Great Job, Internet!: Martin Scorsese is pretty good at guessing his movies from Letterboxd reviews
It's been a minute since we watched Francesca Scorsese torture her dad with modern film culture, but he actually acquits himself pretty well.
Martin Scorsese, Film: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
The Martin And Francesca Scorsese Comedy Hour is a well-established bit on the internet at this point. You’ve seen at least one example over the years, certainly: The younger Scorsese forces her dad to interface with aspects of modern internet film culture, he good-naturedly complains through it, the rest of us get to laugh at a blend of culture gap comedy, Scorsese’s famous gift for gab, and the general niceness of seeing a father-daughter pair who can have fun making gentle fun of each other. Even so, it’d been a second since we’d indulged in the duo’s comedy stylings—and especially when it came to the venerable director trying to wrestle with that most compactly weird example of modern film critique, the one-or-two-line Letterboxd review—so a new installment of their double act was a welcome distraction today.
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Scorsese—who, with Francesca, was promoting Apple TV+’s new five-part docuseries about his life and career—famously has his own account with the movie logging-and-blogging service, although he tends to avoid the cutthroat “pithy film review” game in favor of just noting films he’s enjoyed recently. Even so, the veteran director did a remarkably good job of guessing which of his films various Letterboxd reviews, written in that very particular cadence that seems to propagate in the minds of its users, were attached to. (We suspect he was simply guessing that “Ratatouille would have thrived in this environment” was Goodfellas, but he clocked Killers Of The Flower Moon and The Departed basically instantly.)
As usual with this content, some of the fun just comes from Scorsese’s genial out-of-touch nature, as he blissfully doesn’t know what “Stan Twitter” is, and will hopefully never need to find out. But he also just permanently nails “affable cranky dad” vibes, including protesting the Letterboxd user suggesting his 1993 historical romance The Age Of Innocence was “for the girls.” “That’s for everyone!” he grouchily asserts, as his daughter cackles. It’s all very cute.
Anyway, Mr. Scorsese is currently available to view on Apple TV+.
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