Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes By Guy Adams Investigates For The Daily Mail
15 Jan 2021
Link to article
'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.'
Kai Bickle's world came tumbling down one night in May 2019, when he attended a dinner party at a lavishly decorated mansion overlooking the golden sands of Venice Beach in Los Angeles.
The host was his father, Peter Nygard, a Canadian fashion tycoon famed for the hedonistic lifestyle he pursued at a global portfolio of high-end properties, including vast residences in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, as well as New York, and, most notoriously, a Mayan-themed 'private luxury resort' in the Bahamas.
Modelling himself on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the flamboyant Nygard, now 79, kept a revolving harem of girlfriends. Those caught up (often completely unwittingly) in this web had included actresses Susan Anton and Jennifer O'Neill, stripper-turned-reality star Anna Nicole Smith, and a former Wheel Of Fortune card turner by the name of Vanna White.
His Caribbean parties, meanwhile, tended to attract a better class of A-lister. Past visitors to the island property had ranged from Jane Seymour and Bo Derek to Robert De Niro, , Michael Jackson and Joan Collins, not to mention and , who were photographed there in the early 2000s on an innocuous family holiday.
The 2019 bash, during one of Peter's occasional business trips to LA, was to be a more down-to-earth affair. Roughly 20 guests, including Kai, 38, and his younger brother Jessar (one of roughly ten offspring Nygard has fathered via more than seven women) had been invited for food and drinks, followed by a late-night poker game.
That was the plan, at least. But Kai never made it to the card- table. Instead, he fled the lavish premises in a state of distress, shortly after dinner, believing that he had just witnessed his father attempting to sexually assault an eight-year-old girl.
Details of this ugly development are (it should be stressed) strongly disputed, and we shall examine them later. But the incident would kick-start an extraordinary chain of events that culminated just before Christmas, with the arrest of Peter Nygard on nine charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
Currently behind bars, with his $900 million (£660 million) business empire in tatters and the FBI poring over his computer hard-drives, the fallen tycoon has now been accused of rape or sexual assault by at least 57 women. Several of Nygard's accusers were children when the alleged crimes took place, and many claim they were drugged.
At least 57 women have accused him.
He will appear in court in Canada next week, seeking bail as he fights extradition to the USA.
It is, perhaps, the most high-profile and shocking sex case since handcuffs were slapped on Jeffrey Epstein. And in a remarkable twist, it turns out that a leading figure in the increasingly public campaign to prosecute Mr Nygard is his aforementioned son, Kai.
Upcoming documentary: ‘Unseamly’ Canadian Designer Peter Nygård True Crime Documentary
Behind the scenes, I can reveal that Kai has spent the past 18 months secretly helping both the U.S. and Canadian authorities investigate his own father's alleged crimes. Keeping his role hidden from Nygard and his associates for several months, he has worked tirelessly to assist victims, and their legal teams.
On the personal front, he has changed his name (taking up his mother's surname to become Kai Zen Bickle) and used his influence over various Nygard companies to block efforts to move his assets offshore, fearing that would allow him to flee. 'We have been engaged in a brutal battle against my father and his enablers,' is how Kai summed things up when we spoke this week.
'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.'
Perhaps most remarkably of all, Kai recently helped two of his younger siblings, one of whom remains a minor, to sue Peter Nygard over claims he 'engineered' the rape of his own sons. In an extraordinary lawsuit filed in August, the boys claimed that their leathery, multi-millionaire father instructed one of his long-standing girlfriends (who was also a sex worker) to 'make a man' out of them.
The first of these alleged attacks (which, again, are vehemently denied by Nygard) took place in the Bahamas 2004, when the son was 15 and the woman was in her mid-20s. The second occurred in Winnipeg in 2018, when the younger child was 14 and the woman was in her 40s. Court papers filed by the boys stated that the unnamed girlfriend was instructed to seduce Nygard's son by showering in his bathroom so that he 'could see her naked'. Then she raped him.
Afterwards, she allegedly told the boy he 'wasn't bad' for a 'baby.' The next morning, Nygard's girlfriend brought him breakfast in bed, kissing him on the lips and announcing: 'Mommy's got you.' Kai says he first became aware of this appalling incident last spring, and was 'sickened' to hear his brothers' claims.
He would often yell and scream at his staff.
'We all spoke and decided the best course of action was to file a lawsuit publicly in the hope that other survivors would feel safe to come forward and also file criminally against Nygard,' he says. 'We were originally going to have me in the suit as my young brother's guardian, but in the end decided not to because it would reveal to Nygard that I was working against him . . . At the time I was [secretly] doing everything I could to improve the odds that he would get arrested.'
To appreciate the extraordinary journey taken by Kai, we must wind the clock back to the mid-1980s, when his father was one of Canada's most talked-about self-made millionaires.
The son of penniless immigrants from Finland, Peter Nygard had launched his empire in the late 1960s, with an $8,000 (£6,000) investment in a struggling fashion firm. By the time he was 30, the company had become one of North America's most successful suppliers of leisure and sportswear, while his flamboyant eccentricities, which included keeping parrots in his office and filling the lobby of Nygard HQ with bronze busts of himself, turned him into an object of public fascination.
In 1987, the party-loving entrepreneur purchased a 4.5-acre patch of the island of New Providence in the Bahamas and set about turning it into a 'dream home' where he could indulge his champagne lifestyle. Over the ensuing years, he built 150,000 sq ft of Mayan-themed buildings, stretching over a dozen 'cabana-style' residences. The buildings at Nygard Cay eventually included a casino, a disco hut (with cameras beneath the dance floor, reportedly to shoot images of revellers from below), and the world's largest sauna, a 6,000 sq ft lodge made from 2ft-thick Canadian pine logs.
In the grounds were fake volcanoes that belched dry ice, a flock of peacocks, stone cobras which hissed steam at sunset, 60 ft towers festooned with hundreds of flaming torches (lit nightly by staff) and giant statues of nude women, purportedly modelled on some of Nygard's favourite girlfriends.
At weekends, he would host lavish parties, which appeared on various TV documentaries, including Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.
The place became a magnet for freeloading celebrities and, while Kai believes they generally had the most fleeting and brief relationship with Nygard, photos of their visits were then plastered across company literature and websites.
Prince Andrew, to cite one example, was recorded for posterity wandering with the long-haired fashion magnate on the beach, wearing blue shorts and boat shoes.
Born in the 1980s, Kai spent the first three years of his life in the Bahamas until his mother, Patricia, left Nygard, with whom she'd had three children but never married.
They moved first to California and then to the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. Over subsequent years, he had almost no regular contact with the fashion tycoon aside from occasional visits during school holidays, where he met various half-siblings.
'He would have one family weekend per year at his lake cottage, and a few days set aside for Christmas,' says Kai of the somewhat unorthodox arrangement. 'During those times, the days were filled with activities like horseback riding or mini golf.
'He could be a very charismatic person when he wanted to be and the family weekends were very light and brief.'
In the very limited time he spent with his father during childhood, Kai saw nothing that gave him reason to suspect that Peter Nygard was guilty of criminality, though he did have a highly volatile personality.
'He would yell and scream at his staff often, and that always was upsetting to everyone around it, but he would describe his yelling as 'passion' because of his 'high standards',' Kai says.
Nygard's children were further told that he 'lived a consensual, non-monogamous lifestyle,' Kai says. 'He made speeches at dinner to family when we were together to talk about how he hoped everyone got a wonderful partner and wished that he could find that special someone, but that it wasn't the life for him.
'He also had girlfriends that were persistently with him, always two or three, and often they were around for years. He wasn't embarrassed about it. He flaunted it on TV, it was part of his brand, something he showed the whole world. He was proud of it.'
Be that as it may, rumours of predatory behaviour by Nygard —and worse — had occasionally reared their ugly head, only to be quickly suppressed: a relatively easy task before the internet.
In 1980, for example, he was charged with the rape of an 18-year-old, but the charge was dropped when the complainant refused to testify. In 1996, three female employees meanwhile filed sexual harassment complaints in the Canadian province of Manitoba.
It looked like his hand was on her thigh, rubbing.
One, a 39-year-old communications manager, said that, when called into Nygard's office, she would 'find him in a state of undress . . . with his hands down the front of his pants, fondling himself.' He settled by giving the women $18,500 (£13,600) and denied any wrongdoing.
Then, in 2010, a Canadian TV network put out a Panorama-style documentary about Nygard, focusing on alleged sex abuse and harassment of former employees.
It quoted a former stewardess on his private plane who alleged that on one journey — during which Nygard was accompanied by a troupe of topless women — he lost his temper with staff, shouting: 'You are nothing! You are garbage! I am God!'
The programme also alleged that Nygard had engaged in 'inappropriate sexual contact' with a young woman who had been brought to his home in 2003 from the Dominican Republic. Nygard denied that either incident had happened, and sued to stop the documentary being broadcast.
Fast forward to May 2019, however, and those ugly incidents were largely forgotten. Kai, who was by then in his late 30s, had worked for his father's companies for just over two years after leaving college, but quit to pursue a career in activism and health science.
Nygard's trip to Los Angeles afforded them a rare opportunity to catch up, so he attended the aforementioned dinner party in Venice Beach.
As the night wore on, he recalls becoming uncomfortable about his father's behaviour towards an eight-year-old girl, who was attending with her mother, one of Nygard's old girlfriends.
'He's got her sitting right next to him at dinner, which is usually his girlfriend chair. And he's a creature of routine. So I'm already thinking this is weird.
'He's trying to act like the Papa. It was just weird . . . I'm noticing things. I'm noticing that he's telling her little secrets at dinner. Putting his hand close to her ear and going all hush-hush.' At the end of dinner, most of the other 20-odd guests got up to adjourn to the card table. However, Kai adds: 'I'm still watching him. Her chair gets pushed back. He brings her round to him.
'She was on his right side. He brings her to his left side, with his arm around her waist, and I see his elbow change and start moving as if — it looked to me, I couldn't see, but it looked like his hand was on her upper thigh, and rubbing. That's what it looked like to me . . . Everything in my body told me he was doing something terrible.'
'I had a huge adrenaline rush and I immediately told the mother to get her daughter away from him,' he adds. 'I stood up next to him and looked in his eyes. At that moment, for me, it was like all the walls were crashing down around him . . . And I realised that, yeah, he's probably trying to groom that girl.'
Nygard vigorously denied wrongdoing, and even called Kai 'sick' for thinking as much. But Kai was unconvinced.
Then, in February last year, ten women filed a bombshell lawsuit in New York claiming that the fashion magnate had used wealth and status to 'entice underage girls' from 'young, impressionable and often impoverished backgrounds' into his home, where they would be 'plied with alcohol' and (some allege) date-rape drugs, before being taken to Nygard's private quarters, where he would 'assault, rape and sodomise' them. Court papers claimed they were then coerced into joining a globe-trotting harem of sex workers paid thousands of dollars from Nygard's company funds and trafficked around the world on his company's private jet, which reportedly boasts a stripper pole.
One alleged victim, who was just 14 at the time, claimed Nygard raped her and paid her $5,000 (£3,700).
Another said her encounter with Nygard began with him showing her pornography after which he raped her, 'causing her extraordinary trauma and pain', the suit states.
Three of his existing ten accusers were 14 at the time. Three more were 15.
Within days, dozens more alleged victims had come forward. By the summer, some 57 survivors were pursuing legal action — and the number of alleged victims had reached 100.
Kai again confronted his father, only to be told it was all 'lies' and asked to speak out publicly in his father's support. But days later a friend texted Kai to complain about a recent visit to Nygard's house in Los Angeles.
'He said he'd brought a female friend with him, who had one or two drinks and had started to feel very high. Nygard took her up to his room and aggressively had sex with her, not using a condom.
'When I heard that, I knew he was not only as bad as people said he was, but was a dangerous criminal and had to be stopped.' He duly alerted the authorities about the friend's message. In a podcast called Live To Walk Again, released this week, he revealed that he began helping both the police and the alleged victims' lawyers, who he regards as 'heroes'.
Over the summer, Kai also used official positions held in Nygard firms to block two apparent efforts to move assets overseas, amid concerns that the tycoon might flee to evade justice.
PODCAST EPISODE: Peter Nygard Discusses His Father
'Through the course of ten months I also helped several survivors to file criminally against him, and spent countless hours on the phone with survivors, lawyers and authorities,' he says. Last month Nygard was arrested on U.S. charges at a home in the Royalwood area of Winnipeg. He spent Christmas behind bars and has consistently denied any wrongdoing, saying he 'expects to be vindicated' in court.
Kai has renounced his inheritance and is working on 'making the world a better place' by campaigning to close legal loopholes exploited by sex offenders.
'I'm very happy earning my own money, as I have all my life. We've never had a trust fund or an allowance, and since his money has been made through pain and suffering, I won't accept a potential inheritance,' he says.
His father's cash, he says, should instead go towards compensating victims. 'My focus now is to help the healing process.'

My Dear Melancholy

Gaspar Noe/Cannes Film Festival
The My Dear Melancholy era notable for being a time when The Weeknd was in proximity to a lot of serious directors. While he’s had a foot in Hollywood for awhile, 2017 through 2019 he was actively engaging with filmmakers like the Safdies Brothers, Gaspar Noe, and Claire Denis, amongst others. While he had been actively courting the Safdies since Good Time was released, he attended the 2018 Cannes Film Festival where he crossed paths Noe, whose film Climax took home a number awards at Cannes. Noe’s Enter the Void had previously served as an inspiration for Kiss Land, and for MDM (and later After Hours) seem to call back to Noe’s other films, like Irreversible and Love, which are both twisted depictions of heartbreak. On the other hand, Climax is about a French dance troupe who accidentally take LSD, and according to Noe is not a “message” movie. It is an audacious psychedelic technical exercise, with numerous long takes and highly choreographed set pieces. The idea for Noe, who had previously captured the feeling of drugs in previous films, was to do the opposite, and present the objectively reality of drugs, watching people high from a sober perspective.
Noe is a rather strong advocate of film, and the opening scene of Climax features VHS boxes of a number of films that have influenced his filmmaking. Two of note are Schizophrenia, otherwise known as Angst, one of Noe’s favorite films which The Weeknd name checked to the Safdies, and Possession, which would go on to be an influence on After Hours (more on this later). He is also said to have sat next to Benicio Del Toro at Cannes, which means he likely caught some of the Un Certain Regard section, where Del Toro served as a jury member. Outside of that section, there were a few other films of interest such as The House That Jack Built from Lars Von Trier (The Weeknd has previously expressed affection for Von Trier’s Antichrist), Mandy from Pastos Costamos, and music video director Romain Gavras’s The World Is Yours, as well as a restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Noe has referred to as the film that got him into filmmaking.
https://preview.redd.it/qga7a3l8ct261.png?width=910&format=png&auto=webp&s=371cf20d42ee8783cc23bfe7f2cfa16a0a927a0e
Asian Cinema
Later in 2018, The Weeknd continued his globetrotting with a tour of Asia. He once claimed in an interview that whenever visiting a foreign country he only watches films from there. I’ve previously written about the influence of Asian cinema on Kiss Land, and there’s not enough work from the MDM era to glean anything cinematically adjacent to this, but now would be a good time to mention that the "Call Out My Name" video was heavily inspired by the work of famed Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Asian tour poster seems to be a reference to Ichi the Killer, which leads us to Takashi Miike. Though he is notoriously prolific across a number of genres, his most popular works internationally are genre melding blends of horror, comedy and crime, most notably Audition, Ichi the Killer and Gozu. Another film worth mentioning is Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon’s masterwork about a pop star’s mysterious stalker that The Weeknd posted about on Instagram before. Bloody and haunting, the film was a major influence on Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. In Interviews he has also mentioned a number of Korean films, such as The Wailing, I Saw the Devil and Oldboy. While Wong Kar Wai was previously mentioned as an influence on Beauty Behind the Madness, also worth mentioning is the work of John Woo, specifically A Better Tomorrow, well known for the shot of smoking a cigar off money, and Infernal Affairs, Andrew Lau’s crime classic which served has the basis for Scorsese’s The Departed.
https://preview.redd.it/fx7o9s2bct261.png?width=642&format=png&auto=webp&s=0fec2f841e9d3b09104238d0f89595daa6140faa
https://preview.redd.it/n4x7fiy9ct261.png?width=1316&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a9650263272518216fc5f36913e80a10d2b0a8e

After Hours

Martin Scorsese
While After Hours more so than any other Weeknd album is bursting at the seams with cinematic references, the influence of Martin Scorsese stands above all. Similar to The Weeknd’s body of work, many Scorsese’s are explorations of violence and masculinity, investigating them from a perspective that depending on who you ask (and how they’re feeling) glamorizes, condemns or just simply presents the reality of characters on the fringes of society.
While there are direct references to a number of prominent Scorsese films, what’s interesting is that his influence also reverberates in other films/filmmakers that influence After Hours. Todd Phillips’s Joker is in effect an homage to Scorsese’s loner-centric New York films, and the Safdie Brothers have been putting their own millennial spin on the type of 70s gritty thriller that Scorsese trafficked in (Scorsese was also a producer on Uncut Gems). Specific Scorsese works will be discussed more in depth in the requisite sections, but it is worth mentioning upfront what a prominent role that Scorsese plays in the nucleus of After Hours.
https://preview.redd.it/wcds9qpdct261.png?width=1196&format=png&auto=webp&s=246c560c72340782e26ad03b8ff63367999eaadd
Urban HorroIsolation
With After Hours, The Weeknd departs from the slicker sounds and influences that permeated Starboy and returns to the cinematic grittiness of Beauty Behind the Madness. While urban horror is a theme that permeates throughout The Weeknd as a project overall, there is a thorough line to be drawn here that follows a number of 70s and 80s cinematic and aesthetic references. For one thing, while the initial bandaged nose was a reference to Chinatown (previously, The Weeknd has a Kiss Land demo titled "Roman Polanski"), the full bandaged face that is so prominently featured throughout the After Hours era is a classic cinematic visual trope that was especially prominent throughout 60s and 80s, though it saw a slight re-emergence in the 2010s. The fully bandaged face is often used to remake someone in the image of another, usually against their will (The Skin I Live In, Eyes Without Face), or as a case of mistaken identity and doppelgängers (Good Night Mommy, Scalpel), themes present throughout much of After Hours. The "Too Late" video acknowledges these references, but instead presents the bandages on two Los Angeles models recovering from plastic surgery, in a nod to a famous Steven Meisel’s photoshoot for Vogue Italia.
https://preview.redd.it/dtbxjc3ict261.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=66a98cc3cba73d502f8586a215a65cc41c5408a1
The “masks” people wear is another horror trope that is featured prominently on After Hours, and this is best seen in the red suit character. One important reference in the film is to Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill, where a serial killer is targeting the patients of a psychiatrist (any more on this film will veer towards spoiler territory). The Weeknd is on the record as saying Jim Carrey’s The Mask as being a large influence on the Red Suit character, it being one of the first film’s he watched in theaters. One of the more complex references would be to Joker. While it sort of an in-joke that the character of the Joker is commonly overanalyzed and misinterpreted, referencing Todd Phillips’s Joker is more nuanced because it is in essence a full on homage to Martin Scorsese’s New York films, most notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, which focus on eccentric loners, and can both be seen as cautionary tale of urban isolation, a theme explored perhaps in songs like "Faith." The King of Comedy revolves around a would be obsessive stand up Rupert Pupkin haggling his way to perform on late night TV, with The Weeknd’s talk show appearances being a prominent part of the early After Hours marketing, most notably in the “short film”. This idea of isolated and compressed urbanites recurs throughout After Hours and it’s films.
https://preview.redd.it/egap17ttdt261.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=1aab204ac0845a7df74ceeff6d1f714274f9ace0
The idea of urban repression is in the subway scene of the After Hours short film. The entire film itself is something of a reference to the subway scene to Possession (another Gaspar Noe favorite), mimicking the (also subway set) scene in which Isabelle Adjani’s Anna convulses on the subway due to a miscarriage, as well as Jacob’s Ladder, a 90s cult classic horror film starring Tim Robbins as a Vietnam vet (like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle) who is experiencing demonic hallucinations, encountering them in the subway and later at a party he attends, splitting the scene into two.
https://preview.redd.it/g53copgmct261.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=9d29e368ae695d295b36039e86125ccfd7b4eb88
Las Vegas
As always, The Weeknd once again grounds After Hours with a strong sense of place, this time setting the album against a nocturnal odyssey through Las Vegas. One of the most prominent films is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s book. This is directly referenced in the "Heartless" video, which sees The Weeknd and Metro Boomin in the Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro roles as they tumble through a Las Vegas casino. The Weeknd has gone on the record to state that the famous red suit character was influenced by Sammy Davis Jr.’s character in the film Poor Devil. However, similar red suit has also been sported by a number of Vegas characters, most notably Richard Pryor and Robert De Niro’s Sam Rothstein in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. With the red suit, The Weeknd seems to be playing with the idea of a devil-ish other, another side of his personality that emerges in Las Vegas.
https://preview.redd.it/gjow6hq2dt261.png?width=1992&format=png&auto=webp&s=10a379bc26df54af88064bf64813d5cdd29775d9
While the city lights are the oft discussed part of part of Las Vegas, it should be noted that similar to Beauty Behind the Madness, the desert that surrounds Las Vegas is just as important to the juxtaposition of its beauty. The "Until I Bleed Out" video ends/"Snowchild" video in the desert, similar to the confrontation between Robert De Niro’s and Joe Pesci’s showdown in the desert in Casino, as well as Joe Pesci's death in Goodfellas. The idea of a hedonistic desert playground also bears semblance to Westworld, both the film and the TV show. The desert seems to represent some sort of freedom to The Weeknd, as the "Snowchild" video portrays the desert as a pensive location for reflection, as well as the "In Your Eyes" video showing the girl prominently dancing with the dismembered head out in the open, in reference to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another prominent desert film.
https://preview.redd.it/98ec10wxct261.png?width=1168&format=png&auto=webp&s=45e29aa361fa41ff74e2a6017e203015bdcbc6c3
New York/The Safdies
Despite it’s Las Vegas setting, After Hours also takes a good amount from films set in New York, most notably Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film After Hours. Besides the title, After Hours is similarly about a twisting and turning nighttime odyssey. The film stars Griffin Dunne as Paul, a working class stiff who heads downtown to rendezvous with a woman he met at a diner earlier that night. Of course, things don’t turn out the way they should, chaos ensues, and Paul is set on a dangerous trek back uptown. Like the film, the album After Hours is set off by a woman (though the album takes more stock in romantic endeavors), seems to be set over a single night (or at least a condensed period of time), and involves similar chaos and misadventures (sirens at night at the end of Faith). Tonally, After Hours the film is more comedic perhaps than After Hours the album, however The Weeknd is on the record as having said that "Heartless" and "Blinding Lights" placement on the album is intended to be somewhat comedic, reflecting exaggerated machismo and ecstasy, respectively (to comedic effect).
https://preview.redd.it/f3w7yz4pdt261.png?width=1346&format=png&auto=webp&s=fe7e4f003987fd843020a42a5b53f94092984267
Another of the most prominent filmmakers of After Hours are the Safdies, who featured The Weeknd in Uncut Gems. They also served as a link to Oneohtrix Point Never, who scored their last two films and later worked After Hours. I believe there are three major film tropes (not genres) that inspired After Hours, all of which the Safdies’s have engaged with. There is the one-long-night films, in which a character spends one-long-night on the run from whatever chaos and forces may be that they left in their path. This can be seen in the Good Time, as well as After Hours (the movie). Then, there is the descent-into-madness type, where a character slowly loses grip with reality and ends up in over their head (something like Scarface or Breaking Bad, but for our purposes Jacob’s Ladder can be categorized here as well), which the Safdies did with Uncut Gems. Lastly, but maybe most importantly, the Safdies also explored toxic romance (more on this later) in their less seen film Heaven Knows What, about two heroin addicts and the destructiveness their love brings out in each other, an idea that recurs throughout After Hours on songs like "Until I Bleed Out" and "Nothing Compares." A recurring song throughout Heaven Knows What is Isao Tomita’s synth version of Debussy’s "Claire De Lune", which is featured in some episodes of Memento Mori and bears some resemblance to the start of "Alone Again".
https://preview.redd.it/em255b5qdt261.png?width=1344&format=png&auto=webp&s=a5226c9496d0ae5c14b6d6c05e16f5ea18678a9a
Obsession/Toxic Romance
While love and lust and the ups and downs with it have been a formative part of The Weeknd’s ideology and themes, I don’t think it would be remiss to say that After Hours is perhaps his most outwardly romantic album. Despite this, one of the major arcs of the album is toxicity that comes with it, which a number of already mentioned films deal with. While "In Your Eyes" is one of the more romantic and accessible songs on the album, a re-assessment of it Ala Sting’s “Every Breathe You Take” could frame it as lonely obsessing, such as Travis Bickle’s infatuation with Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute Iris, Joker's fixation on Murray Franklin, Rupert Pupkin’s obsession with Jerry Langford. Casino also deals with toxic romance, another prominent theme in After Hours, best seen in the love triangle that forms between Sam, his partner Nicky and his wife Ginger, played by Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone respectively.
https://preview.redd.it/eq1ioijvdt261.png?width=898&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9e4b781ee60762ae767c4dbd92066357ebc24b0
In almost all of the After Hours’s video content, The Weeknd seems to constantly meet his demise at the hands of women. Another interesting reference that may be something of a reach is to Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about Reynolds Woodcock, a couture dressmaker loosely based on Cristobal Balenciaga and his muse Alma, played by Daniel Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps, respectively. The film delves into their dysfunctional relationship, with Woodcock berating her and Alma poisoning his tea to keep him dependent on her. One of the highpoint of the film is a New Years Eve Party that bears strong resemblance to the "Until I Bleed Out" video. While the balloons may just be a callback to his earlier work, there is something about the color grading/temperature and the production design of the "Until I Bleed Out" video (as well as parts of the "Blinding Lights" video) that made me immediately think of Phantom Thread. A similar relationship is seen in the German horror film Der Fan, which The Weeknd has mentioned in a recent interview. In Der Fan, a young girl Simone spends her days obsessing over popstar R, until she finally encounters him outside his studio. The film is similar to the aforementioned Takashi Miike’s Audition in its exploration of obsession and idealization. In the film, an older man puts up a fake casting call to search for the perfect girlfriend. While Audition explores these themes from an Eastern perspective of societal pressure, Der Fan explores it through a Western lens of pop idolization and idealization. Both films deal with the idea that despite outward appearances, the perfect partner does not exist, and anyone that claims to be (or has the expectations put on them) is not who they seem.
https://preview.redd.it/3m661q62et261.png?width=1342&format=png&auto=webp&s=c9377018cb53f67cf7ce95b24392afb471e4aec1
One film he has spoken at length about is Trouble Everyday, Claire Denis’s arthouse vampire movie. The film stars Vincent Gallo as Shane, a scientist who travels to Paris under the guise of his honeymoon to track down core, a woman who he was once obsessed with who has now become a vampire. Core is locked up in a basement but sometimes sneaks out to seduce and consume unwilling victims. This seems to be where some of the bloody face stuff comes from, but I believe it’s influence is a little more conceptual. To me, a good companion film to Trouble Everyday is American Psycho, which seems to also have been a thematic influence on After Hours. Both films concern idealized version of masculinity and femininity, both very sexual and physical, but hostile as well. American Psycho ends with Patrick Bateman confessing to the killing of a prostitute, but no one believe him. Trouble Everyday ends with Shane killing Core, but Shane is unable to arouse himself after that except through violence. Koji Wakamatsu, a former Yakuza turned prominent extreme Japanese filmmaker (and a major influence on Gaspar Noe) is quoted as saying “For me, violence, the body and sex are an integral part of life.” Despite being hollow, idealized impressions of the self, a vampire and as a banker (cold, seductive bloodsuckers = monsters), Patrick Bateman and Core represent the Frankenstein-ian relationship between sexuality and violence, which I believe is the main theme of After Hours. Truly, we hurt the ones we love.
https://preview.redd.it/zfllbd83et261.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=9c048ee98d86d7bbb9db67fa8302d34c36214c4f

Postscript

To cap things off, I would just like to illuminate some key takeaways. As a filmmaker myself, this has been an extremely helpful exercise in understanding other artists process and ideas.
Steeped in the history of the medium…
It’s clear that The Weeknd is not your typical “I’m influenced by cinema” artist but an extremely legit film buff with serious credentials. The Weeknd’s film taste leans towards 70s-00s genre works, mostly horror, drama and thriller, and is well versed in the classics but also has the nose to sniff out deeper cuts and obscurities. The mantra of “good artists borrow, great artists steal” works even better if not many people know where you’re stealing from! What is impressive to me is that he is not just versed in “mainstream” obscurities, but also serious deep cuts. Films like Possession and Phantom of the Paradise may not stick out to the average person on the street but are well known in most film circles. Films like Inland Empire and New Rose Hotel (Der Fan was especially impressive to me, it is one of my favorite films) however are not as well known and it is very impressive to me that he can come across films like that, and really get enough out of it to bring into his own work.
…is able to interpolate contemporary/mainstream films…
This perhaps is one of the most impressive aspects of his integration of film into The Weeknd’s work. It is very easy for film buffs to get lost within their own obscure taste, living in a world where everyone is an idiot for not knowing who Shinya Tsukamoto. Trilogy and Kiss Land had a lot of contemporary obscurities, like Stalker, David Lynch etc., well known but they still existed as artifacts, not of the time we live in. However, perhaps picking something from his work on Fifty Shades of Grey, of late he has kept his finger on the zeitgeist and anticipated/integrated what the filmmakers of today are doing, such as his work on Black Panther and Game of Thrones, general appreciation of Tarantino, the works of Nicolas Winding Refn in Starboy, and his use of the Joker and Uncut Gems on After Hours, both of which came out just a few months before the album. It feels Jackson-esque, and I believe this is one thing that will help him further in his quest for pop stardom.
…while also being fully in tune to the works of modern transgressive auteurs…
In addition to keeping up with the mainstream is in touch with, The Weeknd also makes it a point to seek out and learn from the cutting edge filmmakers of today. While the Safdies were always going to blow up, I don’t doubt that a Weeknd co-sign accelerated their rise. Gaspar Noe is one thing, Enter the Void and Irreversible exist as masterpieces of the mainstream obscurities I’ve been mentioning, but he really truly tries to understand the heart of Noe’s work, even going so far back as to understand Noe’s influences (I sincerely hope he is tuned in to the work of Koji Wakamatsu). But most of all, to be a fan of Claire Denis is one thing, but to seek her out and make her an offer that she ACCEPTED is absolutely astounding to me. Just spitballing but it would be like if Michael Jackson shot a music video with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who I’d bet good money that The Weeknd was put on to by Noe). We can only PRAY that one day we will be blessed with a David Lynch Weeknd video.
---------------------------
…and that just about does it. Hope you enjoyed this and thanks for being patient with me. I got quite busy after the first two and had my own projects/work going that kept me occupied. As we’re still technically in the After Hours era, I also wanted to wait until a few more videos and interviews came out to aid me in my research.
I also wanted to find enough time to make the Letterboxd for this. I personally don’t love Letterboxd culture, I find the popular culture surrounding the site a bit snobbish and exclusive, but I’ve gotten a number of requests for one and you gotta give the people what they want. Throughout the list are a few films that he hasn’t mentioned but are some of my personal favorites and I believe Weeknd fans will like, I encourage you to accidentally stumble upon things on it. Don't overthink, just pick something and watch!
If you’d like to follow me further, you can find me on Instagram here, where I post about film reviews Letterboxd style. I prefer Instagram so that more average people see it instead of an echo chamber of film snobs. I am also a filmmaker myself, I just recently wrapped this short film and am currently in the process of putting together my next project.
The main reason I did this however, besides a general appreciation of The Weeknd’s work, was to put more people on to the beautiful art form that is cinema. One thing I learned from Scorsese is that one must be an advocate and truly champion your medium. I hope that this encourages to check out more interesting movies than they wouldn’t normally come across, and I hope this will inspire more people to create more as well, whether it be to write, make films, music, anything. If even one person picks up a pencil, a camera or a keyboard because of these posts, I will be satisfied.
Thanks all!

This is my first real Weeknd album roll out and I am really liking it. Of course I knew who he was before it started but After Hours (the track) got me looking into all his old stuff which was great. I also really liked the videos and the feeling that they had.
For references, I can pick out three visual references but I'm not sure which other ones maybe in there somewhere so do let me know because I'm finding this stuff really interesting
The red suit is like the suit worn by Robert De Niro in Casino (1995) also this picture really reminds me of the Heartless video
The mustache and glasses are like Dr Gonzo's in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
and the one most people have heard (I'm not entirely convinced but still), the whole blood on the mouth thing could be a reference to Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019)
There probably is more, so let me know because I really want to put these together so I can write about them.

The Irishman will act as a reunion for a lot of Scorsese's original muses. The last time Vincent was in a Scorsese movie was over 20 fuckin' year.
Sadly Vincent won't be one of them since he died last year. It got me thinking, if he was still alive who could he have played in The Irishman?
I made a little video collating my thoughts together on the matter if you're interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDfWQuKytIM
If you prefer to read, I wrote it up here:
All Martin Scorsese movies that have starred Joe Pesci – Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino – have also starred the late Frank Vincent. Robert De Niro and Scorsese picked up the two, who at the time were a music and comedy duo, for two significant roles in Scorsese’s 1980 boxing drama Raging Bull. Since then, Pesci has gone onto have two major roles in Marty’s two most famous gangster movies, including an Oscar winning turn as tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. Vincent also had roles in these two films but had much smaller parts, though his performance as Billy Batts in Goodfellas has given audiences one of the most famous scenes and lines in the entire genre. Vincent’s last role in a Martin Scorsese film came as the enforcer of Joe Pesci’s character, Frank Marino in the 1995 crime film Casino.
Evidently, Frank Vincent was very much a part of the Martin Scorsese mob scene. Surely then, had he not have passed away in September 2017, there would have been a role for him in the 2019 Scorsese gangster movie The Irishman? One of the key attractions of the film is the way in which it serves as a reunion to some of Scorsese’s original muses, such as Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvel Kietel, bringing together all these actors who worked together many years ago, whilst making room for veterans of the gangster genre who have yet to work with Scorsese, namely Al Pacino.
We may never know if Frank Vincent was in mind to have a role in the film, but if he did, who could he have played? A role as one of the film’s big three characters – Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sheeran and Russell Buffalino, seems unlikely. A reading of the script was done around 2013 and it is thought the only actors at the table were Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, suggesting they were always going to play their characters. Given their pedigree, it only makes sense.
So who else is there then? A minor role as a relatively low-key character or a random mobster is possible, but would be a rather waste of the actor’s talent. One of the juicer roles in the film is that of mob boss Angelo Bruno, known as the ‘gentle’ don for his preference for dialogue over violence, a part which will be played by Harvey Kietel. Personally, I feel neither Kietel nor Vincent would be the perfect actors to play the role. I imagine Bruno as a kind of tender and moderate character, one that people feel comfortable being around. Both of the mentioned actors are terrific at playing fierce gangsters, even if the characters aren’t outright vicious both actors are adept at delivering performances with subtle and nuanced intensity, such as Kietel’s role as the abusive boyfriend in Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore or Vincent’s turn as the gangster Phil Leotardo in the TV show The Sopranos. Because of this I don’t feel either actor would be utilized to the best of their ability playing this character.
One mobster I think would be a perfect fit would be Anthony Provenzano, also known as Tony Pro, who will be played by Stephen Graham. I think Graham is a great actor, but it was a little jarring, given his age in comparison to the rest of the cast, hearing that he would be playing Tony Pro. Vincent was more suited to playing the role, I feel. Provenzano was often the middle man between union leader Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia, and is likely to have several profanity fuelled outbursts in the film and a few verbal beat downs with Al Pacino, a character trait which Vincent is no stranger to. He even kinda looks like Provenzano.
A far smaller role, but one that would give him screen time with most of the main cast, would be as mobster Chuckie O’Brien. He looks nothing at all like O’Brien but if Scorsese wanted Vincent to play a role similar to the one he played in Casino, namely supporting muscle, this would be the perfect role. It’s likely we’d see him a lot hovering in the background of mob conferences, occasionally pitching in and having a part in one major scene in the movie that I won’t give away if you haven’t read the book it’s based on.
Another gangster he could have played was Phil Testa, one of Bruno’s understudies and his eventual successor as boss of the Philadelphia crime family. Again it is likely to be quite a small role, but one that would suit him given Testa being known for having a stern and uncompromising presence.
So what do you think? Would you have liked to see Frank Vincent in The Irishman? If so who do you think he could have played?

I wanted to like it, but just couldn’t bring myself to do so. I’ve dissected and dismembered this movie with friends and relatives since its release in so much detail that I feel drained even before I begin this review. I have a funny relationship with this film. Despite pretty much enjoying all of Scorsese’s previous output and being a huge fan of crime movies, I can’t say The Departed really resonated with me. At first I hated it, then I warmed up to it, and then I went back to thinking it just wasn’t very good. After it had finished when I first saw it I just thought to myself well, is that it? There was no initial excitement when watching and no lasting impact after it was done. As sacrilegious as it is to say, is this Marty’s first boring movie?
I’ve actually seen The Departed more than any other Scorsese movie. These have been a series of failed attempts to work out just what the world sees in this film in order for it to justify its Best Picture win at the Oscars, its 85/100 Metascore and its general well-liked status in the movie world.
The Departed is a remake of the two year old Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs (a superior film in my opinion) and concerns an undercover cop (DiCaprio) in an Irish mob in Boston and a mole in the police force (Damon) who attempt to weed each other out before they themselves get caught.
It’s 20 minutes into the film before any of this happens, or even the title appears for that matter. Before it does we get something of a prologue with Irish mobster Frank Costello (played by Jack Nicholson and based off of real life Irish mobster Whitey Bulger) narrating about his environment, the Knights of Columbus, JFK and black people. It’s the only narration we get throughout the whole movie and immediately after the Rolling Stones’ Gimmie Shelter is unleashed at full volume accompanied by short and slightly fragmented scenes of violence from Costello’s heyday and DiCaprio and Damon’s introduction into their fields of play in the film. It’s all a bit disorderly and has an amateurish feel to it, as if someone told a random fan to make a short Scorsese movie and they proceeded to throw all the cliches at the screen – DiCaprio, narrations, Gimmie Shelter, people getting shot in the back of the head, lengthy tracking shots, ‘the whole nine yards’ as police captain Queenan (played by Martin Sheen) would say.
If I was to find a rational explanation for the way the opening of the movie feels so detached from the rest of the film I’d say it’s because the start of the film showcases an older time, a previous generation. It was a time more wild and animalistic where the only surviving character of that environment is Frank Costello. It reminds me of Gangs of New York and the opening battle sequence, where the only person to come through the endeavour was Bill the Butcher. Everyone else involved in the battle had either died when the film’s main story happened or took their place in the new world of (somewhat) order and stability. It’s why the Butcher sticks out so much in the movie. Not only because of the terrific and wild performance by Daniel Day Lewis, but because he is essentially a caveman in an insurance salesman’s world and towards the end of the film even he knows he has no place in the new ever-changing America. Similarly, Jack Nicholson’s Costello comes off as someone who belongs in a different time away from the tuxedos and police warrants. It’s not only him though; many of the characters in The Departed come off as lions and wolves used to roaming the wild trapped in suits and behind wooden desks and piles of paperwork.
The jarring pacing of the film was a real problem for me. I had no sense of how much time had elapsed over the course of the movie and the one time a character had the chance to explain he merely shrugged “long time, long fucking time” which I agreed with completely. With a runtime of 2 and a half hours the movie is unable to match the brisk pacing of, say, Casino or Goodfellas and instead comes across as a dozen or so clumsily put together scenes in which characters talk tedious topics to each other, with the odd frame of unadulterated violence garnished in. I’m serious – while watching a Scorsese mob & cops film I was actually checking to see how long was left because I was so bored. There is no tension throughout the movie at all which made me unresponsive to scenes that were clearly meant to shock and awe. The dialogue is often vague and meaningless, and only of service when it is used to forward the plot. Take the scene between DiCaprio and Nicholson at the dinner, where they talk about DiCaprio’s father, school, sadness…all until I thought to myself what the hell are they talking about? To which, to my amazement, DiCaprio responds by asking “what the fuck are we talking about?!” Yikes!
The ambling and dreary nature of the movie might have been elevated by some decent acting. But despite the cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone and Jack Nicholson it pains me to say the performances were shambolic: DiCaprio was shaking, shrieking and squirming so much that it made Costello look like an idiot for not realizing that he was the rat in his crew, Damon looked like an awkward schoolboy as the ‘villain’ of the picture, Sheen seemed to be attempting to say his lines without spitting out his fake teeth, Winstone decided that the shooting schedule was the best time to start experimenting with every accent known to man, and Wahlberg’s profanity-fuelled, nostril-flared cop with little-man syndrome was so irritating that I hoped he would get shot in the head or thrown off a building. Ironically, he’s the only major male character that survives the runtime. Nicholson was the best of the bunch, bringing weight to his role where his presence is felt throughout the whole movie in spite of him playing an extension of his JokeR.P McMurphy characters. But even he, it seems, is somewhat sleepwalking his way through the film only waking up for the odd rat impersonation here and there. And nobody is buying that Boston accent for a second.
Sticking with the actors – something about the way the movie was shot makes it feel self-conscious as to who’s in it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but as an example let me say that I knew that Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg would have a fistfight as soon as I realized that both were cast in the film. The camera often stays wide enough so that two A list can fit into the frame, like the scene at the dock with Nicholson and Sheen, or the initial bar scene with Jack and Leo. It’s like the film-makers are screaming at you “Look, Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio in the same movie! Aren’t you blessed!?” It’s things like this that made the film feel as though it takes place in a ‘movie world’ and not the gritty urban real life as it tries very hard to show us.
Scenes lead nowhere and as already stated, there is no tension. Why are these characters doing this? Where are they going now? What is happening here? It’s as if Scorsese is aware you’ve seen all the cop dramas and is not going to use up runtime on things that he thinks you’ve seen, and instead wisely uses it on scenes where the mob leader doodles naked nuns or someone says “FUCK!” really loudly. Speaking of which, the profanity in this movie is horrible. Aside from Nicholson, the cast come off as cringe worthy when spewing out filth. Don’t take me wrong, I am aware the language is supposed to be vulgar and not elegant – after all, these are street gangsters. But swearing on screen takes a little swagger, something that most of the cast lacks, which made them seem like teenagers trying to sound cool in front of their friends.
Editor Thelma Schoonmaker adopted a frantic style that didn’t sit well with me. Some cuts ran for a spit second and we were constantly jumping from scene to scene, camera angle to camera angle. Maybe it was supposed to come off as sharp and gritty, but it just felt unprofessional and clunky. Maybe substituting Scorsese’s coked up direction, which undermined any possible nail-biting from me, for a more subtle but equally stylish director would have been better. I always thought the plot to The Departed would fit snugly into Michael Mann’s filmography. Most of his movies concern two me on different sides of the law and in this case he’d have the third dynamic of Frank Costello to use. Or even a fourth if Queenan was made into a more major character, as was the initial intention when Robert De Niro was slated to play him.
And don’t get me started on the plot holes. This movie is plot hole Las Vegas. It’s plot hole galore with The Departed. But I’m not going to go into that, otherwise we’ll be here all day. All I can say is the plot feels so flimsily put together that even as a standard Hollywood thriller with a forced-happy ending it still doesn’t work. And neither does the horrible looking CGI blood effects which killed any possible thrill the movie could have had in one of its most pivotal scenes. I was too distracted by how crap the blood looked to take notice of the fact that the main character had just been unceremoniously shot in the face dead.
Are we really supposed to believe that of all the Councillors in the city both the rat and the mole fell for the same one? Or question what use Costello is as an FBI informant when he is clearly the biggest fish in the sea? Or how nobody realized that DiCaprio is the rat despite being the only one with a past in the police academy and the newest addition of the crew? And what’s with all the flip phones? And why does Wahlberg commit a murder right in the middle of- wait…I said I wasn’t going to speak about the plot, so I won’t. I can hold it. I’m mature. I can keep it in. Yes I can. I can.
There are some positives. Quite a few, in fact. But the problem is that most of the good stuff was already present in the original movie Infernal Affairs which, at the age of 4 when The Departed was released, begs the question as to why Scorsese’s remake even needed to be made. And it’s pretty embarrassing on the Academy’s part that the guy who made movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull finally won an Oscar for this film, but who cares about awards anyway?
All in all, The Departed is not going to become one of my favourite movies. Far from it. It remains an oddity in Scorsese’s filmography in the sense that it’s pretty much his only movie that I dislike. Plot contrivances, bad acting and hyperactive editing can all be forgiven, but when a film is boring it has committed the ultimate celluloid sin. In my book anyway.
https://cineranter.wordpress.com/2017/01/11/movie-review-the-departed/

(Original post by kprml):
• Have my hands registered as weapons.
• Get kicked out of a casino for winning.
• Jump into a body of water with a knife between my teeth.
• Have a cape removed onstage.
• Have a sports jersey pulled over a nice suit.
• Be killed by the person I told to kill me if I started to become a zombie.
• Wipe down a gun.
• Silently communicate/point to my watch underwater.
• Punch out my undercover partner who is about to say something he shouldn't and blow our cover.
• Play bass in an all-black band, be the only white guy. and whisper something onstage to the conga player and then laugh.
• Put my hand over the mouth of a beautiful woman to stop her from screaming and alerting the bad guys.
• Get shot at and brush it off, saying, “I ain't got time to bleed.”
• Be able to say someone attempted suicide over me: She threw herself on the train tracks.”
• Catch a punch and twist the guy’s hand until he goes down to his knees.
• Have a celebrity shorten my name in an interview. “Bobby De Niro says working with Ace was great.
• Be embroiled in a lawsuit that leads to a heroic story: "I broke the leg of a gangbanger robbing a liquor store, and now he’s suing me.”
• Stop a crime by throwing something. A guy steals a purse and starts running. I throw a can of corn football-style and knock him out.
• Track someone. I dismount my horse, then do that low squat where I pick up a clump of dirt and let it sift through my fingers.
• Hawk a championship belt or Super Bowl ring at a pawn shop when I hit rock bottom.
• Shout, ‘Release the hounds!”
• Be lost in the Utah desert with a hot chick, then come across an old Indian guy and speak his language.
• Pull a fake mustache off someone and shout, “A-ha!”.
• Have a hot towel on my face at a barbershop with a cigar sticking out.
• Dislocate my shoulder to get out of a straitjacket.
• Snap Larry King’s suspenders and turn him into a pile of ashes.
• Shout “Not on my watch....”
• Direct a movie called Awesome so that entertainment shows will have to refer to me as “Awesome director Adam Carolla.” Then follow it up with the sequel Hung Like a Rhino.
• Drive a car off a pier onto a garbage barge.
• Be stripped of a crown.
• Tell my team to “synchronize watches.”
• Dry-shave with a machete.
• Pull down a surgical mask and say, “There’s nothing I could do” or beat someone on the chest and shout, “Live, damn you!”
• Box a kangaroo.
• Demand unmarked bills.
• Drape a suit jacket over handcuffs in the front like John Gotti.
• Fend off a Kodiak bear with a torch.
• Pop the locks on an attaché case full of money and slide it across a table.
• Be tied to a chair with a hot chick.
• Have to choose between cutting a red wire and a blue wire.
• Fight someone on top of a moving train.
• UPDATE: Whisper into fellow guitar player's ear, and him walking away shaking his head no.

Adam Carolla's Bucket List:
If you know of any others, please post.
• Have my hands registered as weapons.
• Get kicked out of a casino for winning.
• Jump into a body of water with a knife between my teeth.
• Have a cape removed onstage.
• Have a sports jersey pulled over a nice suit.
• Be killed by the person I told to kill me if I started to become a zombie.
• Wipe down a gun.
• Silently communicate/point to my watch underwater.
• Punch out my undercover partner who is about to say something he shouldn't and blow our cover.
• Play bass in an all-black band, be the only white guy. and whisper something onstage to the conga player and then laugh.
• Put my hand over the mouth of a beautiful woman to stop her from screaming and alerting the bad guys.
• Get shot at and brush it off, saying, “I ain't got time to bleed.”
• Be able to say someone attempted suicide over me: She threw herself on the train tracks.”
• Catch a punch and twist the guy’s hand until he goes down to his knees.
• Have a celebrity shorten my name in an interview. “Bobby De Niro says working with Ace was great.
• Be embroiled in a lawsuit that leads to a heroic story: "I broke the leg of a gangbanger robbing a liquor store, and now he’s suing me.”
• Stop a crime by throwing something. A guy steals a purse and starts running. I throw a can of corn football-style and knock him out.
• Track someone. I dismount my horse, then do that low squat where I pick up a clump of dirt and let it sift through my fingers.
• Hawk a championship belt or Super Bowl ring at a pawn shop when I hit rock bottom.
• Shout, ‘Release the hounds!”
• Be lost in the Utah desert with a hot chick, then come across an old Indian guy and speak his language.
• Pull a fake mustache off someone and shout, “A-ha!”.
• Have a hot towel on my face at a barbershop with a cigar sticking out.
• Dislocate my shoulder to get out of a straitjacket.
• Snap Larry King’s suspenders and turn him into a pile of ashes.
• Shout “Not on my watch....”
• Direct a movie called Awesome so that entertainment shows will have to refer to me as “Awesome director Adam Carolla.” Then follow it up with the sequel Hung Like a Rhino.
• Drive a car off a pier onto a garbage barge.
• Be stripped of a crown.
• Tell my team to “synchronize watches.”
• Dry-shave with a machete.
• Pull down a surgical mask and say, “There’s nothing I could do” or beat someone on the chest and shout, “Live, damn you!”
• Box a kangaroo.
• Demand unmarked bills.
• Drape a suit jacket over handcuffs in the front like John Gotti.
• Fend off a Kodiak bear with a torch.
• Pop the locks on an attaché case full of money and slide it across a table.
• Be tied to a chair with a hot chick.
• Have to choose between cutting a red wire and a blue wire.
• Fight someone on top of a moving train.
• Whisper into fellow guitar player's ear, and him walking away shaking his head no.

For me as a lover of the gangster style noir. It would be DeNiros character in Casino. You don't die at the end and you make millions throughout the movie. Plus you get to wear snazzy suits throughout the movie. What more could you want

The Irishman will act as a reunion for a lot of Scorsese's original muses. Sadly Vincent won't be one of them since he died last year. It got me thinking, if he was still alive who could he have played in The Irishman?
I made a little video collating my thoughts together on the matter if you're interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDfWQuKytIM
If you prefer to read, I wrote it up here:
All Martin Scorsese movies that have starred Joe Pesci – Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino – have also starred the late Frank Vincent. Robert De Niro and Scorsese picked up the two, who at the time were a music and comedy duo, for two significant roles in Scorsese’s 1980 boxing drama Raging Bull. Since then, Pesci has gone onto have two major roles in Marty’s two most famous gangster movies, including an Oscar winning turn as tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. Vincent also had roles in these two films but had much smaller parts, though his performance as Billy Batts in Goodfellas has given audiences one of the most famous scenes and lines in the entire genre. Vincent’s last role in a Martin Scorsese film came as the enforcer of Joe Pesci’s character, Frank Marino in the 1995 crime film Casino.
Evidently, Frank Vincent was very much a part of the Martin Scorsese mob scene. Surely then, had he not have passed away in September 2017, there would have been a role for him in the 2019 Scorsese gangster movie The Irishman? One of the key attractions of the film is the way in which it serves as a reunion to some of Scorsese’s original muses, such as Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvel Kietel, bringing together all these actors who worked together many years ago, whilst making room for veterans of the gangster genre who have yet to work with Scorsese, namely Al Pacino.
We may never know if Frank Vincent was in mind to have a role in the film, but if he did, who could he have played? A role as one of the film’s big three characters – Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sheeran and Russell Buffalino, seems unlikely. A reading of the script was done around 2013 and it is thought the only actors at the table were Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, suggesting they were always going to play their characters. Given their pedigree, it only makes sense.
So who else is there then? A minor role as a relatively low-key character or a random mobster is possible, but would be a rather waste of the actor’s talent. One of the juicer roles in the film is that of mob boss Angelo Bruno, known as the ‘gentle’ don for his preference for dialogue over violence, a part which will be played by Harvey Kietel. Personally, I feel neither Kietel nor Vincent would be the perfect actors to play the role. I imagine Bruno as a kind of tender and moderate character, one that people feel comfortable being around. Both of the mentioned actors are terrific at playing fierce gangsters, even if the characters aren’t outright vicious both actors are adept at delivering performances with subtle and nuanced intensity, such as Kietel’s role as the abusive boyfriend in Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore or Vincent’s turn as the gangster Phil Leotardo in the TV show The Sopranos. Because of this I don’t feel either actor would be utilized to the best of their ability playing this character.
One mobster I think would be a perfect fit would be Anthony Provenzano, also known as Tony Pro, who will be played by Stephen Graham. I think Graham is a great actor, but it was a little jarring, given his age in comparison to the rest of the cast, hearing that he would be playing Tony Pro. Vincent was more suited to playing the role, I feel. Provenzano was often the middle man between union leader Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia, and is likely to have several profanity fuelled outbursts in the film and a few verbal beat downs with Al Pacino, a character trait which Vincent is no stranger to. He even kinda looks like Provenzano.
A far smaller role, but one that would give him screen time with most of the main cast, would be as mobster Chuckie O’Brien. He looks nothing at all like O’Brien but if Scorsese wanted Vincent to play a role similar to the one he played in Casino, namely supporting muscle, this would be the perfect role. It’s likely we’d see him a lot hovering in the background of mob conferences, occasionally pitching in and having a part in one major scene in the movie that I won’t give away if you haven’t read the book it’s based on.
Another gangster he could have played was Phil Testa, one of Bruno’s understudies and his eventual successor as boss of the Philadelphia crime family. Again it is likely to be quite a small role, but one that would suit him given Testa being known for having a stern and uncompromising presence.
So what do you think? Would you have liked to see Frank Vincent in The Irishman? If so who do you think he could have played?

Out of all the films I used to feel ambivalent about but which I have since positively reappraised due to my wife’s having watched them over and over in front of me, none has risen more dramatically in my estimation than Martin Scorsese’s Casino. I first saw it during its original theatrical run in 1995 when I was 20-years-old. I left the theater feeling disappointed — mainly because it failed to live up to Goodfellas, the prior Scorsese movie that it seemed to most closely resemble. They both, after all, featured Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci as mobsters, there were shocking bursts of violence, epic tracking shots, copious amounts of voice-over narration, healthy doses of black humor, eclectic soundtracks on which the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” prominently featured, and so on. Comparisons were always going to be unavoidable. But what really rankled was the way Casino seemed to me like a gaudier, more Hollywood-ized version of Goodfellas — as if Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi had taken some of the elements of their successful earlier film and re-shuffled them with the added commercial elements of a Las Vegas setting, a bigger budget and the star power of Sharon Stone (then one of Hollywood’s hottest commodities). While I did admire Casino for its impressive and undeniable cinematic value (it was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between Scorsese and his now-longtime cinematographer Robert Richardson), I largely felt indifferent about it on the whole.
Almost 20 years later, after revisiting the film many times on television and Blu-ray, all of my previous complaints have been swept aside and I now consider it one of Scorsese’s finest works. When I first saw it, one thing I didn’t quite understand was what Scorsese was up to in regards to the Las Vegas setting. I remember feeling back then that the quintessential “New York filmmaker” seemed out of his element “out west” and that, in spite of a few faux-documentary interludes, he didn’t seem to have much of an affinity for the gambling scene. (This is born out by the fact that, to this day, serious gamblers appear to prefer the 1998 poker film Rounders as their Vegas movie of choice.) I realize now that it was wrong of me to have expected the same kind of lovingly detailed views of Las Vegas as those of New York City that can be seen in Scorsese’s other films. For Scorsese, Las Vegas is primarily a metaphor: it’s a “paradise lost” to his gangster characters from “back East.” The notion that Sam “Ace” Rothstein and Nicky Santoro (the characters played by DeNiro and Pesci, respectively) had it all and then blew it is one of the ways in which the film poignantly shows the influence of one of Scorsese’s favorite movies, Raoul Walsh’s Prohibition-set masterpiece The Roaring Twenties. Both Scorsese and Walsh seem to be saying that no matter how violent, immoral and unconscionable the behavior of their characters might be, they were inextricably part of a colorful and exciting era that has since been replaced by something duller and more sanitized. The tone of each movie is therefore elegiac and bittersweet.
As far as the “gaudiness” is concerned, I now believe this is actually Casino‘s strongest stylistic virtue: there is much more voice-over than in Goodfellas, the music is nearly wall-to-wall and the song choices are wackier (e.g., Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction”!), while the clothes, the decor, and the use of color are all deliriously over-the-top. In 1995, what I somehow missed was the way Scorsese and his production team’s deliberately outrageous sense of style was taking its cues directly from the Vegas setting, and I was more apt to criticize the film then for what it wasn’t (i.e., another Goodfellas) rather than what it was (the tragedy of a man who was given the keys to the kingdom of a modern-day Babylon and then willingly let them slip through his fingers). In contrast to the eternal coolness of the 1950s and 1960s New York-milieu of Goodfellas — with its great cars, clothes and music — nearly everything about Casino, in terms of content and form, is rooted in the tackiness of the Las Vegas fashions of the 1970s and early 1980s. And what I didn’t see at the time but what has since become abundantly clear in hindsight is how much this tackiness also provides the film with some of its most inspired and humorous touches. This is nowhere more evident than in the amazing poster recently created by a Boston-based artist that depicts every suit worn by Ace Rothstein in the movie.

De Niro Casino Suits - nilecruiseofegypt.com

de niro casino suits

de niro casino suits - win

Robert De Niro Casino Suit for Michael

Robert De Niro Casino Suit for Michael

In Casino (1995), Robert De Niro wore a different suit in each of his scenes with the exception of the first and last. This poster shows all the different suits he wore throughout the film

The many suits worn by Robert De Niro in Casino (1995). At the end of the production, both lead actors De Niro and Sharon Stone were allowed to keep their costumes.

Every suit worn by Robert De Niro in Casino

Each suit De Niro wore in Casino

44 suits worn by De Niro in Casino. (repost from r/movies)

In Casino (1995), Robert De Niro wore a different suit in each of his scenes with the exception of the first and last. This poster shows all the different suits he wore throughout the film

In Casino (1995), Robert De Niro wore a different suit in each of his scenes with the exception of the first and last. This poster shows all the different suits he wore throughout the film

In Casino (1995), Robert De Niro wore a different suit in each of his scenes with the exception of the first and last. This poster shows all the different suits he wore throughout the film

Every suit De Niro wears in Casino

[movies] Every suit worn by Robert De Niro in Casino

“The Canadian Epstein” — Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes

A Cinematic Guide to The Weeknd: Pt 3. My Dear Melancholy and After Hours

My Dear Melancholy

After Hours

Postscript

Every reference from the After Hours rollout(?)

Frank Vincent died just as The Irishman started filming. Who could he have played in The Irishman?

Thoughts on Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006)?

Adams "Bucket List" List

Adam's (Ongoing) "Bucket List" List

If you could live in any cinematic universe what would it be and why?

Frank Vincent died just as The Irishman started filming. Who could he have played in The Irishman?

Re-evaluating Martin Scorsese's Casino

de niro casino suits video

de niro casino suits top

History Buffs: Casino - YouTube