EP.45 Robert De Niro

On this Episode of the Newbies to Movies podcast, Host Justin and guest Mason from the Newbies to Movies Podcast dive deep into the legendary career of Robert De Niro, specifically analyzing his gritty 1995 Las Vegas crime drama Casino and his fierce, Oscar-winning portrayal of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Following a thorough breakdown of De Niro's dynamic performances and Martin Scorsese's masterful direction, the episode wraps up with a lively movie guessing game where the duo test their pop culture and trivia knowledge 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hey, hey, welcome back. Uh this is Newbies to Movies, and I'm Justin, and this week we have a special guest on, Mr. Mason, regularly occurring guest. Thanks for having me back. Always great to be on here. Yes, sir, yes, sir. This week we'll be diving into Robert De Niro as an actor. I guess we could also say we're doing Martin Scorsese part two, uh, as both these movies we're doing are also directed by Martin Scorsese. But specifically, we're diving into his roles in Casino and Raging Bull, which two movies that are widely talked about and I've been wanting to watch for a long time. So I was excited to get into these this week. But first we'll kind of talk about what else we've been watching. Uh Mason, you've been watching anything cool lately?

SPEAKER_02 0:53

I just started watching The Boys because everyone else has seen it, so I figure I might as well be able to talk about it with people. That show is so weird though. How far did you get into it?

SPEAKER_01 1:05

I watched the whole first season. Oh yeah, dude. You got it in for you. Cause I always tell people too, like you think about it with shows like this. The first season, it's a real risk. So they don't renew it for the second and third season unless it does well. So that first season, I mean, it's definitely weird, but it gets they're willing to take way more risk in season two and three because they know people enjoyed the first one. So uh yeah, just heads up, you got it coming for you. It gets way worse. That's awesome. I do, I do really like the idea of, you know, we're kind of uh people call it the superhero fatigue, right? This is kind of a hard uh counteract to that because we see exactly probably what it would be like in the real world if we had superheroes. So it's uh pretty neat to see something different besides uh Marvel and DC all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Yeah, it's definitely a unique and like interesting take on superheroes.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah. I don't know if you know, but they just wrapped up season five and the show's over officially now. But they're gonna do a bunch of spin-off series and and such. So I'm not gonna talk too much about the ending, but yeah, it was it was safe. They played it safe for sure, which I wasn't that much of a fan of, but you'll see. Not really. Yeah, so yesterday I had nothing going on. So me and Madison, we kind of decided uh we're gonna go to our local theater, Regal, and we decided to get the Regal Unlimited. So Shout out Regal. Shout out Regal. So we're gonna uh be watching a lot of movies this summer because we just bought the unlimited pass, so we can go see as many movies as we want. With that said, we were like, okay, there's two we want to see. Uh this is coming this episode's coming out way later, but the back rooms just came out uh this weekend. It opened this weekend, and then the Mandalorian and Grogu last weekend. So we were like, this that's two movies we want to see. We thought we were gonna have a hard time finding theaters for the back room. Instead, it was the exact opposite. We had a hard time getting a theater for Mandalorian and Grogu. There was about five showings yesterday and it just came out last weekend, and there was about 20 showings for the backrooms, um, which is kind of embarrassing for Disney to say the least, um, that they're getting that pushed out to the side. Um, but I guess when you just make BS movies, that's kind of what happens. Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing. I just kind of want to go over it real quick. So Mandalorian and Grogu's budget was 165 million, and it opened last weekend with 167 million. So broke even on the first weekend, but uh that is the lowest of any Star Wars movie ever, included including solo, a Star Wars story. And then you look at something like Backrooms, it had a $10 million budget, and Friday alone it made $38.4 million, and it's projected to get over $120 million. It's just very hilarious to watch a production studio like A24, which we did a couple weeks ago on the podcast. Uh, you know, take risk on these young directors, and then Disney's just playing it safe, trying to sell toys uh and making shit movies, and that's what they get, I guess. I don't know. Just pretty embarrassing to watch. And I was talking to Tyler yesterday. I I don't know where Star Wars goes from here. That was the only thing they had left that was like half decent. And then you just make a nothing burger of a movie. Uh I told Tyler, I was like, I can't even spoil it for you because nothing happened in the movie. Like I could tell you exactly what happened, and you'd be like, that's it. Like there was just nothing to it. There was no stakes, there was no real plot development. It just felt like three episodes of the Mandalorian TV show that they crammed together. So I would go watch it, but I'd watch it just to be like, yeah, I just wasted two hours of my life and I'm not getting back. But Backrooms was really good. I don't want to sound like a Debbie Downer. Backrooms was uh super enjoyable. I thought it was I'm a big hater on horror movies because they don't uh develop characters that well, but uh they definitely did in this movie and it it really showed and with great acting as well. So definitely recommend that one.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

That's that's surprising to me because I honestly was not even gonna consider watching the backrooms because it's like we're making a movie about like an internet meme. Yeah. Like what are we doing? I mean, if if you're saying it's that good, then I'll I'll definitely consider watching it.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yeah, the obviously I don't know if you know the director is 20 years old, and a lot of people were saying like a ghost director helped him kind of make this, but uh he's kind of came out and interviews and stuff. He's been working on this since he was 13, 14 years old. He was making uh backrooms clips on his iPhone. Wow. Yeah, and so if anybody, yeah, just let him keep cooking because they did like enough lore to like make a second movie, but not enough to be like, oh, okay, that's all I need to see of the backrooms. Like I'm still intrigued and I want to know more, which is good. That's how you build up a franchise, right? And that's how you set up a franchise to make a lot of money, and I think they're definitely on that path, especially if they keep the box office going like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they announce sequel in the next couple of days. It's already killing the box office.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yeah, well.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

But yeah, I mean, we'll see what happens. I think uh A24, obviously, I didn't even bring it up, but Obsession uh is doing numbers right now to the other horror movie they had come out this weekend, which is uh big time. So yeah, it's already going a little rant. Yeah, that one looks good too. I just haven't had a chance to see that one. But Regal Unlimited, baby. I'll be back there tomorrow. But yeah, so starting, we'll get into uh Casino. I've been kind of wanting to do Robert De Niro for a long time. Uh Madison had mentioned kind of doing the uh friendship between Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci pretty much in every movie together, but also pretty much in every Scorsese movie together. Not every single one, especially his later movies, but it was interesting to see that pretty much every movie they're like best friends in the movie, and then they're definitely best friends off-screen as well. I didn't know that part. Yeah, yeah. Getting into the plot, I gave it an eight for casino. Kind of follows the rise and fall of the mob's control over Las Vegas in the 1970s and 80s. And I found out it's actually based on a true story. Um, a lot of the casino names and the characters' names are changed up, but it is uh about the illegal operations to kind of skim millions of dollars on tax and casino profits uh through these uh mafia guys in the uh Midwest, which is kind of interesting. I never really knew that story about it. We kind of know about you know the rise of Vegas and how that all happened, but the initial, you know, kind of creation of it was all kind of funded through this, which was interesting to see. But uh, what do you think about the plot?

SPEAKER_02 7:18

I mean, yeah, I didn't know it was based on true story, but that definitely makes sense because it's it's so grounded in reality. Nothing like really crazy like out of the ordinary happens where like you can that would only happen in a movie, like it's all seems pretty realistic, but it's so like well driven by the characters and their motives. I gave like a 9.5 just because I love a movie like that where it's like trying to hit beats on the plot. We're just following the characters doing what they would do in this world that you created. So I really enjoy the plot.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Yeah. Yeah, kind of getting into that with the characters. Uh I g I gave the characters a seven. I think the main characters, right? You had same, uh, sorry, Sam, uh who they called Ace, Ross Dean, played by Robert De Niro, and then you had Nikki as well, who was kind of his uh bruiser, right? He was kind of on his side all the time, just ready to hold down everybody. Obviously, they had a kind of a falling out at the end, and then Ginger as well. I think those three main three characters are uh really exciting, really fun to follow, but after that, I kind of felt like every every other character was just an Italian mobster and they played a side pole in it. But yeah, it was interesting to see. I give characters a 9.7.

SPEAKER_02 8:31

I I love like I know there's really only like three characters to care about in the whole movie, but they're so good. Yeah. And they're all like they all kind of have their own motives. Nikki is like power driven, he just muscles his way through everything. Like Ace is like, I need to control every little detail, and that's how I give my power. Ginger's like about the money. Um, and it's like representing like all these different ways that people seek power and seek control in their lives, and how they like clash with each other. And I just think the characters drove this movie so well, like so well done. And that he adds such like a nice level of depth to the characters, like when Nikki is like turning the portraits around while he's robbing them. Like, that's such an interesting little thing to add for the character.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah, it's almost like you can't make it up, right? Yeah. And uh one thing like you mentioned is kind of how they all want to get to power. It's cool to kind of see them all converge at the end and how they all got greedy, right? And kind of the repercussions of that in each of their their respective ways to gain power. We we just see them all kind of fall at the end, and the way it's done is really cool. I'll get into that a little later though. With cinematography, I gave it a nine. I thought it was really well shot. Um so it's the cinematographer was Robert Richardson. Uh he works with Scorsese on a lot of his movies, but uh it was very hyper-stylized. I mean, you know, we just went to Vegas a couple months ago and it very much felt like that. I don't know if they specifically filmed in Vegas, um, but it it felt like Vegas, and I think a lot of the dynamic camera movements, especially while uh De Niro is kind of narrating over how everything in the casino goes in the beginning. I thought that was so neat how they the camera was kind of following the movement of money through the casino, especially in the the back room where they were kind of counting and moving out all the money. That was a really neat scene, and I think the cinematography in general for this movie was just really amazing. Yeah, I mean, I would just echo pretty much what you're saying. I I gave it like a nine. Um it just perfectly reflects what Vegas is all about. Yeah. And then the dialogue, I gave it an eight. I thought the dialogue in this movie was really great. Um my favorite line was uh from De Niro uh playing Ace. Uh he said in the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing, keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more money they lose, and in the end we get it all. I think it's this was early in the movie, and I think it's a perfect representation of how kind of you know, that greed kind of overcame him in the end of the movie. But um, you see it this quote as a sign of yeah, he's gonna get greedy and this is gonna be the downfall of him as a character, but also the casino as a whole. I love the dialogue in this movie.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

I gave it like a nine-seven. Yeah. Um I don't think there's like a wasted line the entire movie. It's all just perfectly driving the story along, perfectly showing like what the characters' intentions are and the tensions between them. Um freaking uh De Niro and Pesci arguing could just be like it could be five hours of that, and it'd be a great movie.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah. Pesci is always like, I feel like he's always playing this like outlandish, like spiraling character who's just gonna throw a fit all the time. And I I think of the scene when they were in uh the country club and the banker came to talk to them, and Pesci was just straight up threatening the guy who has all of his money, and you you just see him spiraling out of control so fast, and the banker's just sitting there like shitting his pants.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

He doesn't know what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah, but they're they're always so great together. Getting into set design, I gave it a nine. I thought it was pretty uh well done. Um so I was kind of reading about it. The Tangineers Casino is a fictional place, obviously, but um Scorsese talked about how it served as a visual metaphor for uh the characters itself, um, just kind of kind of the environment being so sporadic and always stuff going on, as we see. Didn't uh Sam Ace, he's kind of always standing in the middle of the casino watching the tables. He's very uh calculated about everything that goes on there. And so everything around him is always super fast moving as well, which which makes perfect sense, right? He's clearly a really smart guy. You just kind of let greed get the best of him.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Yeah, I give um set design an 8.5 stone well. I I like that there's a contrast between like when you're in the casino and it's all glamour, it's all this promise of all this wealth, and then they're in the desert where there's like nothing going on, or they're in a run-down diner or something. I thought it was stone well.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Yeah, I thought it was cool to point out too, like sp in the movie, I know this is more costume design and everything, everybody was all dressed up in Vegas back then, and he kind of talks about that in the end, about how Vegas just became this this corporate sanitized playground, but uh and now everybody just do like vacations there, but before it used to be like a real business environment, which is just kind of crazy to see the contrast, and I think they showed that really well at the end of the movie as well. Uh getting into acting, I gave it a seven. I think Robert De Niro as Ace, Sharon Stone as Ginger, and Joe Pesci as Nikki were really amazing. Besides that, I think the the supporting actors fell flat a little bit. I felt like every supporting actor was kind of playing the same role. Um, I know they had different roles in the uh the the gambling scheme, right? Everything that was going on. Um but besides that, I felt like everybody was kind of middling off. They were kind of uh one-dimensional and flat. But I know that's what's gonna happen with supporting actors sometimes, especially in a movie this long, you didn't have time to build up supporting characters that much anyway.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

I mean that's definitely a valid take. Like all the all the other characters are just there for the three main characters, but I I gave it a nine. I thought I thought the acting was great with the um the three main characters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Fantastic, and that's most of the movie. And then um getting into directing, I gave it a a nine. I mean, obviously Scorsese's a legend uh in the flesh, but um he actually co-wrote this spring uh screenplay with the uh author of the uh the book that I told you it was based on. So they uh kind of adapted a book that was called Casino, Love and Honor in Las Vegas. So it's pretty cool to see that, uh obviously based on a true story, so it's uh secondhand writing of it, but yeah, Scorsese's just kind of a master class of working on these mob movies all the time.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yeah, absolutely. I gave it like a nine. I'm sure there's things he's doing with the directing that are just going way over my head that I just can't catch. But I I I don't notice any like flaws for sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

Yeah, his his movies are always so well written. Like you said earlier, there's never like a wasted line. Yeah. It's always there's intent with every scene, uh, which just makes his movies that much more interesting. Because you you see some of these movies and there are wasted lines, right? There's kind of like nothing scenes that are just there to be there, and that's what kind of makes movies drag sometimes. But his movies, everybody's always locked in throughout the whole movie, and that's what makes them so great. Uh getting to the soundtrack, I'm gonna start a new segment this week. I told Tyler. Justin's Justin's needle drop of the week. Okay. This this movie when House of the Rising Sun came on, when everybody's getting off, uh, that was so well done and so well placed, I feel like. Kind of like I was talking about earlier, you see the characters' greed stacking up and then kind of the repercussions of what happens to all of them. Obviously, Ginger ODs with all her cash that she spent in literally a week. I think it was like uh $20 million or something like that. In a week, obviously uh Nikki gets uh offed by his gangsters for I don't know if he necessarily ratted on them, but they kill him and his brother and bury them right there in the middle of a cornfield. And he thought he was meeting them on good intent. And then, yeah, obviously we see Sam uh kind of go into hiding, but then somebody tries to blow up his car and he narrowly escapes based on uh the manufacturer of his vehicle, putting in a metal plate in right where the bomb was, so it kind of helped block it off. But obviously, he still feels not that safe. I think playing that song there was just really well done, and I think that would be my my needle drop for this week.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah, it's a great song for uh that part of the movie, like just perfect choice. I love the the soundtrack of this movie. There's a lot of a lot of blues, a lot of Rolling Stones. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Just great songs. I think they played uh Give Me Shelter by the Stones too, right? Yeah, that's a good one too. Definitely it fits that vibe and that that time period for sure. Um getting into the themes of this movie, uh definitely a lot you could dive into here with those main three characters. Mainly though, unchecked greed, right? They all got greedy and that's kind of what led to their own self-destruction. But also the erosion of relationships built on very bad foundations, right? The relationship between Nikki and Sam uh wasn't always that great. They were kind of partners, but it was never built on like a strong foundation. They just kind of knew each other from back home. Same with Sam and Ginger, she never loved him in the first place. So starting out a marriage and having kids like that is probably not the best idea. But also Sam's relationship with the mob in the Midwest, uh they never really talked to each other, they never really met. It was just kind of a uh a no-dialogue relationship. So that was again a bad foundation with no real communication in it, and we kind of see how all that led to a really bad situation.

SPEAKER_02 17:58

Yeah, it's definitely um a huge part. That's like strikingly obvious in the marriage. Just because like they both know from the get-go what they're getting into, and then it goes exactly as you expect from the beginning of it. And then just like all these characters trying to get control over their lives through different means, but then they they don't control themselves as they're doing it, and so they kind of like just ruin I mean, like they say m many times in the movie, like they had a good thing going, and then it all gets ruined because they couldn't like just enjoy that or they always had to look for more.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Exactly. That that greed kind of just ate up everybody. The other one I'd mentioned too is uh Ginger's relationship with uh her pimp, uh Lester. She obviously that's not a great foundational relationship, but she always kept going back to him for some reason, and that kind of led to her downfall and his downfall as well. Finally, getting into the editing, I gave it a nine. I thought it was really well done. Very high-stakes shots uh of Vegas, which was really cool. And uh the editor, uh Shoon Maker, won an Academy Award nomination for best film editing on her work. So uh I thought it was really well done. I think that everything was pieced together well. And one thing I'd say about Scorsese films is he always puts everything in order really well. I think it was interesting to have the opening scene of De Niro's car blowing up. So the whole movie we're sitting there thinking, oh, he's gonna die, right? And then by the end of the movie, we realize, oh, he didn't die, but everybody else around him did, essentially, which is uh a nice curveball to add to the movie.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Yeah, that that's a crazy choice to open up with like the main character exploding. But it it definitely works really well. I gave editing like a 9.5. Uh I thought it was great. I don't I don't know if this falls under editing, but like the way they handled the exposition with like Joe Pesci or De Niro like talk like just giving straight up exposition for like an hour and a half of the movie.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

It's like it was really well done. It's you would think that would get boring, but they just do such a good job of it.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

No, definitely. And I I think no, it definitely uh counts as editing because I think it's definitely a choice to have yeah, being narrated by your your main characters for such a long period in the movie. It could really drag if you did that bad. If they weren't explaining stuff you you you aren't interesting it interested in, it could go downhill so fast. Like it could, like you said, get very boring. So definitely a a big editing choice to do that. And also De Niro and Pesci just have the coolest mobster voices ever. So how how can you not listen to that for an hour and a half? So good. Yeah, it's it was really amazing. Leading to my final score, I gave it an 8.2 out of 10 or an 82. I mean, yeah, you put these two guys on screen, Pesci and De Nero, it's just gonna work out. And especially setting it up with a good director like uh Scorsese, I mean, you're just asking to have a blockbuster hit on your hands.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Absolutely great movie. I gave it a 92, probably the only three-hour movie. I'll sit down and watch the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

So you said you had seen this one before, right? I have. Yeah, I hadn't seen this one before, but uh everybody always talked about it all the time. You know, I'd seen things like uh Heat that that Daenerys in, and everybody's just like, yeah, you got you gotta go watch this. It's such a good movie. And yeah, I definitely there's it seems like there's a thousand more movies that Daenerys is in with Scorsese, so I got a lot of watching to do. Yeah, we get a lot of Scorsese episodes. Yeah. Getting into the next movie, we also watched Raging Bull. I didn't know a lot about this movie, but I've always seen the clips of the fighting scenes and kind of TikTok edits and that kind of stuff. But yeah, I was excited getting into this one. So Raging Bull uh follows the uh self destructive life and career of uh the middleweight boxing champ, uh Jake Lamoda. He's obviously driven by kind of extreme violence, sexual insecurity. And paranoia, his whole the whole movie, his whole life essentially is what we follow. And his temper kind of helps him become a championship in the champion in the ring, but it destroys his personal life, right? It destroys his uh life with uh his uh his wife Vicky and then it also fractures his relationship with his brother. Guess who? Joe Pesci, and then ultimately leaves him just very isolated and alone in his life. Um and you can tell he really hates that. But for the plot, I gave it a nine. Yeah, I mean you did a great job summarizing that.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

I don't know if you got that the first time you watched it. The first time I watched this, I just did not get it. I was expecting a boxing movie. Yeah. It's it's yeah, it's definitely about like the isolation of this guy and how he's destroying his life. Um but I I gave it a 9.2. It's it's really well done. It's not what I expected.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

I think, yeah, I I see what you're saying. I think if you're not absolutely locked into Jake's character throughout this movie and you're kind of viewing this as a boxing movie, it would get really hard to track what's going on, why this is happening. I could see why somebody would finish this movie and be a little bit confused just because it's a lot going on. You know, it's following basically what I'd say 25, 30 years of his life. He's probably 20 when the movie starts, 20, 20 to 25, and then it's ending him in retirement age, I'd say 40, 45. And so it's a lot to track, and especially all the relationships he has going on. But obviously, he's a very self-driven man. He wants to kind of prove everybody wrong and do everything on his own. And that's what I instantly took away from it at the beginning, just him wanting nothing to do with the the mobsters that his brother hangs out with. Uh, kind of getting into that with the characters, I gave it an eight. I think uh again, the big three. I think Robert Zenero, Joe Pesci, and then uh Vicki, played by Kathy. Uh how do you say her name? More moreti, I think is her name. Yeah, I think those those big three are are the the main points of this movie, right? Kind of his relationship and his marriage, but also with his brother. I think they were done really well. But again, side characters were just kind of there. And obviously the whole idea was that he was kind of trying to be a self-made man. He was trying to get to the championship on his own without anybody but his brother and his wife, essentially. But um, the mob becomes involved uh wanting him to fix matches, and they kind of promise him that if he fixes the matches and loses a couple, they'll get him to the championship, they'll get him the spot in the championship to where he can actually fight and do his own thing. But that kind of destroys his ego, I think, in the long run, and then you just see him kind of crash and burn after that.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah, I give the uh characters like a nine, literally just because of Jake. It's just so interesting, like write a character like that where you're like the whole time you're like, at least once I understood the movie, you're like, what is this guy doing? Like, he's making these terrible decisions, like you're judging him because he's making horrible decisions for his life, he's doing dumb things, but then you also feel bad for him the entire time. It's like it's a very like human character. Yeah. He's just a guy trying to like figure out his life with what he has given, and he's screwing up in a lot of ways, but you can't help but like feel sorry for him sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Especially like late stage, right? We see him obviously beating up his wife. He tries to fight his brother because he thinks he slept with her, but it's all just in his head. We know none of this has actually happened. Uh he's just so paranoid and so ego driven, I guess. But at the same time, we're kind of looking at him like, hey man, we're supposed to be rooting for you, right? You think about stuff like uh I know it's a boxing movie too, but you think about stuff like Rocky, even in Rocky's lowest points, we're supposed to be rooting for him. But then we we see something like this, and he's just doing really bad things, and it's hard to like root for this guy. But some for some reason you keep going back to like we believe in this guy. Like we saw in the beginning of the movie he he's kind of a come from nothing underdog. We're supposed to be rooting from it for this guy, and it's just hard to with the the decisions he's making sometimes, it's tough. Getting into the cinematography, I gave it a 10. I think this was so well done. Um, and the choice to do black and white for that uh that era, you know, that I would say if I had to guess 1930s, 1940s era of the United States, I think it was so well done from the camera shots, obviously choosing to do black and white, uh, more set design and costume design, but obviously everybody's clothes very much reflected that era. I think the ring shots in the beginning, the first couple fights he had, the boxing looked terrible. And I was like, oh god, this is gonna show like through the whole movie. But then uh I think it was if his final fight with Sugar Ray and the championship bout. That was such an amazing fight to watch, and I think it was so well shot uh for that time period. It was just kind of crazy to see it done like that. Um, they had a couple panning shots where they would kind of zoom in on their faces as the boxes were fighting, and I just thought that looked so amazing.

SPEAKER_02 26:55

Yeah, the fighting scenes were were crazy. Yeah. They were so all over the like definitely the first ones, I was like, this is a little cheesy. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah. Just like the sound effects and the the blood like shooting in like perfect tubes. Yeah. Like that was kind of crazy, but I like I think whatever he's doing with that is just going over my head because everything else in this movie is so like meticulously done to like add to this feeling of paranoia and isolation that you're supposed to feel with Jake. Um and also this like that that last fight scene where he's like getting washed in his own blood, and there's like all this like Christian symbolism before he just like accepts this beating from the sugar ray. It's like, I don't know, he he's Scorsese is saying some things that I'm not smart enough to figure out with the cinematography. But it definitely took me some like videos and reading to appreciate it more. Yeah. After I watched it.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

And I know that's a lot to do uh in some of these movies to kind of like have to do research after the movie to understand it fully, but I think in this case it definitely worked. Like I imagine if I went back and re-watched this, I would pick up on so many small details like that. Like I didn't even notice any like a Christian symbolism, like you were kind of saying there. But I definitely want to look into that now just to kind of understand what Scorsazy was thinking during that scene. Um, because even like in that scene, it was hard for us to understand why why is he giving up, right? Why is he giving up this bout? But I think at that point in his life he just felt like he had accomplished everything he wanted to and he was ready to give up on it, you know? I don't I feel like he like wanted to be punished.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Like I feel like that's just a consistent theme of like where he f Even though he's making these bad decisions, he still feels like he deserves to be punished for it or something. I don't know. Because like even in the beginning, he's like, punch me as hard as you can to his brother. And it's like, why? What are we doing? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

But he just wants that beating. Yeah. Getting into that, that's actually I think one of the better scenes in this movie, dialogue-wise, I gave it an eight. Um, my favorite line is when he was locked up in the prison cell and he's just sitting there punching the wall, beating his head on the wall. He's like, I'm not an animal, I'm not an animal. Why are they doing this to me? I'm not an animal, I'm not an animal. But then he kind of accepts it right after, which I think you were getting into is kind of how he feels like he should be punished. But he I don't I don't think he thinks he's a bad person. He's just done some bad things, and that's kind of why he he feels like he needs to be punished, but maybe not locked in jail for whatever reason. But yeah, dialogue, I gave it an eight. I think there were some really, really quotable lines throughout this whole movie, and I think it was done really well. Again, you those the scenes with De Niro and Pesci just sitting in a room arguing with each other. It's just a masterclass. You could watch it for hours. They have like the best fight chemistry. Yeah, for real. And I think about the scene too where um he's accusing him of you know sleeping with his wife, and he's like, I'm not gonna answer that question. And it's not because he did it, it's just because he's like, I'm your brother. Why would I would never do something like that to you? Why are you gonna sit here and harass me? Um I would never lie to you. I've always been on your side the whole time. And we see that reflected too with him seeing him on the street later in the movie and him trying to run up to him, give him a hug, and he wants nothing to do with him because he turned on him, you know? That was such a hard watch, that scene.

SPEAKER_03 30:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

He's like trying to hug him, and he's just like it's so awkward. But that that scene when he's in the jail cell, punch the wall, that that was very powerful. Which one were we just doing? Oh sorry. Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. I gave it um an 8.3. It's just I it's very natural. It never feels like it feels like the characters are just talking, but yeah, when he's repeating these questions, like it's pretty interesting as a boxer, you know, he's repetitively throwing punches in the ring, and then he's also like every time he's antagonizing his family, it's repeated questions over and over again. So it's like almost kind of like a verbal punch, parallelism between boxing and the ring and fighting with his family.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Yeah, that that's a good point. I didn't even think of anything like that. Uh kind of like you were talking about though, with how natural it was. I think the the first scene where he gets to talk to Vicky. She's on the inside of the fence at the pool when he's on the outside. It just felt extremely awkward, right? Like it's the first time you're you're talking to a girl you just met. It it felt awkward. It felt real. It felt like they hadn't ever met or talked before, which was cool. I think I think that's very important in movies to kind of get the viewer fully engulfed into what's going on. Yeah, for sure. Uh set design, I gave it an eight. Um, funny enough, I read again. They Scorsese and his team really wanted to lay into the psychological state of Jake. And uh they kind of used the scenes, and I think the scenes in the ring, um, especially that last fight with uh Sugar Ray was very interesting. Uh I guess they started shifting ring sizes for different fights to make uh his mind basically feel more more contained and pressurized or kind of more open and free, as we see with him through the movie. So I wouldn't even notice, but the rings were smaller for some s fights, depending on where his kind of personal life was at during the movie as well, which is such a neat thing and something you wouldn't even notice until you read about it, you know?

SPEAKER_02 32:25

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. I I did definitely did not notice that. Um I think what I noticed more about the set design, like more so than the actual sets themselves, was just like the character placement. How a lot of times Jake is by himself and then everyone else is over talking, and you know, he's just completely in his own head and in his own world, like not seeing the reality of it, um, of what's actually going on, just feeling isolated. So I I thought that was well done.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Yeah, it definitely was. And I mean, a lot of times they wanted to be talking to him too, but his ego wouldn't let him go talk to other people and get help from anybody else. So I think that was a big thing for him, too. He just wanted to do everything on his own. But, you know, eventually, I guess being that alone and that isolated will catch up to you, which I guess we you know we've seen it do. Getting into acting, De Niro won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this role. I think it was a huge deal. Um, but also Joe Pesci, this was kind of a breakout role for him. This is one of the the early ones they did with Scorsese, and obviously they kept doing it down the road, which it worked. So yeah, why would why would you ever quit? But I think the main three had some really good acting. I think Vicky did really well too, especially those scenes where um she was kind of stoic about Jake. He'd be yelling and screaming at her, and she's just kind of sitting there with a blank face, just because it really makes you feel like she's been through it before. She's kind of expected it this way. Um, and she was very calm when everything with him was just absolutely crazy.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Yeah, dude, that that definitely tracks that De Niro won the award for this, because yeah, that's an outstanding performance. Um, you know, going in thinking it was gonna be a boxing movie, I was not prepared for the kind of movie it was gonna be. And I think just his acting being at that level was what really kept me engaged.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

The first watch. Easy part. Yeah, I gotta tell you, I watched another one this week, Scorsese and De Niro. I watched Taxi Driver, and I think if you liked this movie, you would really like Taxi Driver as well. A very similar acting from him, uh just in the sense that um his character is very different, and you have to really pick up on his acting to see how the character's feeling. Um, it's not explained a lot how Jake is feeling in this movie, right? It's not narrated over anything like that, like we've seen in Casino. This is very much you have to pick up the the acting cues as well as the the body language, right, to figure out how Jake's feeling or the camera, like you we talked about him being so isolated all the time. Taxi driver, it's a very similar situation. He's very uh different, I'll say that. And I definitely recommend that one as well. Getting into directing, I gave it an eight. Obviously, it's widely considered a mass uh masterpiece uh for the new Hollywood era. Um people some people will call this one of the greatest movies of all time. Uh there's definitely uh a fan base for this one, and I think Scorsese Scorsese's vision for this would turned out uh pretty immaculate. Uh turning a boxing movie, which most people would think about I I thought was about the sport of boxing into a very profound character arc uh through the the the telling of of Jake Lam LaModa, I can't pronounce his last name, but La Mata. I I think it was really well done telling of a tragedy, basically. I think it's yeah, really cool.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

For sure a tragedy. It's interesting that like both of these movies are both tragedies. I I definitely saw a lot of parallels um between how like Scorsese was directing these. Both movies had a line that was like you're giving me a bunch of answers, but you're not giving me the right answer. Yeah. I thought it was interesting that that was in like both movies. But I I gave him direct from like a nine. I I heard I read that um Scorsese was like really empathize not empathizing, but like he was relating to the story of Jake as he was directing this because he had just had like New York, New York was like a box office failure or something. It wasn't received well, so he was feeling like down himself and felt like he wasn't making the best decisions. And so it's interesting to think that how much was he trying to tell this story, and then how much was he trying to put his own story in this movie. So I I think that probably added to like how well he executed um what he's trying to do with this movie.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Yeah, that's definitely very interesting to kind of see him uh relating with his main character like that. Definitely sure it makes it way easier to tell that story. Yeah, getting into the soundtrack, I gave it an eight. Obviously, early 1930s, 1940s, a lot of jazz, a lot of swing music, a lot of vocal tracks, um, all curated by Robbie Robertson. Uh yeah, I gave it an eight. I thought it was really well done. I don't think Scorsese misses on the soundtracks that often, and this is definitely not one of them.

SPEAKER_02 37:11

The soundtrack is definitely good. I don't know if he's like trying to make the the punching sound effects took me out of it like every single time. They're like so cheesy, which I I understand he's probably trying to do on purpose, but it was just always like a a little silly to me.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

Yeah, definitely. And the blood, uh like the blood shooting out of their head sound, it was like I was like, what the hell? But that stuff always took me out. Yeah, who knows? I give him the benefit of the doubt too. You know, doing this in black and white, he definitely wanted to make this feel like an older movie than it actually was. So who knows? Maybe he tried to make it feel really corny and cheesy as well for that really old feel. But getting into the theme, I gave it an eight. I thought the themes were really well done here, pretty much all directly through Jake's character and Robert De Niro's character, you know, self-destructive masculinity and kind of how that tore all his personal relationships apart. Extreme jealousy was a huge thing. Um I think he was jealous of his brother and the relationship uh that that he had with all his friends, also his wife. He was jealous of everybody that was around his wife, and then also just the consequences of toxic pride. You know, he he really let uh all his wins and his power get to his head, and that was kind of his uh downfall, even when he did give up. He always felt like later in retirement that he still should be the center of attention with everything.

SPEAKER_02 38:31

I mean, I I think you're hitting it on the head. Like I gave theme like a 9.6. He just executed like exploring those themes so perfectly. It was very interesting seeing it like what what do you think at the end when he's talking to himself in the mirror? And he's like saying, like, I know it's a dialogue from another movie, but he's like saying, like, oh, you're my brother, like you're supposed to do this, let me down. But he's also talking directly to himself. Yeah, so is he still blaming others for not being able to get by, or is he like blaming himself at that point? What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 39:04

I took it as yes, he was still blaming himself. I think him, although he is talking into the mirror, sorry, not blaming himself, I think he was still blaming others. Obviously, he's gonna be able to do it. Talking to himself, yeah. I think even though he's talking to himself in the mirror, that he still I think that was the point to me. This is just how I took it. After everything we've seen and every mistake he made through the movie, he never learned his lesson. And so even in the end, after everything he's been through, you know, us as the audience is expecting some kind of resolution in that sense, uh, but we never get it. I think he's still completely blaming everybody else for all his problems and he wants to do everything on his own, but uh he ri he can't. He he he never will be able to, and so he's gonna blame others for that rather than himself. What'd you think?

SPEAKER_02 39:52

I think I I have the same takeaway from it. Um at least the first time I watched it, because he I mean he explicitly says, like, you're my brother, like you're supposed to help me. But then I I wasn't so sure after reading more about it. I don't know. It's it's difficult. He's like uh it's tricky to read that character because there's no like explicit exposition on what he's thinking, what's actually going on in his head. Like you just he just kind of leaves the audience not in the dark, but like you just have to figure it out on your own.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

Yeah. Yeah, I I think that's cool, and that's kind of what I was talking about with Taxi Driver too. It's not like casino where it's kind of narrated so we know uh what everybody's intentions are. Um it's very left up in the air, and that's what makes the characters so interesting, is that they can you it's kind of up for your interpretation. Do you want to root for this guy? Do you not? I'd say, in the sense taxi driver is pretty much the same thing. Um I was questioning the whole time if I wanted to root for this guy, if I didn't want to, um what really was going through his head, I'm not really sure, but this is how I feel about it. Um it's pretty neat when that happens. Yeah, it definitely makes for a uh an interesting watch for sure, but it's also a little tiring. It is tiring, and it gets I mean it gets discussion around it too. That's what you want when you're making movies like this. Uh you want people to feel conflicted about what they're watching, and that gets just that gets people talking, that gets people watching. I gotta ask you first, I I completely forgot about this on the the soundtrack, sound design, whatever. Um was your sound like very quiet? Mine, I turned it on. I had my TV on 85 and I could barely hear what they were saying. I had subtitles on. Yeah, I had subtitles on, but I just couldn't hear. And I watched it on uh YouTube with ads, so I don't know if that had something to do with it, if it was just YouTube's uh UI or whatever, but I could not hear any what anything anybody was saying. Yeah, the same problem. And then the Liberty Biberty ads would come on, and it and it was so loud on 85 I had to like mute the TV.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

That's terrible. I was just like, what is going on?

SPEAKER_01 41:56

There's no chance I fall asleep in this movie because every 30 seconds I'm gonna get a hit with Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. It was so loud. But getting into editing, I gave it a nine. I th from what I've read, uh, people widely regard this as one of the best edited movies of all time, which I agree. Uh those initial fight scenes were really poor, and I think that was probably just a time constraint thing. Some of those middling fights with Sugar Ray and the other people that he fought, the camera work and editing was so well done. I know it was cheesy blood splatter, cheesy punching sounds, but the camera work itself, them kind of fading in and fading out of the boxers' faces, I think it was really well done.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

Yeah, I gave I gave Edwin like an eight. I don't I don't really know if I have much more to add to it than what you said. Yeah, nothing nothing really like jumped out to me, editing specific.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Yeah, yeah. The editor was uh a lady named Shoonmaker. I mean, she won her first Academy Award for this too. So pretty awesome to see that. I mean, you put Scorsese's name on it, uh the Academy loves it. So and then yeah, overall I gave this one an 8.4 or 84 out of 10 or 84 out of 100, sorry. Uh yeah, I really love this movie. Uh definitely lived up to the expectation. Not exactly what I was expecting. I was expecting like a uh a Rocky or Creed style boxing film, but this definitely was way more involved character-wise than any of those kind of cliche boxing films, um, which I enjoyed. I think it's cool to kind of tell this egotistical character story through the the lens of a sports professional, which is pretty neat.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

I give it a um 85. I definitely would have given it lower just after my first initial watch. Um I think because I was expecting something completely different. But I think the fact that like re watching it and like looking into it, some more adding value to it, like that there's more to the movie than just the initial watch, I think says a lot about like how well done.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Yeah, yeah, definitely for sure. And it just makes me want to mo watch more De Niro movies, Pesci movies. Scorsese movies. Um, it just keeps rolling. Me and Madison were kind of looking how many movies they did with Scorsese, and then you kind of see this transition period where it flips over to Leo kind of doing all these movies with uh Scorsese. So definitely two different errors for Scorsese, but it's kind of neat to see. And there's seems like there's a thousand of them that I haven't watched yet. So it's nice knowing that I always got those to fall back on if I'm if I ever need to watch something. Yeah, for sure. He's got he's got a ton of movies. I was now hit to the. Yeah. So all right, instead of doing a draft or a ranking this week, we're gonna try something a little different um than we've done before. Um, so there's this game called Spottle Movies, uh, kind of uh like a wordle in a sense. I've seen a lot of content creators be uh playing it on TikTok and Instagram and that stuff. So we're gonna try this out for the first time. Bear with us because I've never played this, I've just seen people play it. Um so I kind of understand the rules. Um, Mason definitely doesn't, even though I explained it to him. So we'll try it out. We'll try it out here. So let me share my screen. So essentially the idea is going to be that it's like Wordle, but we're guessing a movie. So we're gonna guess a first movie, and it's gonna give us the information. Okay, cool, cool. So essentially we'll guess the first movie. Uh green will be exactly correct, gold will be close, and gray is no match. So we can use a variety of hints, right? The year the movie came out, the genre of the movie, the box office, the studio, what it was rated, the overall score, directors, actors, anything we can really grasp onto to try to get uh close to the movie. So we have 10 tries. Um, let's hit play here and see how we start. Do we want to start with like Raging Bull? Something that we've seen this week. I think it's Meet the Fox or Meet the Parents. Meet the Parents. The best Robert De Niro movie. All right. I know he's in Meet the Fockers as well, but we'll do Meet the Parents. Okay, it's a romance. And that's it. Oh, we need Tyler. So the absolute only thing we got was romance on our first guest, which is pretty crazy. Um we don't have Tyler. We didn't even get anything else close. Um I figure, you know, Box Office might help. Or I'm assuming it's probably PG, if it's not PG 13. I don't know many romance movies that are rated R, unless it's like 50 Shades of Grey or something. When did the notebook come out after 2000? Uh it's gonna be right or around that. It's gotta be somewhere around that. Oh, but with the notebook, the notebook that look at the score though. It's under 67. And the box office is higher. So it made a lot of money, but it didn't.

SPEAKER_02 46:42

It's a popular movie.

SPEAKER_01 46:43

Yeah. But not well received. Oh, dude, this is yeah, this is gonna be a lot. Hold on. Let's think here. And it's not a rom-com because 50 shades of the game.

SPEAKER_03 46:51

Do you want to do 50 shades? That's 50 shades.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

Yeah, that's actually not a bad guess. Because the idea here is that it made a lot of money, but it didn't wasn't well received, probably with critics. Alright, 50 Shades of Grey.

SPEAKER_03 47:05

Bang!

SPEAKER_00 47:06

From three. I was expecting this this segment to take that much longer. Oh no, it's showing us the trailer. Oh no. Could you hear the sound of that? It was loud. I can't believe we hit that on the second try. I was expecting the segment to be way longer. No, all right. Well, we'll have to try that again another week. That was kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

We had it right on because I knew if it was romance, it had to be something kind of dark because it the comedy was also off on Meet the Parents.

SPEAKER_03 47:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:42

Well, I guess that's it. I thought we were gonna be here another 20 minutes. Sorry, guys, we were just too good. All right, cool. All right, well, thanks for coming on, Mason. We'll definitely have you on a lot, obviously, seeing that Tyler's gone. But uh Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. It was fun. Maybe we'll do a De Nero part two, uh Scorsese part two, Joe Pesci part one. We'll watch some more of these. For sure. All right, man. I'll see you. Thanks for watching, guys.