Hollywood. The city of dreams. The city of lies. The greatest fuckin' city in the world, Okay, I'm out of Gotti quotes now. You won't see another guy like me if you live to be five thousand! "Gotti"? It's so bad! I can't even be ironic. It's just so bad. I swear to God, this is how the movie starts: "Lemme tell ya summin'..." "New York is the greatest fuckin' city in the world." It's kind of hard to hate this movie, but, my God, every single aspect of this production, from the music, to the acting, to the writing, to the cinematography is so. Poorly. Done. "I, me, John Gotti, will sever his motherfuckin' head off!" There's been a lot of controversy over the reviews for this film. Some people accused the marketing team of writing fake user reviews for the film. "Gotti" used its zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes as some kind of a marketing strategy, like, "Oh, THEY don't want you to see this film!" Who's "THEY"? I don't really know. Film critics? The Man? Oh, it's the Democrats. That's right. The Democrats don't want you to see this movie. "Gotti is such an iconic character that I felt that I really needed to- "To honor, uh, disappearing and becoming him." John Gotti, aka the Teflon Don, was actually a pretty interesting guy. And I have some interest in gangsters and the Mafia and all that. John Gotti was born in the South Bronx and was one of 13 children in his family. At a very young age, he became part of the Mafia. He killed an Irish gangster named James McBratney, served four years in prison for it. But what really put him on the map was the hit he planned on Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family. And once John killed Paul, he took over the position. Later on in Gotti's life, his son Frank was killed in a car accident. The man responsible, John Favara, later disappeared. Did John Gotti kill him? Most likely. Gotti went to court many times for multiple reasons, but he always found a way out of jail time by rigging juries, paying people off and so on. What finally got him were recordings from bugs the FBI had planted. He was convicted and charged with life in prison for five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering obstruction of justice, tax evasion, illegal gambling, extortion, and loan-sharking. He was a huge celebrity, and probably the last prominent gangster celebrity of the century. Tons of people loved and respected him. He had so much power. And the reason why I'm talking about all this is cuz this movie doesn't capture... Any of that. I guess it's kind of factually accurate to what actually happened, but in terms of capturing the period and how much power John Gotti had and how respected he was, this film... Fuckin' stinks! Oh, silly me. How can I forget this scene? So, this is supposed to be the scene where you see that the people of New York City love John Gotti. And by "the people of New York City", I mean, like, 10 or 12 extras in the background. And they're all shouting 'Gotti, Gotti' as we cut to stock footage of, uh, fireworks. "It's your town, John!" [Incomprehensible shouting with hints of Gotti in the backround] It's like a PowerPoint presentation of his life. It's not interesting! There's no emotional weight to any of these scenes. There's the scene where his son is hit by the car and, first of all, from the second the scene starts, it's the most predictable thing in the world, like "Oh, he's gonna get hit by a car, isn't he?" Oh, no, the car is coming, oh- What- what is THAT? Why did you raise the ISO? Whoa, a high shutter speed! This is intense! And then, you know, John Travolta's at the hospital and the doctor comes over; "I'm gonna put my hand on your shoulder, John Travolta, because this is a very serious moment." Good. Good job, John Travolta. You're giving a great performance. Hey, uh, first AC, be sure to zoom in right here. Yep. *mechanical whirring* Yeah, yeah, very good. (cracking up) Very good! "You've always credited Scientology as being the thing that's... that's- that kept you... "Going." "Yeah, it's-"
(Ralph) what. John Travolta's a Scientologist? But- I- I'm a Scientologist! "All the things around us are made of matter. "And we're living in space and we're registering time. "And the better you can control it, the better off you'll be." I didn't know John was one of us! God, I-I have to reevaluate my whole review now. I was being sarcastic this whole review up to this point. I know, I know my- my sarcasm has reached a whole new level, dude. John Travolta is trying in this movie. You can tell he's passionate about the role. He isn't that bad. "They allowed us to look at family footage, they allowed us to- to... "I even wore his clothes in some of the scenes, "and I could- I could smell his cologne. Which was kind of haunting." So I commend the guy for trying, I guess? "One simple rule: "Don't you EVER go to a guy's house while he's away and see his wife alone. "And if you ever do this again, I'll park a bus up your ass fuckin' sideways! "You understand that?!" Oh, my God. But the material he has to work with is just so bad. "He's on a jet, he's over Iceland and the stewardess comes up, and she says '"My name is Pussy Galore.' *laughter* "He says, 'I must be dreamin'!" *group laughter* *ominous music* So, for some reason, the people who made this film opted to make it with a nonlinear structure? You know, in some scenes it's his early life when he was 33 And then he goes to his 40s and 50s and then it goes to his 60s and it's all out of order. Sometimes they give you a date, sometimes they don't. Most of the time, I don't know what fucking year it's supposed to be or what's happening or how old he is. I'm- I'm sorry, I can't buy a John Travolta at this stage as a 33 year old man. 33 year old men don't look like that. Apparently, this movie took, like, ten years to make. Crew changed, budget ran out, you know, there's all kinds of problems with a production that can happen. Apparently Joe Pesci was supposed to be in it at some point. They shot most of this movie in Cincinnati, even though it takes place in New York. *Ralph chuckles* My guess is that there were a lot of scenes that they just didn't shoot. Scenes that were supposed to be important plot points, but they couldn't get John Travolta on that day, or they didn't have the money to shoot, or whatever. And so this film has a lot of scenes of just, uh... "John Favara's car hit 12 year old Frank Gotti and killed him." Oh, nice exposition. "They never came to terms with young..." Oh, that's a shot from the movie. How did- How'd the news get that? "...to terms with Jon Favara. On July..." Are- Are you gonna keep going? "...left his job and walked to his car, which was parked next door at the Capitol Diner. "The diner's owner told police he saw three men club Favara and shove him..." Oh, wow, I would've liked to see that. You know, you think there'd be this big dramatic scene where John Gotti goes to find him then kills him, and we see, like, this, you know, corrupted man. But no, it's just shown on the news. It's just a news report. Wow, that's really exciting, isn't it? The writers don't actually do anything with John Gotti's son's death after that. Like, his son gets hit by a car, the guy who killed his son goes missing. And then, the scene after that, John Gotti just tells his wife to get over it. "That's it." "That's it! "That's it." "That's it!" "Vicki." "Enough." And that's it. You know that movie, "First Man", about Neil Armstrong? You know, he sees his daughter die early on in the movie and that kind of motivates him to want to go to the moon? That was the point of the movie? This movie, the son dies, they cry for a little, and then it doesn't motivate him to do anything. He doesn't learn anything from it. He acts like it never happened for the rest of the movie. "We're gonna always live like we're 7." They use tons of real footage as well. It's a quasi-documentary, I guess, except it's not nearly as interesting as just watching a documentary on John Gotti. I mean, for Christ's sake, this movie starts and ends with what feels like an outtake! "You ain't never gonna see another guy like me if you live to be five thousand!" *Pitbull rapping* This is the credit music, I swear to God. I guess this brings me to the next point: I hate the music for this movie. So, this original score was composed by Pitbull. "When you get the call that they want you to compose the score to the movie what goes through your head?" "Man, to be honest with you, I'm still trying to figure it out!" I wish I could play you large chunks of it, but I can't because of copyright issues. But you could just look up the Gotti score by Pitbull and take a listen to some of this. "WAKE UP MOTHAFUCKAAS" It doesn't fit with this movie at all. Jesus, think of all the Scientologists who had to watch this movie because John Travolta was in it and then say to his face, "Wow, John." "That was a great film." "That was a really informative, entertaining, interesting John Gotti biopic." "I can't wait for it to get nominated for all the Oscars." "Oh, what, it didn't get nominated?" "Oh, it must- it must be rigged." "THEY don't want you to see this movie." "THEY don't want you to discover the true story of John Gotti." "Thank you for the opportunity, I really appreciate it." "Well, I'm the one who's privileged and honored that you did it!" YEAH I KILLED, YEAH I EXTORTED, YEAH I ROBBED, BUT I'M THE GOD OF THE MOB "Let me tell you, Nike has a great slogan: "Just do it". "The word in 'impossible' is 'possible'!" "And let me tell you, we possible." "-you modify, your pivot, and you find ways to JUST DO IT™" Hey, people who made "Gotti". I just want to let you know, I really enjoyed that part in "Gotti" where you reused the exact same shot. That was a really interesting choice. Not lazy at all. You just flipped it. I would've loved nothing more than a well-made biopic about John Gotti. RADIO
"Mafia kingpin Paul "Big Paul" Castellano was gunned down gangland style... Wow. Okay. So that entire shot, he was just out of focus. That's great. Color palette is ugly as hell. Look at these stupid zooms. It's like an episode of The Office. And then you got, you know, this dope ass bar fight. Really well choreographed. So I want to compare this film, "Gotti", to another excellent gangster film. HENRY HILL (VO)
"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." Clearly, the film "Gotti", as well as many other gangster films that are bad -- It's become, like, a whole sub-genre now, of just terrible gangster films. "The only thing you've got to offer them now is your dead body!" "Fuck that! I'm going to Vegas! The point is, all of these movies have taken from Goodfellas. So what makes Goodfellas exciting and entertaining and- and... Good? Well, let's just ignore the things like the good acting and the- the music that's actually in period and makes sense. *MR. WORLDWIDE, BASS BOOSTED EDITION* Let's take a look at this one scene: In the film "Goodfellas", Henry Hill is in prison and is visited by his family. In the scene "Gotti", John Gotti is in prison and is visited by his family. So, let's look at the scene from Goodfellas. KAREN
"...sneak this stuff in for you every week!" HENRY
"Stop it. C'mon!" KAREN
"Let her fight those creep bastards EVERY WEEK!" HENRY
"Look what you're doin'! Stop it!" HENRY
"Shh." KAREN
"I'm sorry." KAREN
"Let her sneak this shit in for you." KAREN
"Let her sneak this shit in for you!" This set is packed with people. It's noisy, musty, hundreds of voices echoing through this grand location. It gives you a real sense of how alone and helpless Henry and Karen are in this situation. Now let's take a look at this scene in "Gotti". "Do you know what you're doing to this family?" "You're- You're gonna kill ME?!" "I'd like to see you try!" "Oh, don't get smart with me. Now, look, what do you wanna- What do you want to be? "Why don'tcha aks him what he wants to be instead? "What do you want to be?" "A baseball player?" Boring room. Boring dialogue. Underacting. The lighting is whatever. There's- there's, like, a couple extras over there. It's just a boring scene. I'm getting no emotion from any of this. The performances in the scene from "Goodfellas" are terrific, as opposed to the scene in "Gotti" where it's just these two characters talking at a table and she kind of raises her voice a little because she's a little annoyed. In this, you get a sense of how pissed Karen is! She's throwing stuff at him, he's fighting back with her, she's also trying to take care of the kids during all this. There's so much playable action which makes the performances feel real. Lorraine Bracco and Ray Liotta were given STUFF to work with, as opposed to these two. Who're just at the table. This is what happens when you let a fucking idiot direct the movie. Oh, wow. He was in "Entourage"? Does that mean he can direct a movie? Let's take a look at the hit scenes. The hit scenes in films like "The Godfather" or "Goodfellas" are some of the best parts of the film. They're the most memorable scenes in the movie. There's often a lot of tension that builds up to these scenes and there's this incredible payoff in violence. And the hit scenes in this movie fucking suck. There's no build-up to any of them. There's no tension. You don't care about these characters. You barely even understand what's happening because we keep cutting John Travolta: C'mon, you fucker. Look at this! C'mon.
Ralph: back and forth, and I just can't get over how ugly and old and gay John Travolta is. "AW, MOTHAF-" "And you." "You don't dress like a cop, you don't act like a cop, and you don't talk like a cop." "You understand me?" *Italian music* *phone rings* Eyy, Travolta, how ya doin', my man? Eh, I haven't seen you since, uh... Since the premiere o' "Gotti"! I'm watchin' it right now! Yeah, for the, uh, fifth time! Great movie, great movie... JOHN TRAVOLTA
That's actually why I'm calling you. JOHN TRAVOLTA
See, there's this film critic out there, and I need him... JOHN TRAVOLTA
Taken care of. That's right, you're getting two bad biopics for the price of one. Not only do they butcher the legend of John Gotti, they also butcher the legend of his son a bit. "They're not gonna keep coming after me with more charges." "I get closure." The son is played by a guy who kind of looks like Tom Hardy and we see his journey as a gangster in nonlinear order as well. And he always looks exactly the same. Here, he's supposed to be older cuz he has, uh, glasses on. I get it; this film didn't want to just be about John Gotti. It wanted to be about the Gotti family. The only character I haven't talked about at this point in the Gotti family is John Gotti's wife, Victoria, who is the most two-dimensional character you can imagine. *fightin' and cryin'* When you involve the people you're basing the film on in the production of the movie, it's gonna be biased. The fact of the matter is, the family and friends of John Gotti helped with this production. It's based on the book that the son wrote. The Gottis were always on set, they probably had massive oversight. There's no singular story that this film latches onto. It should have just been about one point in John Gotti's life, rather than his whole life. It does too much too quick and I end up feeling nothing for this character. As much as they'd like to present John Gotti as a great guy, and I'm sure many people respect him, he was also... the head of a giant organized crime family. The more troublesome aspects of this guy's character were glossed over because the Gotti family did not want you to see that. He's a criminal! He's responsible for killing so many people! That's part of why people enjoy watching these gangster films -- we like watching dark, complicated characters. By the end of the movie, you're just left wondering... "What's so special about this family?" Let's compare it to "The Sopranos" real quick. What's the average life like of a Italian mob boss? And at the end of the day, Tony Soprano, he was just a guy! He loved his family, he liked animals, he'd have barbecue by his pool, but at the same time, he was a bad guy! He was a murderer! He was violent. He had a temper. "Shut up!" "And fuckin' Georgie comes into the club, he's got vomit all over shirt! I ask him, 'What the fuck?!'" "He said you're digging up some body you clipped three months ago!" "I was worried-" "SHUT UP!" He's racist. He sees the black guy and he fuckin' has a fit. "You wanna be a big bad guy, Christopher?!" "I was worried that I didn't do it-" "SHUT UP!" It's the contrast we see in this character's actions that make him so interesting. There's plenty of bad and there's plenty of good, and I'm sure John Gotti was the same way. "You're born to this shit. You are what you are." Tony Soprano's character was influenced by real world figures like John Gotti! "Did you ever meet John Gotti?" "Yeah." *immensely slowed down Curb Your Enthusiasm theme* So, anyway, the movie premiered at Cannes. It was, like, swept under the rug. No one really talked about it. There was no promotion for it. There was controversy over the morality of the film, that it takes the side of, like, the gangsters and presents what they were doing as, like, good. Which is very weird. "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather" don't paint these guys as if they're- what they're doing is the right thing. *chuckling* And then you have moviepass™. Do you- do you guys remember moviepass™? So, basically, you paid a little fee, you got a card, you got to see movies for free. The way of making money made no sense and then AMC copied them and the company went into the shitter. So, moviepass™ tried their hand at distributing films for a bit and Gotti was one of those films. So they had this film that was probably incomplete, but it started one of the most famous actors of all time in a biopic about one of the most famous gangsters of all time, so they bought this movie, threw whatever money they could at it to, like, finish it up, make it somewhat complete. "Oh, whatever info isn't given in a scene, we'll just throw it in with some Exposition News Footage." And there you go. You got a smash hit on your hands. *Curb Your Enthusiasm theme plays* *hell* Everyone is overacting and overplaying the "Italian mobster", you know? "...you like- What's that movie you like so much?" "About spaghetti? Meatballs or summin'?" And despite all the stupid Italian posturing and grimacing, this film is missing out on one of the most important parts of Italians: The fucking food! Where's the fucking food?! Every single one of these gangster movies has food everywhere! What, do these gangsters just sit at a table and talk? They talk over dinner! They have meals together! When they're with their family, they're eating a meal! When they're talking about if they're gonna hit a guy, they're having a meal! No one in the "Gotti" movie eats anything! I don't think there's a single piece of food in the whole movie! They're in locations where they should be eating food and they're not eating food! This is a restaurant! What is he, drinking a fucking glass of water?! What the fuck is he doing here?! Hey, Kevin, Connolly, why don't you give them some food to eat?! Where's the ziti? The calzones? The chicken parmesan? The spaghetti? The meatballs? All these fuckin' guys talk over food all the time. Every single gangster or Italian-related piece of media that's worth a shit has at least ten scenes of Italians cooking food eating food, or talking about food. "You sure I can't slice something? Peel something?" "You're a guest. Get up and I'll break your legs." "See, I was cooking dinner that night. "I had to start braising the beef, pork butt and veal shanks for the tomato sauce." "You start out with a little bit of oil. You fry some garlic. "Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it to make sure it doesn't stick." "You got it to a boil, you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs..." "Veal, beef, and pork." "Ahh, good, but you gotta have the pork." "Pork is so good. That's- that's the flavor." "And tonight, we were out late, we took a ride out into..." "Out to the country, and we hit one o' them deers and that's where all the blood came from. "I tell you." "Well, he comes when you call him at least, huh?" "Mostly. He's got a mind of his own, though." "Medium Rare. An aristocrat!" "Leave the gun." "Take the cannoli." "...the sake of a peaceful transition, he'll just have to accept." "I don't know, I don't know. Paula and Jen are pretty tight. "They got a lot of money on the street." "Yeah, well, you can take care of that after. Use DP for that." "Whatever. Somebody'll be like, of course, you know... "On the internet, people are always taking shots at you and it's like: "'Yes, ladies and gentlemen, E from Entourage directed this movie. That is not a typo.' "'E fro-' As if that has- One thing has anything to do with the other!" *intense Italian music* Hey, yo, Antony, this looks like the place. Okay, Antonio. Plan is: we're gonna go in that room, shoot this skinny mothafucka in the head, then we're gonna go home and have some lasagna! *Antony sniffles* Okay, ready? One, two, three, badabo! Let's go! Are you ralphthemoviemaker? Yeah. Can you not bother me now? I'm recording a review of the film "Gotti". Well, Mr. Travolta sends his regards! Um, hi. Yeah, I'm here to keep Ralph safe until he reviews "Aquaman". Oh- We got a problem here?! You- you greasy-haired mo- *BANG.* *BANG. BANG.* *nails-on-chalkboard scratching* *Macon breathing heavily* ANTONIO
No, please! Please! There's no life after death! There's no life after death! It's an endless oblivion! Enjoy the endless oblivion, you fuckin' piece of shit! DIE! DIE!! Jesus! RALPH
Well, um... Thank you all for watching my review of "Gotti", I hope- *BANG.*
https://youtu.be/xhfnTs0RZLs
MEGOLOVANIA
i think this plays at the beginning and end of a horror film. i need to know, this is a matter of life and death
its either a kevin macleod song, youtube library song, or a copyright free sonf