Martin Scorsese, super genius

The dog's name is Yeti. But Travis would be funny.

The only canine with significant screentime I can recall from a Scorsese flick is the Bowden's family pooch in Cape Fear...and it did not fare so well.

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In the original, the dog’s name was Marilyn.

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This new film from Scorsese, "Killers of the Flower Moon," sounds like it could be good! Scorsese is without a doubt an excellent director and the story sounds appealing. However, in my opinion, someone needs to tell Scorsese that his movies are becoming far too long and too expensive to make. There really is no reason that I can fathom for why a movie with this kind of story would require $200 million to make, which is the reported budget, nor is there a clear rationale for why the close to 4 hour runtime is necessary to tell this type of story. Thoughts everyone?

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/202...e520qpkv85q1tp

I don't think we'll know for sure if it's too long or too expensive until we actually see it, but The Irishman acquitted itself well enough on both fronts that I remain optimistic. Scorsese is 80 years old - there's no telling how many movies he's got left in him at all and whether he'll even get to make them so I can't begrudge him too much if he takes a streamer's blank check and runs with it.

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While I would agree that it would be almost a universally good thing if film productions started significantly lowering their budgets, I don't see why films should start limiting themselves to the traditional 90-120 minute runtimes. That's simply another arbitrary element that forces a directors hand in how they choose to tell their stories. It's a handicap on creativity where somebody, somewhere, most likely completely oblivious to the creative process, decided people can't sit still any longer than that. That we should never dare make a single audience member restless. And so we now question any film that dares be longer than this prescribed length. It's nonsense.If anything, there needs to be more 4 and 5 hour films.

I mean, it's coming out on a streaming service anyway so the vast majority of the audience is going to see it in the comfort of their own homes and have the freedom to hit the pause button whenever they want. I remember seeing an image go around when The Irishman came out that outlined the best timecodes at which to pause it in order to pace it out like a miniseries - while that is not how I would go about watching a film of that length, it at least understands that modern audiences have gotten used to binge-watching shows on streaming services and can probably handle a longer-than-usual movie as a result.

Exactly. Why is length even a worry when we now usually (or at least eventually) have the ability to pause it at any time. Come back to it at a later date.



Why would we want Scorsese, who clearly thinks the film is worth a long run time, to change his vision when audiences have the choice to watch these movies any way that they want?



If you're a fan of a director, it shouldn't be a punishment to watch more content by them. It's not like being long inevitably makes something worse. Especially when we are talking about Scorsese, a guy who has proven he knows how to make long movies that can satisfy even fairly conventional audiences.

Obviously if he has more freedom on runtime, he'll get something closer to his vision, and his visions are pretty damn good. But I think that's more generally good than automatically good, because I don't think artistic freedom perfectly correlates with quality. I think there's pretty clearly a point on the curve where it hurts it. People focus on the constraints imposed on directors because that's a much more common situation, but there are pitfalls in overindulgence, too.

We see it most clearly with authors, I think, where someone like Stephen King achieves a level of success that means he can essentially refuse to be edited, and the books are often worse for it. The things that make someone a great artist in the first place do not necessarily apply the same way once they've been recognized as a great artist. Some might simplistically say it's a "hunger" thing, which I'm open to sometimes, but I think it's lots of stuff. Some artists have sprawling, chaotic visions that benefit greatly from outside constraints. Some are perhaps most talented in their choice of collaborators, like great editors and screenwriters, and maybe when the director's clout becomes much greater than their own, the relationship suffers. This seems particularly true in a medium like film, where so many people have their fingerprints on the production.

I don't think longer is inherently better just because it's more of something I liked. That's a sentiment I hear a lot with video games and I always bristle at it in that medium, where people talk about how many "hours" they get out of a game, as if the thing only existed to fill time. I like longer if it makes for a better movie, and I dislike it if it doesn't. I love me some Tarantino but when he tacks on a scene that doesn't fit with the rest of the film I'm not glad it happened. Gimme all of those in the Blu-ray extras.

Now, the idea that Scorsese in particular has earned the benefit of the doubt on this particular front is another matter entirely. I agree with that. I was--and kinda still am, actually--surprised at how brisk The Irishman felt, so I'll gladly watch another super long film from Marty.

I wonder... ...there is a sociology of viewership. A film is a unit. A movie is a meal. That's the deal. The unspoken contract is that you complete it in one sitting. I can binge-watch a TV show, because each break between episodes is an explicit off-ramp and each episode a complete "chapter." However, tell me that you have a 4-hour Scorcese film for me, I am going to look at my watch and seriously ask myself if I want to commit a massive chunk of time to it. You can almost always talk me into eating one more slice of pizza, but put the whole pie in front of me and tell me to eat it in one sitting and I will feel put upon by the demand.

This all boils down to what we consider quality. Quality often seems to be equated with some idea of perfection. It doesn't have any fat. It makes its points clearly. It's exciting when it's supposed to be exciting and thoughtful when it is supposed to be thoughtful. It functions properly.

Those things aren't lost on me. But it's almost never what I'm looking for most. To me having an artist show me who they are as an artist is what is interesting. And that comes with making movies that aren't perfectly tailored to any particular audience type. Genre requirements. Narrative resolutions. Or whatever.

When I'm having a conversation with someone in real life, what I am always most impressed with a person who I sense is alive in the conversation. Who I can see thinking and revising as they are speaking to me. Where not every moment might make total sense to me, and not every story they tell of equal interest, but I feel I know the person when we're done talking. Unlike the person who I feel is beautifully rehearsed and has told these stories a thousand times before and who might be really good at eloquently saying what he needs to say because of this....but I don't feel they are present in the conversation. I'm seeing a performance.

An artist who I feel I can see in the process of thinking and creating on the screen makes me feel I am seeing the person. And that is what I want to see. The movie is just a filter to understand who is making the movie, and I feel that 'quality' can sort of disfigure what it is I want to see. It forces me to look at the illusion the artist is casting, and not the artist themselves. Blech.


Of course. But, as an extension of what I said above, I don't see what's so bad about watching an artist create a pitfall. And all pitfalls aren't created equal. Some crater the enjoyment of a movie, others make the movie more interesting.


In the case of King I agree, because I find him to be a pretty insufferably bad writer outside of the core stories he tells. I don't find anything particularly illuminating about his indulgences. The less words he writes, the better.


But that's of course because I also think he sucks in general.


I'm sure some do. And I'm sure I've been a fan of a lot of work that has suffered outside constraints. That was made 'better' by them. But, if I'm a big fan of the particular artist, I still really wish I could get a glimpse of the pure, undiluted shit, since there would be a decent chance I'd like that just as much or even more.




Definitely not. What I said is it doesn't inherently make it worse, so if an artist (especially of Scorsese's calibre) wants to indulge a four hour movie, why would we want to get in the way. Let him trust his instincts, for better or worse.



I've definitely hated a number of unneccessary Tarantino scenes. But I actually have no interest in seeing these movies without them. His indulgences are Tarantino's style at this point. I don't remotely need to see his movies as perfect little cinematic experiences. I want to see him slobber all over the history of film and make a giant and entertaining mess.


And this really is the less abstracted basis of my point. Scorsese is ****ing amazing. He knows how to make long movies well. And I don't mean he makes good movies in the weird way I've been trying to explain, but in the way that anyone can appreciate, no matter your movie sensibilities. Give him his four hours and let's not get too hung up its an hour and a half longer than a film is 'supposed' to be.

I think that Scorcese is one of a very small group of directors who has the heft to get a 4 hour major movie made. Add to that, the screenwriter is Eric Roth who wrote Forrest Gump up through Dune. I'll guess that at least a third of the $200M budget is paying for actor's fees.

I'll be looking forward to the picture for sure. My only hope is that due to the subject matter, it won't lean too hard on SJ, what with Wounded Knee and all that. But whatever it is I'm expecting it to be first rate...

I don't think that's been the "contract" since home video first became a thing and the directors who go in for longer films these days either understand that or don't care. This could be broken up into a miniseries, but it's not because that's how Scorsese wants it and it's up to an audience to decide if they are willing to keep up, whether in one sitting or not.

Why would you hope that?

I think it goes without saying why, so asking is just inviting an overt political discussion.

This has been a great discussion so far. Art is inherently subjective, and so what I'm seeing from this conversation is that the posters here are not agreeing with me, and that's interesting. I think, for me, both "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "The Irishman" felt too long, and both of those films felt to me what Yoda has suggested was a pitfall of giving filmmakers too much creative freedom, they felt self-indulgent. "Wolf of Wall Street" to me was excessively over the top, which I understand was intended, but to me it was too much. "The Irishman" felt to me to be too long and too slow, and I felt like the digital de-aging was distracting and took me out of the movie. The obvious choice, to have Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro portray their characters in their older years while allowing younger actors to play them in younger scenes, would to me have been a better choice that would have been also been far less expensive. Engaging in the digital de-aging, and being willing to spend $200 million on the film to make it happen, was likely a direct result from it being Scorsese and wanting to accomplish his vision for the film and was likely not a choice that would have been afforded to a less respected filmmaker.

Watching the films at home and pausing it rather than watching the films in the theater is a reasonable and good compromise for some, but to me, I feel like watching movies in parts is not the same experience. There is something different about consuming a film in its entirety at one time that makes for a different and more enjoyable experience than watching it in parts.

And in 4k too! Amazing.

I agree with all the individual things above, just not the part where we put film and conversation on the same scales. To me the best thing about film is how much damn production goes into it. How millions of dollars and thousands of people can be dedicated to making sure a single line lands with as much emotional heft as possible. The artifice and spectacle and overt intentionality behind everything is one of the things I love most about the medium. How incredible and marvelous that people marshal such insane resources to making sure I choke up as much as possible at this exact second of time. We're so damn lucky.

Obviously you'll have your edge cases where someone decides to freestyle it. More power (but less of my eyeball time) to 'em. But they really are edge cases, because even a My Dinner With Andre is going to be meticulously planned,. That's what I want from Scorsese, and I'll bet it's how he operates: slavishly pondering every scene and line for years (or more, with some of these late-career passion projects) for our benefit.

So yeah, legitimate difference here. I don't want the real-time movie, because I suspect almost all of those would be awful. I want the final product after they've done all the second-guessing and revising.

I mention pitfalls because it's usually obvious from the jump that neither of us is gonna say something is objectively better, or CAN'T be the other way, or is ALWAYS one way. We'll quickly sand off the extremes and just be left talking about trade offs and possible downsides. I want them to see the pitfall, avoid it, and then tell us about it after.

But do you want that glimpse inside the work? Process stuff is definitely interesting...separate from the film. Deleted scenes, behind the scenes, whatever. But I take it for granted that stuff's good standing on its own.

Tarantino was a bad example because of what you just mentioned: I'm talking about overindulgence but then I use as an example a man known for indulgence. I wouldn't call it "over," though, in his case. Not usually. Some of the stuff in Death Proof, maybe. That might be a good example here, actually, maybe I just wasn't specific enough. I love QT and I even kinda like Death Proof more than most, but the last scene is just bad. It's not "too long" in that amusing QT way, where maybe it's twice as long as it needs to be but some lovely moment dropkicks you twice as hard as a result. It's just the exact same stuff over and over, five times past the point where you've seen it all. Love the dude, want him to make films until he dies, but I think it would've been better if a trusted collaborator reigned him in on that one.

Yeah, in the end my concerns are more abstract, and I'm more defending underlying principles applicable to other films. In this particular instance my guess is that's a little too long, but I'm happy to find out and won't be surprised if it flies by. The Irishman is a very encouraging data point.

But there is definitely a point where the length becomes so extreme it will inevitably disrupt its own enjoyment for a lot of people. I can look at a sculpture for awhile, come back, and look at it again, and discover or appreciate more, and that's all fine. I can never watch a movie the first time again. And at a certain length, I will have to stop the movie for some reason, either to use the bathroom, or eat or drink, or wipe the junk from my eyes.

And it's not possible to exalt a filmmaker's decisions without caring about this, too, because if pacing and length matter in that way it must also matter that the length will inevitably disrupt those things in ways the filmmaker cannot predict because they will vary from person to person. I guess you could say a filmmaker might decide their film exists for some hypothetical perfect viewer who doesn't do that and pays perfect attention and so on. No real way to argue that, so I'll just say that I prefer filmmakers who think about how real people will actually watch their movie in reality. And in reality there are upper bounds on length that, if you blow by them, have inevitable costs to the viewing process. Worth it? Who knows.

I think there's definitely something there, about the unspoken contract. I've certainly felt that way, and I think a lot of other people do whether they would put it that way or not. A lot of people are willing to say "I hated it, but I was really grumpy that day" or "I loved it, but I was in a really good mood." Or they mention they had to use the bathroom and missed some, or whatever. Thoughtful moviegoers understand that they have a lot of agency in how the viewing goes that the filmmaker cannot possibly anticipate or control and try to factor that in a little. Similarly, if I have to stop watching a film for a significant period of time (say, half a day or longer) and finish it later, I definitely think of myself as kind of "owing" a consideration for that back to the filmmaker if and when I talk about my impressions of it, because I have effectively overwritten all the choices they made about pacing.

Makes for an interesting question, about whether a filmmaker who wants to make a particularly long film "should" (whatever that means) make something that's closer to pacing-proof than they otherwise would.

The conversation analogy I was mostly using to give an idea of the value of something not being perfect. Of why I might find something of interest of even moving if it doesn't stick all of its landings. If some scenes aren't as good as other scenes.



It's not that I never like art that functions perfectly. I have a lot of interest in someone who is an obvious master (Kubrick, Bresson, John Woo, Chaplin, Dreyer) being impossibly great. That's about as good as it gets. But what I don't have a lot of interest in are the 'perfect' work of competent or average or even better than average artists. Unless a film lifts off into some kind of rarefied air, I'll take the inspired but deeply flawed work over that mid ranged perfection every time.


[/quote]How incredible and marvelous that people marshal such insane resources to making sure I choke up as much as possible at this exact second of time.[/quote]


Kurosawa or David Lean were very good at using enormous productions to elicit grande emotions in their audiences. Usually though, I feel that too many hands in a production, and all of the money that sometimes comes with all these hands, dilutes the impact of these kind of films. It makes them feel less personal. More an exercise in 'making something big and great' and less an exercise in being human.




Yes, it would have been planned, but that planning isn't so evident in the final product. A My Dinner With Andre, or (as a better example) any Cassavetes or Mike Leigh film, are very rough looking films that are regardless still born out of enormous amounts of rehearsals. But a good director still allows the movie to have the feel of occurring naturally in the moment, regardless of how much they may have pre planned. That don't choke their scenes into submission so they only function exactly as that all that rehearsing had intended them to be.




Scorsese is one of the special directors who can make a perfect movie that is still worth watching. Because he's special.



Sometimes a singer not completely hitting a note, or a painter letting their paint dribble a bit, are the moments which allow us entry into a work of art. I'm not asking for a film to be purely filmed in real time with all of its errors showing. Or that their should not be any editing at all. Only that sometimes a films can really benefit from hitting a bum notes or letting their paint dribble a bit too. And I simply feel that movie audiences have a really unhealthy need for perfection in their films. That there is some great sin that has been committed if the spell they are weaving is broken by drawing attention to the artifice.



Basically what I'm saying isn't that different a criticism than that which we might throw at those who obsessively nit pick over plotholes. We all know a few of these people. Those who simply can't deal with a narrative that has any kind of inconsistency, to the point that they lose sight of everything else if the logic of the film has been broken. And, while I guess people can't help it if this is their natural response to some nothing burger plothole, I think that most understand this is a fairly horrible way to view film. That it will immediately turn into ash if the seal on its airtight logic is broken.



It's the same for me when it comes to unflattering production details, or wonky or unneccessary scenes. For some I feel these can disproportionately affect their enjoyment of film. And I think its because out expectations for what a movie is supposed to look like, have become warped a bit over the years (to the point that it isn't uncommon to think a movie looking 'cheap' is some kind of flaw). In fact, I feel that sometimes a films missteps in fact enhance the experience of a film. It can make them more human. More soulful. Can draw our attention to the creative fire that drove this person to make the movie in the first place. And, as long as we aren't always pulling out our perfection meter stick, these flaws can be part of the whole experience or watching or understanding or being moved by a cinematic experience.







I generally don't have a lot of interest in behind the scenes stuff. Rarely watch deleted scenes. etc etc. Which is odd considering my stance on wanting to view the process of creativity unfolding. But I mostly just want to look inside the margins of what the artist has told us to look at. That is my primary focus.



Tarantino is always a bad example. He's even a bad example of a great director. No one else could get away with the shit he does. His films are obnoxious and childish and frequently emotionally empty wastelands....but he's also a bit of a genius at appropriating cinematic imagery and shaping it to his own particular means. The more alienating I find his movies become with their endless indulgences, the more fascinating a director he seems to me.....so I guess he is a good example after all, for this conversation. His bad scenes (and they are so bad) are still somehow better than most films good scenes (which never have the decency to even risk being bad)






I'm currently watching a 14 hour long movie and, believe me, I understand the kind of disruption an overly long production can cause. I can't get it out of my mind that after watching 7 hours of this, I'm only half the way there. These things can be daunting, even for me and all of my protestations to the contrary. But....in the instance of this really really long movie, the experience of climbing to the top of that 14 hours is also part of the point. The overindulgence of a movie stealing an entire day from me makes you relate to what you are watching in a different way. Which makes the whole experience interesting, regardless of the films qualities (it's pretty good)









I think every artist, except for those who may be legit mentally ill, at least have some kind of hypothetical audience in their mind when they are creating. Maybe they are writing to please their mother, or their friend, or their partner, or their dog. But they have some being out there they want to have fall in love with their film.....when I start getting worried about this process though is when an artist tries to cater to a generalized audience he doesn't know. A big blob of people who is aiming to make as happy as possible. That is, with the exception of a Stephen Spielberg or Billy Wilder or Charlie Chaplin, a recipe for disaster. I probably almost always prefer movies that aim to excite a very specific and small audience. Then it still remains a personal and beautiful statement, not some universal creative smear a hundred million people might agreeably nod along to.





Even bad movies are worth it. The way I think of art, and what its ultimate goal should be, is that at the end of civilization, all of our songs and movies and paintings, when looked at as a whole, express every element of what it was like to be human on this planet. Every nook and cranny of the experience can be found. Every truth and contradiction and falsehood. Which is why I don't see failure as a terrible thing in art. It has its necessary place somewhere alongside of success.