RE: The Last Movie You Watched
January 1, 2020 at 12:28 am
(This post was last modified: January 1, 2020 at 1:00 am by Rev. Rye.)
This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Gotti. So, basically, this is another of John Travolta's passion projects, like Battlefield Earth, but this is less of a non-starter than that film was. It's the biopic of famous mobster John Gotti, which wouldn't seem like a bad idea for a movie. So...
Well, Richie Cusack, let me count the ways:
Well, Richie Cusack, let me count the ways:
- It jumps all over the place with little rhyme or reason. One scene he's in his prime, the next he's old and terminally ill, the next, he's a bit younger, then it's 1971. There are movies that really do benefit from a nonlinear storytelling. Hell, John-boy starred in one. In Pulp Fiction, it helps with dramatic tension, like you see Jules and Vincent wearing T-shirts and shorts, telling Marcellus that they don't want to know why they look like dorks, but we do, and then we see it. I know a lot of this is framed through his trying to convince Junior to not take a plea deal (which doesn't explain why he refers to Junior in the third person), but this random structure does not help the story at all. Especially when we see Junior going from a five-year-old to a college student to a slightly older kid in three consecutive scenes. As a result, we have no narrative through-line to give a shit about these mob guys.
- "Motherfucking these guys." No, I didn't mistype "These Motherfucking guys," Gotti uses "motherfuck" as a verb. I have been swearing for well over a decade, and I know that motherfucking is not a motherfucking verb! Fun fact: Stephen Wildish has a section of his book How to Swear that talks about the use of "motherfucker" as a noun and an adjective. Not as a verb. I have never heard this in the wild, and rarely in the media, because it's really fucking awkward.
- In the later-period scenes, John Travolta needs to wear old-age makeup to portray Gotti. Thing is, on the day Gotti started principal photography, John Travolta was 267 days OLDER than John Gotti was when he died. I know actors are vain, but this is really ridiculous.
- After a couple dozen scenes where we switch back and forth between timelines, one thing becomes abundantly clear: this movie has a concerning bias in favour of John Gotti. We have long scenes of him doting over his kids, and the crime (you know, the reason people are going to want to see a movie about a famous mobster) is really rushed over. There's a scene of him making his bones by killing a guy in a hotel room, and the movie rushes this over like, well, imagine that you go to a motel because you left a book there, go to the room, see it on a table, and jog back to the car. That hit is pretty much played like that, except instead of getting a book, he shoots a guy in the chest. And I used the word "jog" instead of run, because while he gets back to his car quickly, it's not like the typical "I need to get out of here before the cops show up" run, it's just a jaunty run. Apparently, Travolta was a friend of the Gottis, and his pro-Gotti bias really shows. And it really gets in the way of an interesting story. Hell, near the end of the movie, they include testimonials from supporters in the street, and, well, I wasn't a fan of this when Spike Lee did the same for Malcolm X. Do you really think I'd give it a pass here?
- You know how, in Suicide Squad, they had a trailer company to help with the editing, and they put these stupid-looking introduction scenes that might be fine in trailers, but look horrendous in an actual film into it because the movie as it was was a mess? They do the same for this movie. Admittedly, they're lower-key, but we keep seeing all the miscellaneous mobsters they failed to properly develop getting captions explaining who they are because the film failed to develop them in any meaningful way.
- At one point, they have to explain what the five boroughs of New York are to John Gotti. Gotti was born in The Bronx, grew up in Brooklyn, and eventually spent most of his career in Queens. Manhattan. Staten Island.
- Apart from that, I liked it a lot more when it was calling itself Goodfellas.
- Also, one strange note: the studio noticed the movie was getting bad reviews, so they created ad campaigns claiming that critics are "trolls behind a keyboard" and that critics "don't want you to see it." In reality, 40% of the people who saw the movie on its opening weekend were given free tickets by Moviepass, who are affiliated with the studio. And the film was not screneed for critics. This tends to happen because A) the studio does not want any advance information leaking before the release, B) the studio knows it's not likely to get good reviews, or C) it's Christopher Robin. Looking at the "Not Screened For Critics" page on TVTropes, I can remember exactly five of the films listed actually being worth watching. And Piranha 3D and Snakes on a Plane were both So Bad They're Good movies.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.