Vintage Sand

When our Greatest Living Director puts out a new film that feels like a capstone to the major themes of his incomparable career, you know that Team Vintage Sand is on the case. Thus, Episode 17--The Irishman: It's What It Is. Martin Scorsese's 3 1/2 hour epic The Irishman reunites all of the director's major players (and adds in Al Pacino for good measure) to tell a sprawling organized crime story whose scope and range have not been seen in 35 years, since Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (which Josh thinks is a better film than The Irishman, over Mike and John's strenuous objections). The Irishman will probably not be Scorsese's last film, but it seems to be a final statement regarding both his ideas on the human impact of the male-centered world of organized violence (from Mean Streets through The Departed)and, in its brilliant final half hour, the spiritual searching prominent in some of his most underrated films (Last Temptation, Kundun, Silence). While we disagree slightly on The Irishman's place in t