The Irishman

Right off the top, let me say that it's more than a little presumptuous to put out a three and a half hour movie. Really?

We were lucky to be watching on Netflix in the comfort of our home. I can't even imagine sitting in the multiplex, where you can't push "pause" for the multiple bathroom breaks you're gonna have in the course of the afternoon.

While it was certainly very well done, I think Scorsese et al are having their "OK Boomer" moment.

Pacino's Hoffa was, overall, on the sympathetic side. I've always been something of a Hoffa fan, so it was nice that in the end he was portrayed as trying to pry the tentacles of organized crime off "his" union.

People tend to forget that by the late fifties and throughout the sixties and seventies, truck drivers in the Teamsters pretty much set the benchmark for what working class pay and benefits could be.

Hoffa's biggest mistake, in my estimation, was in refusing to organize the independent owner-operators. That was a decision based on principle. Hoffa's position was that it wasn't the role of a labour union to negotiate a return on capital.

Sounds straight-forward enough. After all, owner-operators were "independent businessmen." But those independent businessmen cut the floor out from under the union jobs, and the rest is history.

Today, generally speaking, trucking is rightfully considered a shit job. Long hours, low pay, few if any benefits.

But back to the film. Robert De Niro did a masterful job not only playing the ageing Frank Sheeran, but standing in for all the other boomers doing their swan song here, including Scorsese himself. Scorsese got a little attention recently with an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that the 90-minutes-or-less adrenaline-drenched crap coming out of Hollywood these days isn't "cinema."


This is definitely cinema.