeed it is the last example I can readily come up with where it didn’t seem like they were just showing up on set to pick up a check. Pacino might be particularly amped up to the peak of his late-stage-rage, but that can be fun to watch in the proper context. The rest of the cast, too, is at their best, with even bit parts being inhabited by actors I would watch do other things, all performing at the top of their game. Although it’s hard to watch Hank Azaria do much while I’ve been doing a Simpsons re-watch and not think of the character work he has done there.

But there is just something about the work of Mann that skips over the virtues and keeps everything from being as great as it might be. There’s a mannered, fashionable quality to his films. It keeps Manhunter (1986) from joining the pantheon of other great, Hannibal Lecter adaptations. It kept Public Enemies (2009) from being watchable beyond a sleep aid. Here, you have bank robbery sequences that are as good as anything ever committed to film. The tension never lets up, and never a second is wasted. Then, you have longer music interludes that seem soggy. Composer Elliot Goldenthal can do action music better than anyone, but his emotional beats just don’t work. See Batman Forever (1995) for other examples of Val Kilmer films from 1995 which suffered a similar fate. There are scenes of characters talking around but not to their significant others that feel like they were filmed on a cheap set instead of a real city. 

Then again, that may just be the way L.A. is. 

Those take me right out of the film, but you can’t fault the film for working when it does, because at those moments it is transcendent.

*Seriously, take away the dream-based science fantasy of that later film, and Inception practically is a remake of Heat. For that matter, there’s a reason Willima Fichtner plays the banker. I’ll let you decide which movie I’m talking about.

Jackie Brown (1997)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro

Have I Seen it Before: Yes.

Did I Like It: But that’s the interesting thing. I don’t think it would be a terribly controversial opinion to call this Tarantino’s least memorable film. It’s certainly a different type of film from Tarantino’s other projects. It’s more linear than anything else from him, with the plot unfolding form A to B to C in such a coherent order (until the third act, a little bit) that if it weren’t for the close up of ladies feet, one would be forgiven for not realizing Tarantino is directing at all. It’s the only adaptation Tarantino has done—from a novel by Elmore Leonard—but I’m still a little bit surprised that the story of Jackie (Grier) didn’t get thrown into the Tarantino narrative blender.

But, that’s not a bad thing, the lack of memorability and relative anonymity of it all. I’ve watched Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019) about a half a dozen times in the year since its release. It’s terrific, naturally, but the little moments and touches of the film that make Tarantino have become quite familiar over such a short amount of time. The same can be said about Pulp Fiction (1994) and either of the Kill Bill films. So, it’s an extra treat to rediscover this movie every once in a while. It’s almost like getting a new Tarantino movie every once in a while when you really weren’t expecting one. It may not meet some of the delirious highs of some of his other films, but even with its minor status, I can’t readily think of a better film from 1997.

Plus, Michael Keaton is in the movie, and frequent readers of this space know I’m prepared to give any movie a pass if Michael Keaton is in it.

The Irishman (2019)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Romano

Have I Seen it Before: No, but it took several days to get through the film. So, yes I went against Scorsese’s wishes and watched it essentially as a miniseries, and I watched it almost exclusively on my phone. I’m not sure Scorsese gets to dictate the terms in which his films are watched anymore.

Which brings us to his recent comments about current popular filmmaking, specifically those films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He dismisses them as not really cinema, and even went so far as to say that they shouldn’t be shown in cinemas.

Is it possible to disagree with him, and not blame him for having the opinion in the first place.

If I were Scorsese, and I had made a career out of a litany of prestige films, the shifting of the movie business to favor what would have been B-movie material during his formative and prime years would feel a little disconcerting. It means that his material of choice is now receiving the resources of B productions.

Thankfully, he is still getting the resources—if not the exhibition he once had—to tell the kind of stories he wants to tell.

Did I Like It:  Oh, I guess you came to this review wondering about that part. Sure. What’s not to love? Pacino and De Niro taking a swing at not slumming it for the first time in what feels like forever? Scorsese working in the genre that made his bones, so to speak? The long-prophesied return of Joe Pesci? Hell, make the movie six hours next time. I’ll show up. One might quibble with the under-utilized Anna Paquin—and even I’m a little befuddled by her near-prop status—but it is a minor quibble with an otherwise ornate tapestry of mob goodness. It feels elegiac, but I think that is a remark on De Niro’s character, and its stretching to apply it to Scorsese himself. I think he’s got plenty of great films still left within him.

Now if only he could get the same kind of presence in cinemas as some of the Marvel movies, maybe we could all get along again and enjoy watching De Niro shoot people in the face.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepard, Albert Brooks

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. They’re coming to take my official film snob membership card as I type this.

Did I like it?: It’s an experience, but I’d have to be a certain kind of person (read: Hinckley) to say I really enjoyed it.

The movie is such an insistent attempt to make a film that eschews the usual trappings of Hollywood entertainment, but Bernard Hermann’s score (his last, he passed away before the wide release of the film) bubbles through the movie. If you were only listening to the proceedings instead of watching, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a romantic comedy in the early goings. Between that and the whole cowboy motif and homages to The Searchers (1956) it’s hard not to see this movie as the story of a man—and perhaps a culture at large—warped by exposure to cowboy stories that never fully came to grips with the violence that surrounds them.

And then there’s that ending. 

I’m so constantly annoyed by the rash of youtube videos “explaining” the ending of like, every film released. They’re boring bordering on odious. I don’t need an explanation of Joker (2019). It’s pretty straight ahead, if wobbly. For that matter, why would anyone need the ending of a movie like Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) explained. Most—if not all—current movies are as straight ahead in their proceedings as your basic fairy tale.

But I digress. I’ll be damned if at the end of this movie I didn’t want to rush to the internet and have the true nature of our final moments with Bickle spoon-fed to me. Thankfully—blissfully, even—there is no concrete answer. Both Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader acknowledge the interpretation that after Bickle guns down the gangsters, synapses fire in his mind for the last time and he imagines a world where he ended up a hero, but maintain that their intension was to display the irony of a monster like their main character slipping into a hero’s role purely by luck, with the knowledge that he will be nowhere near that lucky the next time. I like that version of the ending better; it inflames the imagination.

Joker (2019)

Director: Todd Phillips

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy

Have I Seen It Before?: That’s the real question, isn’t it?

Did I like it?: Wow, just the one-two punch with the really tough questions, huh?

I had a temptation to write two separate reviews for this movie, one unrelentingly positive, the other abjectly negative. The film had spawned so many hot takes even before its wide release that adding anything to the discourse started to feel like a mix of disingenuous and redundant.

There is a fundamental flaw in the idea of trying to explain the Joker. Part of his disturbing appeal lies in the fact that he eschews origin. The comics are steadfastly bumfuzzled as to where The Joker even has a name. Alan Moore’s superlative The Killing Joke even casts a vote for the notion that The Joker himself can’t even remember how he became like this (a notion hinted at by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight [2008]). Trying to explain who he is by giving him a name and a series of events to go wrong to push him into murderous clowning takes away from the essential spark of the character.

Before you start, yes, I know Batman (1989) tried to give similar dimension to the character by way of Jack Nicholson, but I’m allowed to love a movie despite its flaws. I’m allowed to live with some contradictions.

There is no way this film would work even fitfully if it weren’t for Suicide Squad (2016) and Jared Leto. Much as it pains me to give credit to Leto for anything outside of Dallas Buyers Squad (2013), but that ill-considered adventure effectively nullified the question of should anyone play this character after Heath Ledger’s mesmerizing turn. So, thanks, Jared. As it stands Phoenix gives a performance to rival—although I think I will land on not-quite surpass—Ledger’s. He certainly has committed to the part (far more than others associated with the movie committed to their roles, but I’m getting ahead of myself), and the anguish he contorts his face into during his flare ups of pathological laughter add a dimension to the character at a time when one would have been forgiven for assuming that there was nothing left to mine in the Clown Prince of Crime.

The sequence where Arthur/Joker (Phoenix) finally arrives on the panel of Murray Franklin’s (De Niro) talk show is about as good as any handful of minutes of Jokerdom from Cesar Romero to the present. The tension is palpable. The movie itself wants to telegraph the punch that Arthur will kill himself live on TV, Budd Dwyer-style. Anyone who’s read The Dark Knight Returns had to have been like me, and wondering how he was going to kill everyone in that television studio. When he puts a slug in De Niro’s face and chest, it’s genuinely surprising.

I wish I could say as much for the rest of the film. The clown’s uprising spreads throughout Gotham on that same evening, culminating in—you guessed it—the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. If I have to see that woman drop her pearls on a wet alleyway one more time, I think I may lose my mind. Including the TV series Gotham this is the sixth—count it, sixth—time I’ve had to watch that same exact scene, and there really aren’t a lot of ways to stage those events.

It’s the first crumbling piece in the façade that is the entire movie. Phoenix may be doing great work, but every other ounce of the movie and every word out of director Todd Phillips’ mouth has been a real bummer. Yes, it’s sort of new to bring the early-Scorsese sensibility to the superhero film, but it is still not far removed from films that have already been made. Phillips is—to borrow a phrase from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)—imitating the sounds, but not the language of those films. He’s even gone record to insist that the film should not be taken seriously, because he wasn’t trying to say anything with it. Such a cop-out feebly tries to absolve him from any negative impact on society, but it also nullifies the entire movie.

It’s lazy, and it’s dumb. While there are parts of the film that work despite itself, it can never truly achieve escape velocity from that unfortunate reality.

Now, this is all to say that I saw a story (it was admittedly click-bait-y) that hinted that after this film’s somewhat surprising box office success, Warner Bros. may be wanting to further branch out into weird one-off films, including an adaptation of Batman Beyond with Michael Keaton as Old Man Wayne. If that comes to pass, everything is forgiven, Todd. You gave me what I always wanted, despite yourself. Kind of like Jared Leto.

Stardust (2007)

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Cast: Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: I really was pretty sure that I had, but as I watched the movie on this screening, it became pretty clear that I’ve only ever seen bits of it. My wife loves it, and so I must have, over the course of ten years, seen about half an hour of it.

Did I Like It: The fact that just half an hour feels like a more than complete experience of the movie, should tell you something. Ultimately, its unfair to expect me to like it, but here we go.

Something about the fantasy genre usually bugs me. J.R.R. Tolkien may be a master wordsmith, but the legacy of having to excruciatingly detail your world building in fantasy is often mind-numbingly boring and stops any forward momentum in the story when in the hands of lesser writers.

Now, Neil Gaiman is not a lesser writer. In fact, he is one of the greats. That only makes me expect more from him, and maybe the book from which the film springs is different, but this is entirely too much run-of-the-mill fantasy material for me to recommend it in any way. The first ten minutes are weighed down by a lead balloon of VO narration by the admittedly pleasant Ian McKellen and wandering plot lines that never quite pay off.

The rest of the film is pleasant enough, I suppose, but never quite outgrows the turgid first half an hour. Maybe the big performances of Pfeiffer and De Niro are meant to be fun, but in the context of this film she feels too kitschy for her own good, and it’s been years since De Niro has approached a film role with more focus than I make a left-hand turn. 

The Godfather Part II (1974)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Diane Keaton, John Cazale

Have I Seen it Before: At 202 minutes, it is quite a commitment, and yet I make that commitment as often as I possibly can.

Did I Like It: What kind of sociopath would I be if I said no? 

Of course, The Godfather Part II is a great film. There is no reasonable way to deny this, and I wouldn’t try to do so, even if I wanted to. What’s more, anything that could be written about this film has already been done so. It is a dense, rich meal of intrigue, tragedy, and machismo. Coppola’s output may have fluctuated fairly wildly with his fortunes in Hollywood, but when his story is done he will have still made several truly great films, and a couple of bottles of affordable, yet drinkable wine.

And so, on my twentieth or so screening of this film, I am mostly struck by little moments or feelings as the film unfurls. 

Pacino’s unrelenting, patient ruthlessness. He is equal parts cautionary tale and towering example of not taking shit from anyone. It’s the final eerily quiet performance from the man before he started shouting in Dog Day Afternoon and has yet to stop. Actually, I suppose he starts #yellingpacino in this movie in a few scenes, primarily when confronted with the attack on his Tahoe compound and later when he is confronted with the fact that, despite his machiavellian perfection in ealing with the underworld, Kay Corleone (Keaton) sees right through him and will not abide his opportunistic evil.

James Caan’s cameo in the final scene, along with the pointedly unknowable absence of Marlon Brando. Paramount, Coppola, and Brando could not come to any sort of an accord to get him to make the small appearance, but if you ask me, Michael’s story is more complete if he is completely removed from his father for the runtime.

And speaking of tragedies with fathers, the small moment of this film that sticks with me forever is seldom written about, but for my money is the linchpin of not just the film, but the entire Corleone saga. The family boards a train leaving Sicily and Vito (De Niro) tells his youngest son to, “Say goodbye, Michael.” Can’t distill the series down more perfectly than that.