The "You Talking to Me?" Martin Scorsese Fanclub
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It's not near Scorseses best because it is his best 
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Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019
Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019
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Funny Cob, my issue with The Departed is the exact opposite. I love the first two acts and then I feel Scorsese goes Hollywood with everyone getting a bullet. Still great though. and one of my top ten from that year.
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Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of The Departed. I can understand that it's a good movie, but you have to realize it's also a remake. It's not COMPLETELY original, and I honestly just don't like it that much. It just doesn't have that great emotional element that most other Scorsese films do.
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Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me.
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me.
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Funny Cob, my issue with The Departed is the exact opposite. I love the first two acts and then I feel Scorsese goes Hollywood with everyone getting a bullet. Still great though. and one of my top ten from that year.
I don't dislike the first two acts, by the way. I don't want a movie that's constantly like the third act. I just wanted the first two acts to be a little more fleshed out. I wouldn't ask this from a regular cop or action movie, but it's a Scorsese movie, so I feel like I have to be a little stricter. Certain characters and situations could and should've been developed a little deeper. I assume the studios didn't allow Scorsese to make the film longer than it already was, though, so that's why some things kind of come across as a little bit rushed (in my opinion).
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I myself really dig The Departed. And while it is not in the same league as Goodfellas or Taxi Driver, it is an excellent film in the genre where Scorsese EXCELS at. We have a fantastic cast and great performances all around. Even from Markie Mark, who before this I thought was not that great an actor. And though we may debate until the cows come home on should this have been the movie he should have won the Oscar for or was this a make up Oscar; it does show that Scorsese has not chosen to go into cruise control this late into his career.
It may not be the best movie Scorsese did with DeCaprio (that would be The Wolf of Wall Street for my money), but this is pretty damn good too.
It may not be the best movie Scorsese did with DeCaprio (that would be The Wolf of Wall Street for my money), but this is pretty damn good too.
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It may not be the best movie Scorsese did with DeCaprio (that would be The Wolf of Wall Street for my money), but this is pretty damn good too.
I love the characters in this as well. Not a weak one in the bunch. The little touches Scorsese adds are just perfect. When Damon meets the psychiatrist and says he doesn't need her card because he is a detective, then quickly takes the card at the last second. I just love little character moments like that. You seem to get those in films from the great directors. That is the kind of stuff that sets them apart for me. The Departed could easily be another ho-hum cop thriller, Scorsese elevates it.
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My personal ranking of Scorsese's collaborations with DiCaprio:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street
2. The Aviator
3. Shutter Island
4. Gangs of New York
5. The Departed
I like all five of these films of course, but this is how I would personally rank them.
4 and 5 are really close, though. The Departed has an awesome ending, while Gangs of New York kind of starts dragging near the end, but I still think the latter is a film of much higher quality overall.
But yeah, there's one clear winner for me:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street
2. The Aviator
3. Shutter Island
4. Gangs of New York
5. The Departed
I like all five of these films of course, but this is how I would personally rank them.
4 and 5 are really close, though. The Departed has an awesome ending, while Gangs of New York kind of starts dragging near the end, but I still think the latter is a film of much higher quality overall.
But yeah, there's one clear winner for me:
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And The Aviator and Gangs Of NY for mine.
I love the characters in this as well. Not a weak one in the bunch. The little touches Scorsese adds are just perfect. When Damon meets the psychiatrist and says he doesn't need her card because he is a detective, then quickly takes the card at the last second. I just love little character moments like that. You seem to get those in films from the great directors. That is the kind of stuff that sets them apart for me. The Departed could easily be another ho-hum cop thriller, Scorsese elevates it.
I love the characters in this as well. Not a weak one in the bunch. The little touches Scorsese adds are just perfect. When Damon meets the psychiatrist and says he doesn't need her card because he is a detective, then quickly takes the card at the last second. I just love little character moments like that. You seem to get those in films from the great directors. That is the kind of stuff that sets them apart for me. The Departed could easily be another ho-hum cop thriller, Scorsese elevates it.
My personal ranking of Scorsese's collaborations with DiCaprio:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street
2. The Aviator
3. Shutter Island
4. Gangs of New York
5. The Departed
I like all five of these films of course, but this is how I would personally rank them.
4 and 5 are really close, though. The Departed has an awesome ending, while Gangs of New York kind of starts dragging near the end, but I still think the latter is a film of much higher quality overall.
But yeah, there's one clear winner for me:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street
2. The Aviator
3. Shutter Island
4. Gangs of New York
5. The Departed
I like all five of these films of course, but this is how I would personally rank them.
4 and 5 are really close, though. The Departed has an awesome ending, while Gangs of New York kind of starts dragging near the end, but I still think the latter is a film of much higher quality overall.
But yeah, there's one clear winner for me:
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And yet I still haven't seen Wolf or Aviator 
Dude!
The DiCaprio Wolf GIFs are perfect for almost every post. I don't think I will ever get sick of them. Has anyone found an animated one of him banging his head with the mic?
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The DiCaprio Wolf GIFs are perfect for almost every post. I don't think I will ever get sick of them. Has anyone found an animated one of him banging his head with the mic?
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One of my favorite film publications, Reverse Shot, has just entered a partnership with Museum of the Moving Image, becoming their official publication. In celebration, they're running a symposium on the entire career of Martin Scorsese. I think you would all enjoy reading these, as the team is full of great writers with interesting perspectives.
Here's a sample from the introduction to the symposium:
"But the question of what we think of when we think of Scorsese is a much larger, confusing one. Once he was seen, reductively but not inaptly, as the preeminent chronicler of Italian-American Catholic guilt. Now that seems merely a starting point. Of late, his work as a preservationist and as an all-purpose guru for the legacy of world cinema itself—his 1981 campaign against the looming issue of fading color stock, which got the attention of Eastman Kodak; his heroic World Cinema Foundation, which rescues and preserves films from around the world; his various documentaries charting his personal journeys through film, which make him something like American cinema’s more scholarly, less radical Jean-Luc Godard—has somewhat overshadowed his directorial career. His generosity in giving interviews and making appearances to talk about other filmmakers’ work has resulted in him becoming perhaps the American film industry’s most recognizable, omnipresent artist—a walking, talking personification of cinema itself."
-Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert
Here's the link to the articles, which will be updated every day with another article on a Scorsese film: http://www.reverseshot.com/symposium...e-he-is-cinema
Here's a sample from the introduction to the symposium:
"But the question of what we think of when we think of Scorsese is a much larger, confusing one. Once he was seen, reductively but not inaptly, as the preeminent chronicler of Italian-American Catholic guilt. Now that seems merely a starting point. Of late, his work as a preservationist and as an all-purpose guru for the legacy of world cinema itself—his 1981 campaign against the looming issue of fading color stock, which got the attention of Eastman Kodak; his heroic World Cinema Foundation, which rescues and preserves films from around the world; his various documentaries charting his personal journeys through film, which make him something like American cinema’s more scholarly, less radical Jean-Luc Godard—has somewhat overshadowed his directorial career. His generosity in giving interviews and making appearances to talk about other filmmakers’ work has resulted in him becoming perhaps the American film industry’s most recognizable, omnipresent artist—a walking, talking personification of cinema itself."
-Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert
Here's the link to the articles, which will be updated every day with another article on a Scorsese film: http://www.reverseshot.com/symposium...e-he-is-cinema
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Mubi
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Excellent article! And more to come it seems. Looks like I get an early birthday present! Thank You bluedeed!
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Today's article is a careful consideration of race in Taxi Driver (fanatics be warned):
"Taxi Driver’s most problematic scene in terms of its treatment of race, however, is notable for its relative lack of allusion and ambiguity: it arrives just over an hour in, when Bickle visits a bodega to pick up some groceries. A jittery young black man (Nat Grant) enters shortly thereafter, and proceeds to hold up the Puerto Rican shopkeeper (Victor Argo). Bickle appears from behind and shoots the black man to death, nervelessly, clinically. This decisive action serves a valuable narrative function in that it proves that Bickle—who has earlier informed his boss that he served in Vietnam—has lost none of his sharp reflexes, and is now primed to kill. The two men look down on, and prod at, the dead man like he’s a piece of expired meat, and the disturbing sequence seems mostly concluded. But Scorsese isn’t finished. The shopkeeper grouses about how “that’s the fifth one this year,” and implores Bickle to scram; he’s got things under control. As Bickle warily exits the store, Scorsese launches into an ostentatiously edited, five-shot sequence depicting the shopkeeper beating the black man’s limp body with an iron bar. It’s an appalling instance of intra-ethnic violence that is notable for moving, albeit briefly, away from Bickle’s point of view (a rarity in the film). From this switch of perspective, it can be inferred that Scorsese (and perhaps Schrader) is making some sort of objective statement about the totem pole of contemporary New York racial tensions, while also spotlighting the outsize, visceral rage of the shopkeeper. But this type of commentary jars with the rest of the film’s impressionistic subjectivity, and draws unfortunate attention, once again, to its authors’ general compulsion to leverage the black-male image without offering any right of reply—essentially a kind of image-based, racial taxation without representation."
-Ashley Clark
"Taxi Driver’s most problematic scene in terms of its treatment of race, however, is notable for its relative lack of allusion and ambiguity: it arrives just over an hour in, when Bickle visits a bodega to pick up some groceries. A jittery young black man (Nat Grant) enters shortly thereafter, and proceeds to hold up the Puerto Rican shopkeeper (Victor Argo). Bickle appears from behind and shoots the black man to death, nervelessly, clinically. This decisive action serves a valuable narrative function in that it proves that Bickle—who has earlier informed his boss that he served in Vietnam—has lost none of his sharp reflexes, and is now primed to kill. The two men look down on, and prod at, the dead man like he’s a piece of expired meat, and the disturbing sequence seems mostly concluded. But Scorsese isn’t finished. The shopkeeper grouses about how “that’s the fifth one this year,” and implores Bickle to scram; he’s got things under control. As Bickle warily exits the store, Scorsese launches into an ostentatiously edited, five-shot sequence depicting the shopkeeper beating the black man’s limp body with an iron bar. It’s an appalling instance of intra-ethnic violence that is notable for moving, albeit briefly, away from Bickle’s point of view (a rarity in the film). From this switch of perspective, it can be inferred that Scorsese (and perhaps Schrader) is making some sort of objective statement about the totem pole of contemporary New York racial tensions, while also spotlighting the outsize, visceral rage of the shopkeeper. But this type of commentary jars with the rest of the film’s impressionistic subjectivity, and draws unfortunate attention, once again, to its authors’ general compulsion to leverage the black-male image without offering any right of reply—essentially a kind of image-based, racial taxation without representation."
-Ashley Clark
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So yeah I read the entire article, and the author spends the majority of the article talking about 10 - 15% of the film. Nothing about loneliness and isolation? Slow decent into madness? Yes racism is part of Bickle's character. But the way the author tried to talk about race in this article and trying to tie Travis Bickle to the Tea Party and Birthers is head scratching. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I think they author is way off.
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