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Martin Scorsese on THE IRISHMAN, Crime and Corruption in His Cinema – Jennifer Merin interviews

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Throughout his filmmaking career, Martin Scorsese has been drawn to stories of crime and corruption. His name is associated with movies about mobsters. Yet, of the 25 narrative films Scorsese has directed to date, only eight of them have focused on criminal behavior, lifestyle and credo – and they range in focus and scope from the expose of the exploits of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street to the epic period civic rumbles in Gangs of New York, and from low to mid-level mob life in Mean Streets and Goodfellas to high stakes gaming in Casino, to the exploration of adversarial exploitations by organized crime and law enforcement in his Oscar-winning The Departed.

Scorsese’s latest film, The Irishman, releasing November 1 in theaters and available on Netflix on November 27, is the director’s eighth foray into the world of crime and corruption. Based on Charles Brandt’s investigative book, I Heard You Paint Houses, the film is a three-hour long epic drama about events spanning decades, leading up to and following the 1975 disappearance of the power-wielding, mob-associated union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), a real life crime that has never been officially marked as solved. The titular Irishman is Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a union leader and high-level mafia hitman who, if the film’s scenario is accurate, was the capo who carried out the mob-ordered execution of Hoffa. Continue reading on CINEMA CITIZEN

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Jennifer Merin

Jennifer Merin

Jennifer Merin is the Film Critic for Womens eNews and contributes the CINEMA CITIZEN blog for and is managing editor for Women on Film, the online magazine of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, of which she is President. She has served as a regular critic and film-related interviewer for The New York Press and About.com. She has written about entertainment for USA Today, The L.A. Times, US Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Endless Vacation Magazine, Daily News, New York Post, SoHo News and other publications. After receiving her MFA from Tisch School of the Arts (Grad Acting), Jennifer performed at the O'Neill Theater Center's Playwrights Conference, Long Wharf Theater, American Place Theatre and LaMamma, where she worked with renown Japanese director, Shuji Terayama. She subsequently joined Terayama's theater company in Tokyo, where she also acted in films. Her journalism career began when she was asked to write about Terayama for The Drama Review. She became a regular contributor to the Christian Science Monitor after writing an article about Marketta Kimbrell's Theater For The Forgotten, with which she was performing at the time. She was an O'Neill Theater Center National Critics' Institute Fellow, and then became the institute's Coordinator. While teaching at the Universities of Wisconsin and Rhode Island, she wrote "A Directory of Festivals of Theater, Dance and Folklore Around the World," published by the International Theater Institute. Denmark's Odin Teatret's director, Eugenio Barba, wrote his manifesto in the form of a letter to "Dear Jennifer Merin," which has been published around the world, in languages as diverse as Farsi and Romanian. Jennifer's culturally-oriented travel column began in the LA Times in 1984, then moved to The Associated Press, LA Times Syndicate, Tribune Media, Creators Syndicate and (currently) Arcamax Publishing. She's been news writer/editor for ABC Radio Networks, on-air reporter for NBC, CBS Radio and, currently, for Westwood One's America In the Morning. She is also a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association. For her AWFJ archive, type "Jennifer Merin" in the Search Box (upper right corner of screen).