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Almost Blue posted:Cape Fear isn't one of my favorite Scorsese, but it's pretty good. Weirdly feels more like a De Palma movie to me, I guess because of all the split-diopters and some Hitchcock homages. If I remember correctly Spielberg was slated to make it and had done a decent amount of preproduction. Scorsese was, at the time, originally set to do Schindler’s List. Scorsese felt a Jewish filmmaker should tackle Schindler’s so they traded. I heard this in film school way back when so might be bullshit, but Nolte would absolutely fall into the Spielberg Dad stereotype.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:47
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That is true, but I don't think he got that far into development with it. Spielberg did still produce it even if his name isn't on the movie. I've heard Spielberg's choice for Max Cady was Bill Murray. Would've been a wild entry in his filmography if he'd stayed on.
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Feb 18, 2021 08:28
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Shutter Island seemed like the weakest of the 5-6 films I've seen, but only in the sense that it didn't strike me as more than a pretty solid thriller while the rest of his movies have, at minimum, scenes that still stick with me years or decades later.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Shutter Island seemed like the weakest of the 5-6 films I've seen, but only in the sense that it didn't strike me as more than a pretty solid thriller while the rest of his movies have, at minimum, scenes that still stick with me years or decades later. Yeah, I'll agree with that. Shutter Island's the weakest of his I've seen. Still, I like the atmosphere, premise, and it's visually nice.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:38
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Shutter Island is a mess, but a good 75% of what's wrong with it is straight out of the source material - I like Denis Lehane, but that one's a potboiler even by his standards. It has some funky directorial choices too though. I do really like the Patricia Clarkson and Ted Levine scenes.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:44
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Shutter Island is a mess, but a good 75% of what's wrong with it is straight out of the source material - I like Denis Lehane, but that one's a potboiler even by his standards. It has some funky directorial choices too though. I do really like the Patricia Clarkson and Ted Levine scenes. I was gonna ask about the book, if someone brought it up. What's a good Lehane to try, if any?
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Feb 18, 2021 20:54
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Franchescanado posted:I was gonna ask about the book, if someone brought it up. What's a good Lehane to try, if any? I really like the Kenzie/Gennaro books, Gone Baby Gone was adapted from the fourth in that series. Really solid Boston PI yarns.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:56
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Did anybody see that Jesse Plemons is now going to be the lead in Scorsese's next movie? He's taking over from DiCaprio, who'll still be in it in a different part. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jesse-plemons-to-star-in-martin-scorseses-killers-of-the-flower-moon
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Feb 18, 2021 22:08
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I won’t say Gangs of New York is his best film, but it might be my favorite.
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Feb 18, 2021 23:39
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What's a mess about Shutter Island? Not saying you are wrong, just I always find it a nice atmospheric thriller. I guess the whole experiment is a bit over the top, but I dunno, I just kind of went with it.
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Feb 19, 2021 02:17
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sponges posted:I won’t say Gangs of New York is his best film, but it might be my favorite. I have complicated feelings about Gangs of New York, because it's definitely a mess of a movie, but the world-building is next level good in it. My main issue with it: I think Bill the Butcher should probably have been the protagonist. Bill is on par with some of Scorsese's best monsters, Jake LaMotta or Travis Bickle or Max Cady. But Amsterdam's revenge quest against him is such a tedious weight around the movie's neck. You'd think it'd lend a sort of tragic inevitability to it...that Amsterdam befriends Bill but is duty-bound to kill him. Or that it'd be cathartic in some "Count of Monte Cristo" sense, that you want to see Amsterdam do it. But I mostly saw it as this limp obligation in the plot getting in the way of what's great about the rest of the movie: the gleeful lawlessness of 19th-century New York, and watching DDL play out this horrifying character. Of course, the parts of the movie I think worked, *really* loving worked. The scene where Bill "confesses" to Amsterdam in the middle of the night, draped in an American flag, is one of those god-tier moments in filmmaking. In general, though, I can't think of many directors as prolific as Scorsese who are also consistently good. Even now, after 5 decades, he's STILL taking chances and doing new things and they're turning out great. It sucks that his popular persona is as a violent mob movie guy, because those account for like 5 of literally dozens of features he's made. And when he isn't making The Irishman, he's making things like Hugo or Silence. He's made 19th-century romances, dark comedies, psychological thrillers, a musical, and literally a biopic about the Dalai Lama. Right now, he's pushing 80 and still has several upcoming projects I'm genuinely excited to see. How is this fucker so good at movies?
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Feb 19, 2021 03:42
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I'm also wondering what the shutter island haters have to say for themselves
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Feb 19, 2021 04:17
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checkplease posted:What's a mess about Shutter Island? Not saying you are wrong, just I always find it a nice atmospheric thriller. I guess the whole experiment is a bit over the top, but I dunno, I just kind of went with it. I don't think it's a mess, but it's hampered by its source material, which is the platonic ideal of an airport newsstand thriller, and some of the deviations / additions really just kind of add ... I don't know, complexity for the sake of complexity? This is a pretty common thing with the screenwriter's other movies, looking at her credits. But I still enjoy it quite a bit for its atmosphere, and "Scorsese does Hitchcock" is a pretty great selling point. The cast is pretty uniformly excellent, too, even if I wish someone other than Ruffalo had been DiCaprio's partner; he's just full as dishwater in the movie. It's not top-tier Scorsese, but it's absolutely worth watching.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:57
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I think the episodic nature of Shutter Island plays a little better in the book than in the movie, where it feels like "and then THIS character actor gives a monologue to Leonardo Dicaprio, and then THIS character actor gives a monologue to Leonardo Dicaprio, and then..." I also think it doles out the series of big reveals at the end in the clumsiest way possible (again, partially the book's fault - it's kind of a dumb ending no matter how you slice it) and some decisions just kinda baffle me (Why cast Elias Koteas in a one scene cameo as a dream sequence vision of a character who turns out to be a figment of Leo's imagination? Again, this plays better in the book where there's never any need to see that character, whereas the movie puts him in as a weird swerve so "it was actually Leo the whole time" is harder to predict, i dunno it feels like a cheat). This also all felt pretty stark at the time since it was Scorsese's second consecutive Boston-area Neo Noir starring Leonardo Dicaprio, and while The Departed is not without its flaws, it's both a lot better and a lot more fun. I haven't seen Shutter Island since it was in theaters, but also I've never really felt compelled to revisit it. Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 15:27
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Re: Silence I read the book before I saw the movie, I would recommend it to anyone who at least kinda liked the film. You get more pov from some of the minor characters, the priests do a bit more, etc And LtKen is correct, it works a bit better as a novel than a movie but there's not a huge gulf between them really.
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Feb 19, 2021 23:09
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Timby posted:...and "Scorsese does Hitchcock" is a pretty great selling point. It ended up being really divisive among my friends, and I think this is why: they either loved this about it or hated it. The third act exposition dump especially turned a lot of people off, as “anti-cinematic” or lazy. I appreciated it as a Hitchcock reference, the explicit denouement. But it’s an incongruous choice for a movie in 2010, as is the blaring and anachronistic score throughout. He made Hugo around the same time, which is also an explicit love letter to old cinema. I guess 2010-11 was a super nostalgic time for him as a filmmaker.
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Feb 21, 2021 10:54
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sponges posted:I won’t say Gangs of New York is his best film, but it might be my favorite. Gangs of New York is a movie with incredible characters, actors and setting and yet it focus on DiCaprio and DIaz at their blandest. 
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Feb 21, 2021 12:03
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Spatulater bro! posted:I think he does a pretty good job in the NYT article detailing what, as he sees it, are the key qualitative differences between the two types of films. The list of directors Scorsese does approve of is interesting, specifically Wes Anderson and Kathryn Bigelow since an argument could be made that these two have been spinning their wheels for years now. Obviously he's not wrong in saying that Marvel movies are market researched but is he really finding something new in every Wes Anderson movie? Or even in his own series of films about the rise and fall of white sociopaths? It seems like the problem is less with the points Scorsese makes and more with the way he goes about arguing them.
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Feb 21, 2021 15:02
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Wes Anderson has a specific but I’d hardly accuse him of making the same film again and again.
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Feb 21, 2021 18:21
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I thought Hugo sucked rear end.
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Feb 21, 2021 19:59
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Well I quite enjoyed Hugo
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Feb 21, 2021 23:11
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Hugo is great, so is shutter island and I think that Silence is one of his best. Wolf of Wall Street is his worst movie easily though. I blame that on Terence Winter being the writer though. He’s the worst writer to come from the sopranos crew for sure.
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Feb 22, 2021 02:44
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Thread inspired me to re-watch Bringing out the dead (like 15 years since I saw it), and to finally fix my shame and watch Goodfellas for the first time ever. Having finally watched all of Goodfellas, Casino and The Irishman I realize I'm the weirdo that just doesn't care for those films. They're great but something about them just doesn't appeal to me. I did like Bringing out the dead, had some fun seeing Michael K. Williams and Sonja Sohn well before their The Wire days. Isiah Whitlock Jr. was also in a tiny role in Goodfellas. Gonna watch Silence soon hopefully, I remembered being excited over the trailer at the time.
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Feb 22, 2021 19:57
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Laughing Zealot posted:Isiah Whitlock Jr. was also in a tiny role in Goodfellas. Absolute top tier bit part.
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Feb 22, 2021 20:19
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Laughing Zealot posted:Having finally watched all of Goodfellas, Casino and The Irishman I realize I'm the weirdo that just doesn't care for those films. They're great but something about them just doesn't appeal to me. I get it. They're phenomenal movies and deserve the credit they get, but also I couldn't be hosed to care about Italian mob stories at this point. I couldn't get into Sopranos for this reason, either. I think prestige media has said all it can about macho Italian mob guys in the tri-state area at this point. Scorsese's other work is way more compelling to me. I'd love to see more Russian mob narratives out in the world, though. Eastern Promises was great.
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Feb 22, 2021 20:58
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To be fair, Scorsese's mob movies are a massive part of the very reason Italian mob stuff is so ubiquitous.
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Feb 22, 2021 21:06
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No, of course. And I think Goodfellas is remarkable. But also that Casino is...a good movie that feels a lot like Goodfellas. And that The Irishman was a good movie that kind of feels like a retrospective on Goodfellas and Casino. No judgments for people who love that poo poo, I just think the well is a bit dry now. FWIW I have immense affection for The Departed, which I see as an occasional parody of Scorsese's mob movies (and crime films generally, I suppose.)
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Feb 22, 2021 21:40
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Thank you for starting this thread. I love Scorsese and now realize I haven't even seen all of his films. His name came up in some other thread in a discussion about Spielberg and someone asked me if I was "honestly comparing Marty to Spielberg in terms of cultural impact" or something close to that. In which case...yes? I don't think it's the Speilbergian blowout that was suggested at least and overall, I prefer Scorsese's films to Steven's even though JAWS is my all time favorite. What do you guys think of the suggestion/criticism that Marty leans too hard on DeNiro? I've heard that offered but to me it's more of a synergistic thing where they bring out the best in each other. Also, everyone go see King of Comedy and After Hours since they are great and get buried under the other stuff.
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Feb 22, 2021 22:05
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BiggerBoat posted:What do you guys think of the suggestion/criticism that Marty leans too hard on DeNiro? I've heard that offered but to me it's more of a synergistic thing where they bring out the best in each other. No, but he was leaning a bit too hard on DiCaprio for a while
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Feb 22, 2021 22:06
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I'm just waiting for him to work with Willem Dafoe again.
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Feb 23, 2021 22:01
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:No, but he was leaning a bit too hard on DiCaprio for a while Yeah, like between 2002 and 2013 he made only one film without DiCaprio (not counting docs, of course). Meanwhile, he took a 24 year break from working with DeNiro between 1995 and 2019. The fact that Killers of the Flower Moon is going to finally unite them feels like it should be a bigger deal.
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Feb 24, 2021 20:33
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TrixRabbi posted:Yeah, like between 2002 and 2013 he made only one film without DiCaprio (not counting docs, of course). and honestly, DiCaprio was not very good in a couple of those (Gangs of NY, Shutter Island), whereas De Niro knocked it out of the park every time, even in lesser Scorsese movies like Cape Fear
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Feb 24, 2021 20:48
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:and honestly, DiCaprio was not very good in a couple of those (Gangs of NY, Shutter Island), whereas De Niro knocked it out of the park every time, even in lesser Scorsese movies like Cape Fear You and me are about to have a problem, Uncle Boogeyman.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:31
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BiggerBoat posted:You and me are about to have a problem, Uncle Boogeyman. Cape Fear is fine, but I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than lesser Scorsese. I mean, it's kinda outclassed by its own Simpsons parody episode.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:39
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Yeah, Gangs of New York is one of his weakest films easily, even if it's got a good DDL performance propping it up.
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Feb 25, 2021 15:59
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TrixRabbi posted:Yeah, Gangs of New York is one of his weakest films easily, even if it's got a good DDL performance propping it up. I actually like Gangs of New York a lot for the most part but Leo, Cameron Diaz, and that other bland dude that fights Leo over Cameron Diaz are all film-cripplingly bad.
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Feb 25, 2021 16:04
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Time to step in and defend Leo. He's not quite at the level of DeNiro, but I think he's pretty great. Especially when he's working with talented directors. I mean I get why people don't like him. He has that baby-faced 90s heartthrob aura that he can't seem to shake, and I think people often interpret that as him being miscast. He doesn't dissolve into his characters as well as some of the greats. But despite all that he has a great screen presence and I absolutely love watching him.
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Feb 25, 2021 16:42
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I think Leo is pretty good in The Aviator and The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street. Not so much in The Gangs of New York.
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Feb 25, 2021 16:49
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I've always thought Leo's strengths were in more comedic oriented roles, such as Once Upon a time in Hollywood, Wolf of Wall Street, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
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Feb 25, 2021 16:49
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:I think Leo is pretty good in The Aviator and The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street. Not so much in The Gangs of New York. I think he's a little shaky in parts of The Departed but that was where I started taking him seriously. He's excellent in The Aviator* and The Wolf of Wall Street. *I saw The Aviator after I saw The Departed which is why I wasn't already taking him seriously
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Feb 25, 2021 17:13
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