On Lasso and De Niro

Some Critical Commentary to begin the week....

TED LASSO (no spoilers)

 

The Apple TV series "Ted Lasso" ended last week after three delightful seasons.  I thought that i was a terrific ending to what has been a great series.  Jason Sudeikis' Ted went home to Kansas, AFC Richmond's season concluded on a high note, and all storylines were wrapped up in a wonderful montage played to the music of Cat Stevens' "Father and Son."  Yes, everyone I know who watched the series thought that Season 3 was, if perhaps not as great as the first two seasons, a delight nonetheless, and were quite charmed by the conclusion of the show.  However, as I alluded to in a post last week, the professional critics who praised the series at the outset, felt it was their obligation to tear it to shreds.  For example, the headline in a piece in Variety  stated "'Ted Lasso' Season 3 Was Unbearable".  Really? This is how the author of that piece, a pseudo-intellectual need Stephen Rodrick, opened his critique:

Now quarantine is long gone, and we are out in the world crammed into middle seats, intent on spending our last disposable dollar on Maui rentals and a down payment on a jet ski we definitely don’t need. “Lasso’s” recently completed third season joined the bacchanal. The show’s 12 episodes ran 650 MINUTES. That is 78 minutes longer than Krzystof Kieslowski’s “Dekalog,” which dealt with all 10 of the commandments.

Now that is a piece of high brow bullshit that really speaks to all of the mass audience to whom "Ted Lasso" appealed, isn't it?  I mean, who didn't think of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Dekalog" when watching "Ted Lasso", am I right?  And if you search the interwebs, you can find all sorts of similar critical rantings.

However, allow me to refer you to the write up of Jason Fraley.  He is an entertainment editor for WTOP in Washington DC, and I have come to know him through various podcasts and am happy to say that we have come to regularly exchange our views as Facebook Friends.  THIS PIECE by Jason hits the nail squarely on the head when it comes to "Ted Lasso", both in its entirety and in it's finale episode last week.  I think that you will enjoy it.

Here is another good (and favorable) recap that appeared in the New York Times.  Be advised, though that this piece contains spoilers, so if you haven't yet seen the final episode, you might want to delay reading this one.

So farewell, "Ted Lasso".  You will be missed, but  if that spin-off hinted at in the final scenes of the show ever comes about, I will be there, proudly wearing my AFC Richmond scarf.

Four Stars from The Grandstander for both the series and the Final Episode.

ABOUT MY FATHER

When I first saw the trailers for this, I figured that it was going to be one of those movies where the best of it would be what you see in the trailer.  That might be unfair, but it wasn't far off.

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco plays a guy named, can you believe it, Sebastian Maniscalco.  He's the son of Salvo (Robert De Niro), an immigrant from Sicily who came to America after World War II, became a successful hair dresser in Chicago, is now a widower, and who is a guy who has spent his entire life wanting nothing more than to make a better life for his son than he had for himself.  That's the American Dream, right?

Well, Sebastian has fallen in love with a beautiful girl who is the daughter of an ultra wealthy the-ancestors-came-on-the-Mayflower family.  Daddy owns one the largest chains of ritzy hotels in the world, Mom is a US Senator (played by Kim Catrall; first time I've seen her since Sex and The City), and they have invited Sebastian to come to their luxury country club estate in Virginia for the 4th of July weekend.  Through a series of events, Sebastian ends up bringing his Dad with him.

It's the old fish-out-of-water trope, and it unfolds and ends up exactly as you imagine it will.  I'm a big fan of Robert De Niro (who isn't?), and I thought it would be a hoot to see him in a comedy role (think "Midnight Run"), and he delivers just as you thought he would, although I say that he did seem to be playing a guy who was playing "Robert De Niro" in this one.   As I said to someone yesterday, actors like De Niro can make great art in their work, but every once in a while, they're entitled to do something just for a paycheck.

This movie will make no Top Ten lists and will win no awards, but it was a fun bit of summer comedy fluff, and De Niro was De Niro, and that is always worth seeing.

Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

Old Movie Time - "Mean Streets" (1973)

In his ranking of Gangster Movies, Washington DC film critic Jason Fraley listed Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" at Number 16 on his list.  This prompted me to seek out this now forty-seven year old movie, which, surprisingly given my affinity for mob movies, I had never seen.   

The storyline of this one follows a couple of young trying-to-be-up-and-coming-wiseguys in New York City's Little Italy.  Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, whose uncle is a capo of sorts in the neighborhood, and Robert De Niro plays Johnny, a punk wannabe who can't keep up with his payments to the neighborhood sharks and who's constantly flying off the handle and getting into fights with the other punks in the neighborhood.  Charlie spends most of his time trying to cover for his buddy Johnny Boy at the possible expense of his own standing in the neighborhood hierarchy.  It all comes to a predictable conclusion on the "mean streets" of Little Italy.  

In and of itself, "Mean Streets" is a somewhat predictable gangster story.  If it was the only such movie that Scorsese made, it probably would not be as highly remembered or regarded today, but what makes it an important movie is what it foreshadowed.  In 1973, the 31 year old Scorsese had a few directing credits to his name, mostly shorts and documentaries, and the 30 year old De Niro had only one significant role to his name ("Bang The Drum Slowly").  "Mean Streets" was the first time that these two collaborated on a motion picture, and it was the beginning of one of more significant director/actor combos ever.  The two of them would go on to make nine other  feature films together over the next forty-three years, and they're probably not done yet.  This movie had everything that we came to know as trade marks of a Scorsese flick.....a freeze frame shot where the character's name gets  superimposed on the screen to identify him to the audience....a scene consisting of an extended  single take tracking shot (this one was a fight among the various hoods in a bar's  back room that circled a pool table)....extended swatches of dialog with De Niro going back and forth one-on-one with other characters in his NYC/Italian/Wiseguy dialect....and, most significantly, a sound track of period rock-n-roll music (Motown, Rolling Stones, etc) that blared almost constantly throughout the movie.  All of the things that Scorsese did, and did better, in movies like "Casino", "Goodfellas", and "The Irishman", were seen for the first time in "Mean Streets", and THAT makes this a movie worth watching.

In a vacuum, The Grandstander would give "Mean Streets" Two and One-Half Stars, but because it represents and presages what was to come from the Director and the Actor, it gets Three Stars.

A couple of more words on the casting.  Keitel was 34 years old when he did this movie, and he, too, would appear in many other Scorsese films, most recently, "The Irishman."  About the only Scorsese touch missing from this movie was Joe Pesci!  Another character in this one was actor David Proval as Tony.  Many years later, Proval would go on to additional screen Mob fame as Richie Aprile in "The Sopranos."  

De Niro and Keitel

A much younger De Niro and Scorsese

"The Irishman"

So Mrs. Grandstander and I decided upon a Saturday Night at the Movies date night this weekend, and settled in to watch perhaps the most anticipated movie of 2019, Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman", and what can I tell you, it did not disappoint.

This is an epic of a movie.  Three and one-half hours long and and all-star "mob movie" cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci.  It is the story of the rise of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), the Irishman of the title, within both the Mob in Philadelphia and the Teamsters Union of the 1960's, and how he became a favorite of both mob leader Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and teamsters head man Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino).  It has all the trademarks of Scorsese - the long single take that takes us through the halls of a nursing home (and a few other such takes elsewhere in the film), the sound track featuring period music, the voice over narration of the main protagonist, and the freeze frame shots of characters that tell us "whatever became of" them.  "The Irishman" is reminiscent of all great Scorsese movies, and it is just as good, and perhaps better, than all of them.

The main thrust of the movie is the story of "what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa, anyway?"  Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zallian posit their theory on how Hoffa came to his end, and I won't spoil it for you.  There are so many great scenes in this movie.  One of my favorites involved a meeting between Hoffa and mobster Tony Provenzano (played by Stephen Graham, who played Al Capone in "Boardwalk Empire") wherein Tony Pro is late for his meeting - an unforgivable sin with Hoffa - and most of the meeting is the back-and-forth between the two of them as to why you should never be late for a meeting, per Hoffa, and who-gives-a-shit-I'm-here-now, per Tony Pro.  Fantastic.

The three stars are great. No surprise with De Niro, who's always great. Pesci plays a very different type of mobster, not the bombastic, fly off the handle type you are used to seeing him as, but quiet and perhaps even more chilling.  And Al Pacino will probably get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa.  

I really, really liked the movie, but I wish that I could have seen it in a movie theater.  As I wrote about earlier in the month, this is a Netflix production that was released to a few theaters in selected cities for a three week period so as to qualify for the Academy Awards and then pulled and sent straight to the streaming service.  I would like to have had the experience of seeing it on a big screen with a crowd of people in a theater, but this is the wave of the future, so I guess that there is no point shouting at the clouds about it.  And with its three and one-half hour length, I was able to hit PAUSE for both a bathroom break and a break to get myself a dish of ice cream, so there is that.

About that length.  At first, I was put off at the thought of it.  Hey, a good movie should be no more than two ours, tops, amiright?  After watching "The Irishman", though, I can't think of any part or parts of it that were superfluous or that could have been done away with to tighten it up.

One final thing.  The movie is based on a book by  Charles Brandt called "I Heard You Paint Houses".  You can guess what "painting houses" is a euphemism for.  Anyway, both the opening title and the closing credits did not say "The Irishman", rather they said "I Heard You Paint Houses".  Wonder what was up with that? 

"The Irishman" gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.