Martin Scorsese, super genius

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As Scorsese's Silence gets ready to release, here is a snippet about what looks to be nearly officially the next project on the slate for him, The Irishman. From The Toronto Sun...

Citing “unfinished business” that he has with long-time close friend and collaborator Robert De Niro, filmmaker Martin Scorsese is planning to shoot The Irishman with De Niro and Al Pacino in the new year. Among all his possibilities, “The Irishman is the one for which the script is finished!” Scorsese told Sun Media in an interview for his new film Silence. Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York, Moneyball) has turned in a final version.

De Niro has held the project near-and-dear for a decade, having pitched Scorsese soon after he read the 2005 Charles Brandt book, I Heard You Paint Houses. That title is a Mob euphemism for making a contract hit. Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran is a real-life hitman who was supposedly responsible for at least twenty-five mob murders; and Sheeran claimed to be the one who assassinated Jimmy Hoffa.

“You know,” Scorsese said, “De Niro and I have some unfinished business, so it looks like that might be next!” Told that outsiders also want to see De Niro and Pacino on screen together again in a crime movie, Scorsese laughed and said: “Me, too!”

The unfinished business is re-teaming with De Niro. “We’ve been trying for years to do something again, since Casino, but we’ve never got the right story. This seems to be the right one.” De Niro, said Scorsese, “had tears in his eyes when he described this to me, and I think I know how to do it.”

http://www.torontosun.com/2016/12/14/the-irishman-martin-scorsese-says-his-de-niro-pacino-crime-movie-to-be-filmed-next-year
DeNiro and Scorsese made eight films together between 1973 and 1995: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, GoodFellas, Cape Fear, and Casino. Eight projects in twenty-two years. 2017 will mark the twenty-second year since Casino's release. DiCaprio has been catching up over the past decade and a half, starring in five Scorsese projects to date (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street) with a sixth on the horizon in the next couple years (The Devil in the White City).

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I've read the book. It's good even though it's most likely bull, entertaining bull at least. Got to say i'd much rather him do something else, just think he's made enough mob movies in his career. Obviously i'll look forward to it though.



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Why is he making a Netlfix film? He always did movies that went to theaters before, why did he decide to do a straight to VOD movie?



Why is he making a Netlfix film? He always did movies that went to theaters before, why did he decide to do a straight to VOD movie?
As with Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs from 2018 Netflix does a limited theatrical run and prestigious festival screenings prior to the movies being available for streaming, which lets them qualify for awards such as the Oscars. I am sure they will do the same thing with The Irishman later this year.



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He is pretty good, and has lots of great movies, but does anyone feel that his directing is kind of generic at all?

I mean I don't want to start an argument, since I too, agree that he is a good director, who knows how to choose a great script. It's just the way he sets up his scenes, with the over the shoulder shot, cutting to over the shoulder, the close up, cutting to the close up, etc.

His shots and editing style, are just so generic and vanilla, like we've seen this style in a million other movies before, and he just doesn't have that unique non-vanilla flavor that a lot of the great masters have.

But I feel that maybe keeps him from being the best of the best to a degree, but he still may be the best of that conventional filmmaking style of course. I also find that his movies have very generic looks to them cinematography wise.

Goodfellas looks like a crime thriller would that came out in 1990, The Departed looks like how a crime thriller would look that came out in 2006, The Last Temptation of Christ looks like how an epic Biblical movie would look that came out in the late 80s, Taxi Driver has a very conventional 70s look to it, etc.

He just directs and edits in a very conventional way, which is good, nothing wrong with that.Unless I'm crazy?



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He is pretty good, and has lots of great movies, but does anyone feel that his directing is kind of generic at all?

I mean I don't want to start an argument, since I too, agree that he is a good director, who knows how to choose a great script. It's just the way he sets up his scenes, with the over the shoulder shot, cutting to over the shoulder, the close up, cutting to the close up, etc.

His shots and editing style, are just so generic and vanilla, like we've seen this style in a million other movies before, and he just doesn't have that unique non-vanilla flavor that a lot of the great masters have.

But I feel that maybe keeps him from being the best of the best to a degree, but he still may be the best of that conventional filmmaking style of course. I also find that his movies have very generic looks to them cinematography wise.

Goodfellas looks like a crime thriller would that came out in 1990, The Departed looks like how a crime thriller would look that came out in 2006, The Last Temptation of Christ looks like how an epic Biblical movie would look that came out in the late 80s, Taxi Driver has a very conventional 70s look to it, etc.

He just directs and edits in a very conventional way, which is good, nothing wrong with that.Unless I'm crazy?
Guess it depends on how you differentiate between generic and not. In any case, I can't begrudge him for settling on simple shot-reverse-shot filmmaking where it suits the film when he's not pulling off the energetic montages and long takes that I mainly remember when I think "Scorsese directing" (and I would think that any director where I can remember their style when I hear their name wouldn't count as a "generic" director). Besides, the dude's one of the most notable and influential filmmakers of the past half-century so it's easy for some of his stuff to look generic - what if it's not a matter of seeing his films as being like every other film so much as how much the other films want to be like his? It's like saying that Wolf of Wall Street looks like a generic 2010s black comedy biopic just because it came out in the same decade as stuff like The Big Short and War Dogs.
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For a guy who's been around as long as he, and who can still pack a punch in a film, I wouldn't call his directing generic. He uses a tried and true formula, but he also interjects with scorching close-ups and lavish sound design (Raging Bull - the flash pops), and other oddly metered items (Goodfellas - sky zoom helicopter, slightly sped-up paranoid close up of Liotta). The last thing I think of is generic when I hear the name Martin Scorsese. Watch After Hours. There's a ridiculous crane/dolly shot in the office cubicles. There's a floating $20 bill over mariachi music hanging in the city night air.

Scorsese does have genius qualities, and I think the reason his films work so well is because he uses the tried and true formula to engage a mass audience and then slips in his unconventional riffs, as I just described. Generic sounds a little like genius, so maybe the wording confuses some people? lol

And as far as editing goes, let's not forget the unsung Thelma Schoonmaker behind the blade. Her sensibilities with Scorsese as collaborator are a damn big part of the reason why his films come out the way they do. She has an interesting history, starting as a documentary film editor. Study up on her, too.



Scorsese is a director with an eye for effective and beautifully filmed cinema. And he has lots of great films, but I don't think people would love him nearly as much if it weren't for the subject matter of his films. Think about that...how much of Scorsese's praise is for his direction? and how much of that praise is for the movie scripts that he doesn't write? When it comes to his non-crime movies that praise drops down a notch or two.



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I think Scorsese is more worshipped because of the scripts he chooses though, rather than the actual directing style. For example, if you compare The Departed with Infernal Affairs, and asked which one had the more unique, or less generic shooting and editing style, and less generic look to it, I think most people would pick Infernal Affairs.

But if you asked which movie had the better script that dived deeper into it's stories, and characters, perhaps more people would pick The Departed? That's kind of why I think most people like him for the scripts I think rather than his actual physical directing style.



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I really think people can identify a Scorsese movie based off a few minutes of footage and that you’re selling the guy very short if you think he just picks good scripts.

His predilections are overtly classical (as said above) but they’re being not as obvious, by your own definitions, whatever they may be, doesn’t negate their effectiveness and make them any less worthy of study and/or admiration.

That his work, past and present, continues to stand out to this day amisdst stylistic overloads is pretty big testament to that.



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I still think he is a good filmmaker I just don't get why he is such a legend, since he never seems to want to expand beyond the tried and true formula that he sticks to I guess.



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By that logic, you’d have to discount other directors who’ve stuck to more obvious styles throughout the years and build careers off of them.



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Well I feel that I recognize other directors styles as more unique though. I know a Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, or Yasujirô Ozu movie when I see them. But Scorsese just seems to blend with so many others it seems.



That might be the genius of Scorsese. He's able to acclimate to the current film climate with ease. Not every film of his has to be a saga (even though it is lol). The King of Comedy. That movie right there. Cape Fear.

I really just don't understand the confusion. Martin Scorsese may not make films as good or as popular as he used to, but that's only because he's the same guy who gave us Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Casino, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Color of Money...the list goes on.

I can absolutely recognize a Scorsese picture. His camera movements for one. The way he chooses to dramatize or sensationalize a scene. Who does music montages as good as him? Not many people. People have copied him to lesser effect. see american hustle.

Boogie Nights blatantly rips off Scorsese in many scenes. The cross fade colonel getting out of his limo for starters.

Oh, god - I forgot The Last Waltz. And that reminds me that a directing style very much includes choosing your script, or choosing your project. The style is not limited to the mechanics of blocking scenes, lighting and cues/sides. A real director, like Scorsese must man the ship, answer every question, have his hands in ever single cookie jar. Of course success has allowed him to be less the auteur in certain respects (he doesn't have to clean up cables and put tape down), but his decision making is there from the start. Someone's "style" of directing is not such a limited scope. Even if a project is suggested by a production exec or studio president, a director still has to implement a tone and ideas of how to shoot it. Another hugely important aspect are re-writes. Directors may not get writing credit (the guild stands in the way a lot), but you can be your bottom dollar that someone like Scorsese is popping lines in here and there, and doing on the fly re-writes to make a scene work. He's a proud Italian. It's a his a sauce.



It's true he has a very recognisable style, and he's made some great movies. I wonder why I no longer have an emotional attachment to them.
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He'll be getting an Oscar nomination next year for The Irishman.
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It's true he has a very recognisable style, and he's made some great movies. I wonder why I no longer have an emotional attachment to them.
Probably a similar reason why I don't, either lol. I am looking forward to the Irishman, though.