S4E39.5: The Irishman

Reminds me of something who I used to work with said “Getting old sucks but it beats the alternative”

for trans women trying to choose names near the middle of the alphabet, consider Maddy! Maddy's a good name, it's served me well. and there are tons of long versions (Madeleine, Madigan, Madison, Magdalene if you're feeling spicy,)

I'm so owned by asking me to get past a

So excited for something to replace the Trucker Convoy from my city with a Marxist Convoy next week

I feel like truck season would be Criminally underrated without, F.I.S.T. Federation of Interstate Truckers. A Sly Stallone union movie also talking about Ol’ Jimmy.

My grandma recently told me that when you’re old, “you don’t remember you’re old.” You wake up every morning and think that you’re young until you get up and remember your body and look in the mirror and realize “oh, I’m old”

You guys HAVE to do I Love Boosters for heist season; I know it’s popular right now but it’s so fun and explicitly Marxist (the dialectical materialism machine!!) which is so cool

Oh, a suggestion for truck season: Mad Max Fury Road, just for seeing it through the lens of carman vs truckman.

As a trans girl who recently named herself "Alice"... Hey!

More notes from the book, and things that got left out of the movie include Frank delivering a bag of rifles that are expressly used to murder JFK later (three rifles delivered to a CREW), driving a truck full of guns to Florida to arm the invasion force for Bay of Pigs, and being at least in part responsible for Joe Biden's election to being a US senator for the first time. There is a lot of documentation on his participation in that one, at least. Frank really liked to talk, and Marty cut a LOT of stuff for the sake of clarity.

The Teamster offers the James R. Hoffa Memorial Scholarship. I missed it and that's my greatest regret because I think it would be really funny to get the certificate that comes with it.

Comparing this with the book is odd, both are pretty great. The book spends the first 1/3 or so talking about him as a kid and in the war, which is documented enough so him spending four months in a dugout as the Germans shelled him before participating in the liberation of Dachau is interesting in and of itself. As far as Scorcese being a conspiracy theorist, all that shit about Castro and the Kennedys and shit is in there and came from the guy himself. DeNiro is odd casting, since apparently Frank was a huge motherfucker in life, 6'4 and built like the fuckin Rock. Pictures of him with Hoffa have him towering over that dude.

Listening to three youngsters try to talk about aging made me chuckle more than a little. I can’t really tell if any of the more recent generations are talking about it, but when I was young, none of the oldsters ever talked about what it was like getting older. I think they were all shell-shocked by the experience, or afraid of their own mortalities, or something. The thing that really took me by surprise as I passed 40 was how much everything hurt. I mean, sure, I had heard people mention aches and pains, but the part they all skipped was how it sneaks up on you. Passing 40, you do not feel any different at all, but suddenly, you cannot do stuff, and there’s no warning. You only discover you cannot do something anymore when you hurt like hell the next day or sometimes even an hour later. Then, it gets worse because you will hurt for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You will wake up in the morning, and your shoulder or hip or leg will be in serious pain, and the only thing you did was sleep. The act of sleeping caused an injury. And through it all, you do not feel any different at all. Your brain is the same and keeps telling you to do this or do that. It’ll be fine, but it won’t be fine. It’ll hurt in an hour. And that is when I finally understood why older people were so angry. The aches and pains and inability to do things are fun little surprises you could not see coming. I’m trying to remember the exact story, but it was someone’s grandmother getting into or out of a chair, and it made them laugh. I get it. I understand. The absolute absurdity of “How the hell did this happen? When did it happen? And why don’t I feel any different?” is very strong. I am in my middle fifties now, and it still amazes me that I’ve made it this far. I never ever thought I would live to see twenty. I never ever thought I would live to see thirty. Dark times, very dark times. And yet, holy shit! Middle fifties! How? How have I survived this long? What deep-seated well of bloody-minded determination has gotten me through it all? It’s a question that Samantha and I will sporadically throw around. “Did you ever think you would live this long?” “Did you ever think you would see twenty?” “How about third?” “Nope, me neither.” Samantha is now in her early fifties, and I am in the mid-fifties, and we're both shocked to the core that we've survived. So anyway, I like to talk and joke about the aches and pains of aging sneaking up on you because nobody ever talked about it when I was young, and I want to share the joy, so to speak. You want to talk about what you cannot eat anymore because that's a laugh riot? Goodness, long post

I loved your Sexy Beast episode and having just rewatched 44 Inch Chest (by the same writers, starring Ray Winstone) I'm back to repeat my request for it on here pls ❤️ "M" may be in punitive zone

My father died after a fall, as did my grandfather just a few years prior. I thought it would affect my love for funny videos of people falling but thank god it didn't make s a difference.

Tony Pro is short for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Thanking the pod for this return to Religion Season

Does the movie do the death subtitle thing with RFK?

Devon, every time you hear Casino, imagine Draft Kings and Kalshi. That will make you the appropriate amount of Disgusted

Devon playing my song by calling Convoy a *Marxist* text. The scene with the old man almost explicitly describing his life as Marx's theory of alienation

As we are bracing for Fast X, which I can only assume will be as edifying as the fastices that came before, may I interest you in a soviet film about a guy stealing cars from the rich and giving money to the poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beware_of_the_Car

…so is nobody going to mention the fact that there is a very good possibility Frank Sheeran just made up everything? Like not even that he wasn’t involved in killing Jimmy Hoffa, that he never killed anyone period. Which almost makes the ending even sadder: that this is just the fantasy of an old man who made up stories to console himself in old age.

For another truckman movie, A Violent Year is very good

1 million years of KJB!

i had no idea that's what "painting houses" meant. i thought it just meant... painting houses 😬. i guess i need to watch more movies.

To take omertà so seriously that one cannot bare one's secrets to the All Knowing Lord; to spite hell & renounce heaven so that you hope the grave spits you out, to be the halfworlded in being William of the Marshlights That call unmanned him; hanging up cut him from his descent (he leads no subsequent generation of the mafia) & from the power of his "warrior" "brotherhood. He violated something of what being A Man meant to him. To care for the widow & the fatherless child, to make the call the day after, to tell a better lie To be damned to hell for eternity minus a day

I remember asking my dad when I had just entered my 20s "hey dad, when did you start feeling like an adult" and his response was "when it happens, i'll let you know." And hearing that from him, who had just entered his early 60s, was so impactful. He then told me he had a similar convo w his mom, my grandmother, a few years previous. She was in her 90s then, and she told my dad that inside she still felt like she was a teenager. That was crazy to me; my grandmother was the pinacle to me of an adult, of someone who had it together, who understood life, of maturity. Knowing she, in the last yrs of her life, felt so young actually makes me happy a little. I hope I never lose that youthful spirit. I hope I look at the world with fresh eyes forever.

Oh I know this one! Frank and JFK being Irish is a big deal because the Irish mob, for a lot of American history, was the other mob. By the timeline of this movie, the Irish mob had largely bartered it's criminal enterprise for entrenched "legitimate" power, but for most of American history before that, the Irish and Italian diaspora were the two biggest mob operations (particularly on the east coast)

Nova, I am 30 years older than you and you said about aging is spot on. It really is a surreal experience. My brain is telling constantly saying I can do that and my body is saying the fuck you will!

Dark star for trucker season

Also, I think you should do a good/different Vin Diesel vehicle as a bonus episode soon

The problem with the deep episodes is that they always provoke interesting thoughts I've never had before and then go on talking while I'm still thinking, forcing me to rewind to figure out what's going on 😔.

I nearly screamed with excitement hearing Devon's pick for the next bonus. Possibly one of my favorite movies of all time, can not wait for it. Convoy and Emperor of the North Pole are two of Ernest Borgnines most unhinged but amazing to watch roles and I'm unbelievably happy to get one of those two on the pod

JFKirk had me guffawing. In high school I took an intro psych class where we all answered a survey that had been given to kids in that class for decades. One of the questions was "When I was 30 I will be _______." A steady 15% or so of kids (me included) wrote "dead" every year. I'm over 50 now clearly things didn't work out as I expected. On a slightly related note: for romance season: Harold & Maude. I first saw it my senior year at boarding school in a girls dorm lounge where it they kept that VHS tape tucked away on a secret shelf so you could always watch Harold & Maude if you needed to.

As I listen to our intrepid trio discuss the how bad the deaging looks it hit why it was done. The whole film is a hazy recollection of a very old man. I think that Scorse made a deliberate choice with the deaging to signify that Frank can't quite get where he can recapture his youthful vitality.

I recently learned the feeling you were not going to live this long has a name. It’s called “sense of foreshortened future” and from where I’m sitting at 44, it is a deeply weird sensation.

Random personal connection: the restaurant where Hoffa is rumored to have disappeared from (the red fox) still exists under a different name and my fiance sings there on fridays. This movie was incredibly impactful to us because we know several of these guys kids and grandkids. It’s kinda surreal

I appreciate a movie review that opens with a bit about size play

"the door is still open" in The Irishman is "there is still time" from I Saw the TV Glow.

Getting half called out there xD

Brilliant episode as always. I'd already seen the movie and enjoyed it for what it was, but especially the religious reading gave me a new lense through which to appreciate it. Probably my favorite Scorcese along with KotFM (very excited for that episode!)

I love the little tagline that comes up for the one guy who dies of old age surrounded by loved ones or whatever it said. The guy that was trying to be a peacekeeper in the meeting if I remember correctly I'm a Godfather freak and I would love to hear y'all talk about it. I've read three novels and watched the first two movies. A woman's pelvic floor drives like three different plots in the books.

There was a lot of controversy when this film came out around Anna Paquin’s role, the fact that she literally has only one line in the entire film. But goddamn it, she’s such a good actor that she NAILS that line. You feel her utter loathing and contempt for Frank down in your fucking mitochondria. Marty knew exactly what he was doing with that casting.

I'm convinced that the last 40 minutes of this movie is Frank's Purgatory.

My birthday is tomorrow, and lately I've been thinking about how at a certain point you realize that you're older than you ever thought you'd be. And then that just keeps happening, over and over, for the rest of your life.

The chore wheel for the teamsters/mafia polycule must be really diabolical.

Hey Nova? As someone also born in 1991, I want to call out how fucking real the "I didn't think I'd reach this age" feeling cause fucking hell yeah it's surreal. Like I was supposed to be dead over ten years by now, and yet here I still am.

One thing, solidarity part, Whiteness, is a social construct, people that are White NOW, were not always White, in the US Celts and Mediterraneans were not White until around the 1960s, November kind of covered this on WTYPP the Titanic episodes. You still had many places in the US in the 1960s with segregation signage that included Irish and dogs, with the Blacks. It also wasn't a switch, on/off, there's still many places that quietly uphold those rules. Hell, my family didn't see Celts as White, some of them still don't, I grew up listening to most of my family decry the Celts, not so much the Scots or Cornish, but the Irish and Welsh for sure, well into the 2010s... Point being, "You're White!" Devon, no, they ain't White, for much of America anyone not a WASP ain't White. By modern standards, generally Celts and Italians are White, sure, but not there and then.

As an autistic person who's job hunting right now, to me every job interview feels like the coded double-talk mob job interview

love the trio talking about some marty once again