Fuck Him Or Fight Him.

Hmm, I don't know what it is with Scorsese. Maybe he's a director I have to be in the mood for. Like, I gave Goodfellas 5 stars, and thinking back on it I don't know if I still would. Then I gave Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 4 stars, where I'd probably now give it more. But I'd still probably give Shutter Island 2 stars. Maybe three, depending on my mood. I think that two stars is more related to the fact that I just wanted more from the film, from Scorsese.

With Raging Bull, I think my biggest obstacle is the fact that I thought it would knock me for six. I was waiting for it to blow me out of my chair, to completely astound me. I went in with three decades of expectations (well, less than two decades of that I was aware of it, but still, it was made thirty years ago) and came out thinking it should have been a little more. Not that it wasn't fantastic. There is something not quite grabbing me around my organs, which I can normally identify with those truly incredible movies, however. There isn't an overwhelming urge to go and watch it again, immediately. Though I must say the depth and texture of the film, and particularly De Niro's Oscar-winning lead performance, is drawing me back towards it.


De Niro plays a boxer, the raging bull of the title, one Jake La Motta. The story follows him over twenty years, with marriages, arguments, family fall outs (his brother is played terrifically by Scorsese regular Joe Pesci (does three films count as a regular? Sure. Let's go with it), bar purchases, mob run-ins - the full gamut of Italian-American boxing life in the 40s to the 60s. De Niro is at his powerful best, proving what an inimitable force he can be when given the right material, and when he really puts his back into it. God knows what path he's wandering down now, but give him back some meaty material and Marty and maybe we'll see him as good as he can be.


Scorsese takes Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin's adaptation of La Motta's autobiography and hones it into a taught biopic, spanning twenty years without dragging. And his fight scenes - holy gemini. The boxing scenes were truly beautiful to watch, in that they were also quite horrific. Cinematographer MIchael Chapman gave editor Thelma Schoonmaker some beautiful images to work with (and she won an Oscar for her terrific efforts). 


The film is very, very good. It's a terrific show of craft, and I think that's what I mean when I talk about it missing something to truly grab me by the balls and shake. I think this is a problem I have with many of Scorsese's films, in fact. I think they are incredible examples of craft, but somewhere along the line the heart goes missing. I'm not feeling this film. I'm watching it, I'm liking it, but I'm not feeling it.


Having said that, it is very good. Terrific, even. 4.5 stars.

This Is This. This Ain't Something Else. This Is This.

Crikey (good morning, Australia!), talk about taking a tumble. How do you go from a five time Oscar winning film to what was derided as an enormous flop that pretty much brought down a studio? I don't know, but the answer probably lies somewhere within Michael Cimino's brain.

Don't worry, I'm not going to talk about Heaven's Gate, his tragic opus - I haven't seen it, though there is a part of me that wants to. So I will eventually. But today we're here to talk about The Deer Hunter, his masterpiece, as it were. I must say, one of my favourite parts of watching films from, oh, probably about the 1960s to the 1980s is watching the opening credits to see where the stars of today appear. Like Dennis Hopper popping us as 'thug' or whatever it was in Rebel Without A Cause. Or here in The Deer Hunter, where Meryl Streep is listed after John Cazale and John Savage (who?) in the opening credits, after the title. Well, I guess this was only her first Oscar nomination out of the 235128475134 she has received, and only for Supporting, so... 

Robert De Niro takes the lead in this Vietnam War drama, playing Michael, leader of sorts among his friends. These friends include Stan (Cazale), Steven (Savage) and Nick (Christopher Walken.) They're a small town group of friends, steel workers preparing for Steven's marriage, their heading off to the war, and the hunting trip they're embarking on that evening. Shortly the boys find themselves in the midst of the brutal war, held captive, dropped in rivers, mentally and physically tortured - everything you have heard about the war. In fact, I'm sure it's nothing compared to what you have heard, but it's vicious nonetheless. Steven loses both of his legs and ends up in a military hospital back in the US, barely coping and keeping away from his wife; Nick goes mental and remains in Saigon, playing Russian Roulette for money, which he sends to Steven in hospital; Michael is the only one who seems relatively unscathed, though the trauma of what has happened to his friends and his promise not to leave Vietnam without Nick haunt him into returning, where he finds Nick seriously deranged, wracked with guilt and a complete sense of loss brought about by his conviction that he was the only one of his friends to survive. 

It's a long and haunting film, with much of it set in and after the Vietnam war, which doesn't make for easy viewing. The performances are uniformly terrific. De Niro holds his cards close to his chest but plays them at the perfect moment. Walken especially is incredibly haunting, his happy-go-lucky fun-filled character turning so severely to something so remote and removed so very convincingly. He deserved his Oscar for this film. Streep, as Nick's girlfriend kept completely in the dark as to what has happened to him, is terrific in an early role, quite small, torn between her love for her fiancee and the comfort of Michael's arms.

The script, by Deric Washburn with a bunch of others on story duty, is studied and measured, perfectly paced and pitched along the way. Cimino gives the film plenty of room to breath, allowing for a harrowing journey through the psychology of the characters and an insight into the devastating effects of war on those it spits out at the other end. A fairly typical score from Stanley Myers is worked into brilliant sound design to work your emotions in a standard but effective way. It all combines to a solid three hours of hard-going but worthwhile cinema. 5 stars.

I'm Alone, I Am Not Lonely.

I sometimes think I am quite easily flabbergasted. Well, maybe that's a little harsh. I guess in retrospect it's easy to state an opinion on what should have happened, but I do wonder what people were thinking at the time. I mean, looking back, do we really think Braveheart was the best film of 1995? Really? I'm not even talking just out of the nominated five films for the Academy Awards. 

Here we have Heat, a film that is very highly respected, was highly critically acclaimed, reasonably commercially successful, united two acting legends on screen in the same scene for the first time, with an excellent and exciting supporting cast. And it gets nothing? Really? Doesn't seem right, does it?


Heat is a crime saga set in LA, and it's quite a big film. There's a lot going on in it, and I'm not going to try and summarise it because, well, it's hard work and I'm so behind on my writeups that I need to get cracking on the rest of them. Briefly, Robert De Niro plays criminal Neil McCauley, pursued by Al Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna. Working with McCauley are fellow crims Chris (Val Kilmer), Nate (Jon Voight), Michael (Tom Sizemore) and Donald (Dennis Haysbert.) McCauley is getting mixed up with a girl, Eady (Amy Brenneman), complicating his no-attachment dogma, while Hanna's marriage to Justine (Diane Venora) is falling about because of his commitment to his work, leaving his stepdaughter Lauren (Natalie Portman) stranded and despairing.


Michael Mann directs his own screenplay, and does it with his usual brilliance. His Heat to Ali period was fantastic, yielding such solid films. His fearless and bold directing style allows you to seep into the mood of the characters and the situations, giving you time to breathe with them in the few occasions there are moments to spare, and sucking you into their world of glamour and dirt with beautiful photography (from Dante Spinotti) and a terrific use of music (score from Elliot Goldenthal.)


Heat is a luscious landscape, a true modern epic, taking inspiration from the methodical yet languid stylings of films such as The Godfather, imbuing them with modern moralities and a lack of judgement. There's respect flying everywhere in this picture. The performances are uniformly superb, expected from heavyweights De Niro and Pacino, but bolstered by the likes of Kilmer and Sizemore - why has Val Kilmer fallen off the face of the planet? We love him!


5 stars.

The Fuck Is That?

You know, I tried to watch Dances With Wolves a number of years ago and just couldn't get through it. A little bit of Keven Costner dislike (and where the hell is he, by the way? Anyone?) and maybe I was just not in the mood. I think I'll have to give it another shot though, because it pipped Goodfellas to the Oscar post for Best Picture, which seems strange.


Goodfellas is the type of film that I think Martin Scorsese excels at. And he does this mob flick well. It's funny in parts, scary in parts, ruthless in parts. The performances are uniformly fantastic - I've never been a Ray Liotta fan, but I am now. De Niro - great. Pesci - great. All of them were. It looked really good, and it was very entertaining.

As mentioned, I'm just going to have to power through reviews to get through them (these are getting a bit old now, not that fresh in my mind, so there's not a lot I can talk about them. I really should take notes...) so this is about all I'm going to say about it. It's a great gangster flick, definitely worth checking out if you haven't already seen it. It's not my favourite Scorsese film, but I really like the majority of his films, so by any other director it would probably settle at the top of my esteem for them. Costner had better have pulled something remarkable out of his hat in order to have made something better than this.

5 stars.