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.

You Blew Up My Car. I Loved That Car.

Meh, I don't have a great deal to say about Martin Scorsese's latest Shutter Island. I didn't think it was terrible, I just didn't particularly like it. I kept waiting for it to get scary, for the tension to cut through, and it never did. It was a seemingly constant almost there film, which seemed to get stuck in contentment with its own mediocrity. It was like Scorsese got tired part way through and thought 'ah, fuck it, I'll just coast with this one.' We've seen much better here and here, after all.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Teddy, a 'duly appointed Federal Marshal' heading with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to a mental institution for the criminally insane on the remote Shutter Island in Boston Harbour. The two are investigating the disappearance of a patient who must be hiding out somewhere on the island. Run by Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the question is raised as to whether the hospital is running experiments on its patients. Teddy gets crazier and crazier, searching out a patient he believes to be responsible for the death of his wife in a fire (played in flashback by Michelle Williams.) He encounters sinister beings in Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow), who liaises between the board of directors and Cawley, and patient George Noyce (a terrifying Jackie Earle Haley), as well as the missing patient Rachel and a whole host of dreams and hallucinations. Gradually, and then faster and faster, Teddy descends into his own paranoid insanity... but I won't give away the twist, no matter how easy many people claim it is to pick.


The cast is terrific, and they do some good work. I thought DiCaprio was trying a little too hard with his intensity, but I think I can see why he had to go all or nothing... it was kind of necessary for his character development, but I found it quite irritating after a while. The rest were all exemplary, with Emily Mortimer and my love Patricia Clarkson popping up, and the performances and Scorsese's direction worked well with the way they had to play their cards - I found them all a little off to start with, but it all came clear as to why that was.


The elements of the film... meh. I thought the production design was waaay over the top, similar to the horrible and completely removed from reality look of Gangs Of New York. It was just so over the top. I remember a scene early on where there was dirt or mud on someone's hands, and it looked so fake, so hammed on because we're in the movies now, where it really shouldn't have distracted from the psychology of the piece. And some of the effects... how when you're working with a budget like that can green-screening or projection be left to look so, so unrealistic? Seriously. We all know it can be done better than that. Robert Richardson lensed it pretty well, getting in lots of moody tones and sinister scenes, but the sets he was working with left it all looking a little too hyper-real - not even psycho-hyper-real, just not-very-well-done-hyper-real. Though, art director Dante Ferretti isn't exactly known for toning it down.


So yeah, coming out of this I think it is definitely lesser Scorsese. When you've built yourself a reputation like he has, it's sad to see a film so average. But we all have our off days. Here's hoping the next one restores my faith. 2 stars.

'Life Is Short.' 'Yeah, Well, So Are You.'

It's an Ellen Burstyn festival! (There's another Burstyn starrer coming up in a couple of films time, after this one. Woohoo!) She's another that can do no wrong, though that goes back to when I first saw The Exorcist, back in the day. Requiem For A Dream merely cemented it for me.


While Burstyn won her Academy Award for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she had already been nominated twice (for support in The Last Picture Show and lead in The Exorcist), and has since been nominated three times more. In Alice she plays the Alice of the title, recently widowed from a tumultuous relationship. With no money and no pre-marriage career outside of some singing she gave up when wed, and a young son to take care of, Alice heads off from where she had been living to make her way back to Monterey, where she had last earned a living off her voice.

Stopping off in Phoenix to sing at a piano bar in order that she can make enough to money to carry on with son Tommy (Alfred Lutter III), she begins a relationship with the immature but sweet Ben (Harvey Keitel), and bites off far more than she can chew. After discovering that he is not only already married but violent to boot she flees the town, finding herself in Tucson. Unable to find work as a singer she takes up as a waitress, working with loud, flirty Flo (Diane Ladd) and the simple Audrey (Jodie Foster.) There she meets and becomes involved with David (Kris Kristofferson), who owns a ranch outside of town and seems too good to be true. A divorcee with children he doesn't really see, David quickly starts to exert his own opinions on the family, creating tension between Alice and Tommy as the deadline for Tommy to enroll in school in Monterey approaches and they are still in Tucson, not earning enough money. After a short breakup, David and Alice get back together and the option of staying in Tucson rears its head... something both Alice and Tommy ultimately find very appealing.


Martin Scorsese helms the film, fresh from the acclaim of Mean Streets, before taking up the reigns on Raging Bull, though Burstyn apparently retained full creative control due to her starring role and the phenomenal success of The Exorcist. She chose Scorsese based on his willingness to embrace learning about women for the picture, but presumably due to Burstyn's influence the film is tonally quite different from Scorsese's pictures to follow. Visually it is striking in a very distinctive Scorsese way, with the angles and the movement of the camera, almost flat to the screen, something he manages to achieve without it ever feeling empty or amateurish. But it is a lot lighter than the majority of his work - not that that is a negative note on the film. It's a fine film centred around the outstanding performance of Burstyn, who is truly pivotal to the film. Hers is the story being told, and she is in almost every scene, and she owns every scene she is in, using a great script by Robert Getchell and wringing every comic and dramatic note out of it. Her relationship with her son is beautiful and hilarious. It didn't feel real in the slightest, not on the surface (though maybe I just know nothing about the era), but underneath you could feel the emotion running deep and the lines they exchanged worked so well that it is not only forgivable, it is laudable. 


A great effort all round. I think Burstyn's performances in both The Exorcist and Requiem For A Dream were more worthy of an Oscar than this (not that she wasn't worthy - I guess I mean her other two big ones were so damn big, but ignored), but she does turn in a very solid and definite lead job. 4 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.