The Projector #17: Roll Credits (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps 

On this week’s bonus episode — posting soon! — Scott Tobias and I talk about Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman, an epic in length, scope, and ambition that, without spoiling anything, ends up being a meditation on death and endings. That’s true in a couple of different ways. It’s a film concerned with how lives end and what they leave behind, but also how eras pass and those who shape them get forgotten. It plays like a final film. Happily, it’s not. Scorsese has one in the works and, intriguingly, he apparently has already shot a mystery-shrouded movie starring Sharon Stone and Meryl Streep. But someday Scorsese will shoot his last, and what a sad day that will be.

To follow a director’s career — or an actor or musician’s, but let’s stay focused on directors — is to form an attachment. Every few years brings a new Scorsese (and apparently every few months now brings a new Soderbergh). It’s something to anticipate and sometimes it’s a marker to note a particular moment in time. October 2006 is when the Cardinals won the World Series, Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” topped the charts, and Scorsese released the cops-and-criminals fever dream The Departed. But that won't always be the case. There’s no more Altman movies. No more Varda movies. And someday no more Scorsese films.

That might sound inappropriately morbid, but wait until you see the movie, which is, among other things, a reminder to appreciate greatness while it’s still among us. Last month, our friend Steven Hyden tweeted “Later today I'm driving to Mankato, Minnesota to see Bob Dylan play a concert at a local community center, and I'm just marveling that such a thing is still possible.” I thought of that driving back from The Irishman. It’s worth remembering what we have while we have it — and that someday we won’t.

That’s probably enough Scorsese for a while in this newsletter, by the way. If you want to read about some other topics, we’ve got some great suggestions:

• For The Guardian, our Scott Tobias wrote about Being John Malkovich at 20.

• It’s 1999 again everywhere. In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri digs into Michael Mann’s The Insider.

• For TV Guide, our Keith Phipps wrote about how the days of stumbling across movies on TV might be over, or might have just moved to other platforms.

• For The Ringer, Keith Phipps also wrote about Scorsese’s least-talked-about dramatic feature, Boxcar Bertha. 

• And as long as we're doing self-promotion, I’m also going to be writing about horror movies regularly for Fangoria, including pieces like this exploration of why we now love the once-hated Halloween III: Season of the Witch. (You need to login to read it, but you can get three free articles a month. Or subscribe. It’s good stuff!)

• At The New Yorker, John Lahr profiles the great Todd Haynes.

• Relevant to recent episodes, Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt talks to Bong Joon Ho and production designer Lee Ha Jun about building the Parasite house.

• At Slate, Sam Adams ponders whether HBO’s Watchmen occupies a similar place in the superheroverse as the graphic novel did in 1986.

• At Vulture, Matt Zoller-Seitz has a chilling story about Disney pulling Fox films from repertory showings.