AndyDursin wrote: ↑Tue Dec 03, 2019 10:36 am
I'm about halfway through, will reserve comments until I'm done except for this: it is incredibly WEIRD to watch a movie where elderly actors are playing their younger versions. They can employ all the digital technology all they want -- and it's really not that effective -- but even if it DID work more credibly, it wouldn't change the fact that the three leads are all closing in on 80.
You can see it in how they
sound, and how they
move, no matter how many wrinkles they scrub from their faces.
When you watch DeNiro kind of gingerly meander down a street to beat up the shopkeeper who put his hands on his daughter, you can see it's an 80 year old DeNiro -- it's not the younger, spry DeNiro from GOODFELLAS, even though he's supposed to be the same age.
It's the same as hearing a frail, 90-year-old James Earl Jones reprise iconic voice work in the
Lion King remake, or in
Star Wars: Rogue One or the
SW: Rebels cartoon...yeah, you wouldn't want to hear someone else's voice come out of those characters, but it's
not the booming, hale & hearty voice we grew up listening to.
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/icon_confused.gif)
For De Niro's shopkeeper beatdown scene, they couldn't have just digitally popped his face onto the body of a younger stunt double for that one bit? That was the most creaky, arthritic beatdown in the history of cinema.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
And his character was supposed to be, what, in his forties at the time, maybe early fifties? In real life, De Niro was still physically spry in the mid/late-90s fare like
Heat and
Ronin, and he was around that age at the time. I mean, they could digitally de-age Clint Eastwood by about fifty years and make another
Dirty Harry, but he'd still move and sound like an ancient ninety-year-old (which also made the superfluous additional scenes in the ersatz-"directors cut" of
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly so distracting, suddenly Clint and Eli Wallach sounding like the raspy, seventy and eighty-year-old men they were at the time).