Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for both Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. Unfortunately, the Academy was not a friend of Hoffa, and the film failed to win a single trophy. Still! Ten Oscar nominations is pretty good — that’s [checks notes] 10 more than Grandma’s Boy was nominated for (it was robbed). Netflix hopes to have better success with its next prestige project from an all-time acclaimed director: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.
Both films — one about a truck driver who becomes a hitman, the other about four African American veterans returning to Vietnam (guess which one is which!) — are reliant on flashbacks, but with a key difference. “I was not getting $100 million to de-age our guys,” Lee told the New York Times, adding, “I think we were able to turn a negative into a positive.”
Notably, the actors, all over 50, play themselves in the flashback sequences, without any de-aging makeup or digital effects. According to notes about the film sent to the press, this was meant to illustrate the bloods’ “living memories,” how “current dilemmas and even ailments color recollections of their former selves.” (Via)
There better be at least one scene of Isiah Whitlock Jr. eating ice cream, though. Da 5 Bloods, which also stars Chadwick Boseman, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Jonathan Majors, and Paul Walter Hauser, premieres on Netflix on June 12.
