Daddy loves you! It is what it is.

Rating: 7/10 (15 December 2019)

This movie received brickbats even before it came to the screens (or rather Netflix). Scorsese, maybe on purpose, stirred the hornet's nest by making a statement about the genre that seems to captivate the imaginations of the Millenials - the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). He asserted that the MCU world is not cinema but mere theme parks. To quote Scorsese, "cinema is about revelation - aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It is 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. Marvel movies don't encapsulate those criteria."
To be fair, even Alfred Hitchcock's and P Ramlee's movies were criticised in their days. There were said to be gruesome or too violent (Psycho) or crossing the social norms (Ramlee's Gelora). Even though the new franchises are said to be final products of market-researched and audience-tested, as well as a matter of supply and demand and giving people what they want, there is still place for good old storytelling set in reality.
'Irishman' is based on by Charles Brandt's book 'I heard you paint houses'. It is supposed to be a confession by the protagonist of the tale, Frank Sheeran. He admitted having killed Jimmy Hoffa, a unionist and a mobster. In real life, Hoffa is said to have disappeared since 1975 without a trace. Since then, many have come forward to vouch that they had killed Hoffa and had their versions too. Sceptics have accused Sheeran of making the last kill (money wise) for the family as he struggled in the nursing home counting his end of days.

It said to be a presentation of septuagenarians trying the reminisce the good old times of the genre they are familiar with - Scorsese, De Niro and Joe Pesci and mob movies like 'Goodfellas' and 'Casino'. For good measure, they roped in Al Pacino, Don Corleone himself.
As the story spans over almost 30 years, and they were utilising aged actors, the filmmakers had to use digitally de-ageing technology on them. MCU fans had a field day attacking Scorsese as it was in one of MCU films that this science was initially introduced - Michael Douglas in 'Ant-Man'.

This three-and-a-half offering tells about Sheeran, a WW2 veteran, who gets entangled with the mafia. He finds it rewarding to support his family. In the course and subsequent to this line of duty, he has to make many life-altering decisions. There is only so much of Mafia-related movies one can watch, the loyalty, the killing and all the coded talk. But still, there are some valuable points to ponder while watching the movie.
People can make a living or make a killing for a living. Ultimately we all work hard to ensure that the generation after us is not deprived of the things that we yearned and never got. We do not want them to go through the similar 'hardships' that we went through. But no, the offsprings will never appreciate this. They would look at the actions of their elders through a different prism quite contradictory to what the adults value. They (the youngsters) fail to appreciate the environment upon which their elders made the decisions they made.
Morality and kindness do not matter in desperate situations. When your next meal is not a given thing, your yardstick of what is right and what is not is malleable. This type of innovation can be seen in slumps and refugee camps. People become imaginative on how to survive, to fulfil their primal desires and acquire money. Somehow, money still remains the panacea of all woes.
This must probably be what Sheeran must have been thinking when he was sending his last few days in a home. All his friends and mentors were dead. He was the only person who would probably carry all his secrets to the grave. He was alone. His wife was dead, and his daughters shunned him for his association with the mafioso.
The question remains. Did he concoct the whole story for his children to savour the fruit of the returns of the royalty of his story? Even though Sheeran admitted in the book to have made the difficult decision of putting a bullet in the head of his mentor Jimmy Hoffa, many others claim to have done the same. Sheeran's story, it seems, did not collaborate with police records. Was the tale spiced up to show Sheeran making the difficult decision of following the orders of Russel Buffolini, his guru, versus killing Hoffa who was a thorn for the mafia? Haffa was possibly going to leak the secret of unionists monies being used to finance Mafia's Las Vegas casinos.
The movie also suggests that JFK's assassination may have been arranged by the Mafia.