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The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 1:03 pm
by silverscreenselect
Today marks the official debut of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, which is almost a shoo-in for Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Actor (Robert De Niro). But because of Netflix's feud with Regal and AMC, theaters showing it will be few and far between, especially outside of NY and LA. Here in Georgia, it's playing in one theater, the CineBistro in Athens (home of the University of Georgia), about 70 miles northeast of Atlanta. Further, it's only playing Thanksgiving weekend, at the same time as it starts streaming on Netflix. If you live in Florida, it's playing in one theater, in Bonita Springs, the week before Thanksgiving. Also, unless AMC and Regal change their minds, you won't be able to see it during those Oscar marathon festivals the week before the Oscars either.

While I'm certainly going to watch on Netflix, this is really shortsighted on the part of everyone involved and there's plenty of blame to go around as well.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 1:23 pm
by Bob78164
Wow. It's distribution is pretty limited here in Los Angeles as well. Normally I'd have a dozen or so reasonably convenient theaters to choose from. My Google search brings up 4 choices.

By comparison, I have 15 options to see Joker. --Bob

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 2:42 pm
by Bob Juch
Part of the problem is that it's 3:30 long. That means there's only one prime showtime per night.

No theaters here have it. That's okay with me; the only time I go to theaters is to see the sci-fi blockbusters.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:11 pm
by silverscreenselect
Bob Juch wrote:Part of the problem is that it's 3:30 long. That means there's only one prime showtime per night.
That didn't stop films like Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago from becoming big box office hits.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:47 pm
by Bob Juch
silverscreenselect wrote:
Bob Juch wrote:Part of the problem is that it's 3:30 long. That means there's only one prime showtime per night.
That didn't stop films like Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago from becoming big box office hits.
Times have changed.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2019 5:21 am
by Estonut
Bob Juch wrote:
silverscreenselect wrote:
Bob Juch wrote:Part of the problem is that it's 3:30 long. That means there's only one prime showtime per night.
That didn't stop films like Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago from becoming big box office hits.
Times have changed.
Since 1990:
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Schindler's List (1993)
Magnolia (1999)
The Green Mile (1999)
JFK (1991)
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Titanic (1997)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Inland Empire (2006)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
King Kong (2005)
Blood In, Blood Out (1993)
Hamlet (1996)
Short Cuts (1993)
Nixon (1995)

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2019 12:02 pm
by Bob Juch
Estonut wrote:
Bob Juch wrote:
silverscreenselect wrote:That didn't stop films like Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago from becoming big box office hits.
Times have changed.
Since 1990:
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Schindler's List (1993)
Magnolia (1999)
The Green Mile (1999)
JFK (1991)
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Titanic (1997)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Inland Empire (2006)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
King Kong (2005)
Blood In, Blood Out (1993)
Hamlet (1996)
Short Cuts (1993)
Nixon (1995)
Notice that only two of those were in this decade.

The Hateful Eight made only $155.8 million. A lot of the others were bombs.

The Irishman has no younger actors who would be a stronger draw.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2019 4:42 pm
by bazodee
I’m a Netflix disc customer. You can’t even put this movie into your queue for future release. It’s not even in their data set. Usually new releases can be put in the queue weeks in advance of release, even though the disc won’t be available for months. There must be some novel marketing strategy (or some legal snafu) here.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sun Nov 03, 2019 11:12 am
by goongas
I don't think Netflix will make a DVD version of this.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sun Nov 03, 2019 12:14 pm
by silverscreenselect
goongas wrote:I don't think Netflix will make a DVD version of this.
Netflix has released some seasons of their original series like The Crown, Stranger Things, and Orange is the New Black on DVD. It's usually because they think it serves a marketing purpose (like getting people interested in subscribing to see a later season).

That's not the case with standalone movies like The Irishman. Some of their best regarded films like Roma, Mudbound, Beasts of No Nation, and Buster Scruggs don't have DVDs.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 9:34 pm
by jarnon
A sad commentary by Scorsese (copied in full from behind the firewall)
When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.

Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way.

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in “The Steel Helmet” by Sam Fuller and “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman, in “It’s Always Fair Weather” by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and “Scorpio Rising” by Kenneth Anger, in “Vivre Sa Vie” by Jean-Luc Godard and “The Killers” by Don Siegel.

Or in the films of Alfred Hitchcock — I suppose you could say that Hitchcock was his own franchise. Or that he was our franchise. Every new Hitchcock picture was an event. To be in a packed house in one of the old theaters watching “Rear Window” was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the picture itself, and it was electrifying.

And in a way, certain Hitchcock films were also like theme parks. I’m thinking of “Strangers on a Train,” in which the climax takes place on a merry-go-round at a real amusement park, and “Psycho,” which I saw at a midnight show on its opening day, an experience I will never forget. People went to be surprised and thrilled, and they weren’t disappointed.

Sixty or 70 years later, we’re still watching those pictures and marveling at them. But is it the thrills and the shocks that we keep going back to? I don’t think so. The set pieces in “North by Northwest” are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story or the absolute lostness of Cary Grant’s character.

The climax of “Strangers on a Train” is a feat, but it’s the interplay between the two principal characters and Robert Walker’s profoundly unsettling performance that resonate now.

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.

So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.

That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.

But, you might argue, can’t they just go home and watch anything else they want on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure — anywhere but on the big screen, where the filmmaker intended her or his picture to be seen.

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.

For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 12:18 pm
by silverscreenselect
Martin Scorsese wrote: Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.

That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

But, you might argue, can’t they just go home and watch anything else they want on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure — anywhere but on the big screen, where the filmmaker intended her or his picture to be seen.
The "theatrical window" here in Georgia is five days over Thanksgiving weekend at one cinema drafthouse in Athens. Not many audiences are going to see it.

I'm not sure how big a fight Scorsese put up for wider distribution of The Irishman, but I've got to believe that someone with his clout could have gotten it into more than one theater in Georgia.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 2:04 pm
by Vandal
It's no secret where Jimmy Hoffa can be found (but I'll spoilerize it anyway):

Spoiler
Image

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 4:17 pm
by Bob Juch
Comic book movies are to classic cinema as Andy Warhol's paintings are to classic art. They're not for everyone.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 7:15 pm
by Bob78164
Vandal wrote:It's no secret where Jimmy Hoffa can be found (but I'll spoilerize it anyway):

Spoiler
Image
I was hoping to find a professional football team there. In vain. --Bob

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 8:22 pm
by Vandal
Bob78164 wrote:
Vandal wrote:It's no secret where Jimmy Hoffa can be found (but I'll spoilerize it anyway):

Spoiler
Image
I was hoping to find a professional football team there. In vain. --Bob

Truly. Giants Stadium was demolished a decade ago.

Image

Image


and replaced with Hoffa-less MetLife Stadium:


Image

But your point still stands!

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2019 9:56 am
by silverscreenselect
I just heard that The Irishman will be playing this weekend at the Landmark Theater in Atlanta. That's the primary theater for showing foreign and independent films here. Eddie Murphy's Dolemite movie, which is also a Netflix production, just played there for 2-3 weeks before showing on Netflix. I'm not sure what other theaters, if any, will show the film here in Atlanta.

Re: The Irishman Is Tougher to Find than Jimmy Hoffa

Posted: Sat Nov 16, 2019 5:40 am
by silverscreenselect
goongas wrote:I don't think Netflix will make a DVD version of this.
The Criterion Collection will release Roma (which won the Best Director Oscar) on Blu-ray and DVD in February. This is the first Netflix film to get a DVD release.