THE DEPARTED
I wonder why it is that every time I watch a Martin Scorsese film I am filled with such an overabundance of testosterone that by the time the movie is over I have grown a full beard. When I say "beard," I mean more than gray stubble. I mean a yank of steel wool that reaches to the floor. I mean facial hair laced with cross bones, onyx rings and virgin blood; hair growing from my baby face, curling like a Chinaman's heart valves, lacerated with battle scars and the tint of revenge. Perhaps the reason is the running time, something that with a Scorsese film borders on a full evening, which is fine. I like getting my money's worth. But I suspect that's not the reason for my hormonal surge. The real reason probably lies with the presence, the omnipresence, of machismo surrogates, men such as Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert Mitchum, Joe Don Baker--guys who can melt women such as Juliette Lewis with a mere shrug of their hips, leaving those dames in the twitching throes of pre-orgasmic depression. Yeah. Yeah! That's it.
The other reason--the honest to God reason--is because of guilt. Ah, guilt: that five-letter curse word known to fallen Jesuits and Bible students everywhere. Guilt remains the earthly consequence of sin. And all men have sinned and thus have come short of the grace and the glory of God. Men can come lock you away, deprive you of the company of friends and family, whip you until your flesh wilts and dies. But none of that can break you with the same smiling vengeance as guilt. Guilt will bury you up to your nose and eyeballs, drop a bucket over your head and bang you with a club.
From what I've read, Scorsese grew up watching gangsters. Doubtless he learned a bit from their presumed style. How does one go about justifying an admiration for their self-possessed glow? I suppose a person with prodigious talent might make movies that deal with guilt while at the same time glamorizing the power those gangsters demonstrate. The director's most ardent fans would likely bray that I am oversimplifying this, or that by engaging in amateurish psychoanalysis, I am diminishing gifts greater than my own. To that I can only reply, "You bet I am, sweetie."
Having had the insides kicked out of me from time to time, I am in the happy position to assure you that those beatings we have come to expect in movies actually hurt. In my case, they didn't build character or teach me a lesson or toughen me up. They simply hurt.
I remember one time, decades ago, I got into a verbal altercation with some mountain of a man inside a bowling alley, said argument culminating in my suggestion that he might enjoy doing something inappropriate with a close relative and so should give it a try since everyone else with the means (and a few without) had done so. To this very day I can still recall how slowly time moved as he lifted me by my neck, high up from the thin carpet where moments earlier my feet had been safely perched, his right hand curling into a tentacled fist, his broken teeth pulling back against his gums as he fired off the cannon at the end of his wrist and knocked me across the room where a friend of his was nice enough to pick me up and then punched me in the chest with an unbroken soda bottle.
So, yes, beatings hurt. I suspect it hurt when the Martin Sheen character in The Departed (2006) was lifted up by Nicholson's goon squad and hurled off the roof of the building where he broke into pieces on the pavement. Probably it hurt when Leonardo DiCaprio smashed a wiseguy in the head with a beer glass. It appeared to hurt when Mr. French shot a deadbeat in the head and then set his house on fire.
Lot of pain.
Because pain is notorious for hurting, we have developed a tendency in this country to identify with those who dole out the pain rather than with those who receive it. The cost for the reward of that identification is supposed to be guilt. When we say to ourselves, "Better him than me," we are expected to kick ourselves for such sociopathy. But that is not the way one typically approaches a Martin Scorsese movie. We approach movies such as The Departed, Goodfellas, Casino, and some others, with the expectation--and because the director is an artist, that expectation is reasonable--of feeling as if we are right there in the midst of the action, hanging out with killers, coke heads, arsonists, mutilators, and wise guys. If you find that morally reprehensible, you are not alone.
So it pains me like a beating in a bowling alley that I must confess that The Departed is brilliant.
"Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints" could be the theme. The fog, blur, translucent overlay of motives of the characters here function as an ode to street confusion. This is not the world where some urban hood breaks into your house because he needs money to feed his habit. This is Boston, baby, and Boston, we are led to believe, ain't for small timers. This world is about power. This is the world where the Local Gun steals micro processors that can launch nuclear warheads and sells them to the Chinese. This crime lord has brains and balls and can smell a cheese-eater a mile away. We have DiCaprio playing a cop who infiltrates the mob and Matt Damon playing a criminal who infiltrates the police. Neither man is what he appears to be, just as neither is necessarily what he wants to be. When DiCaprio screams, "All I want is my identity back!" he means it.
None of that should be taken to mean that the director understands women any better than he ever did. We have here the usual assortment of whores and waitresses. Somewhat predictably, Scorsese gives us a female police shrink who exists to (a) create an anticipation for the cop and criminal to unexpectedly discover one another, and (b) to take the offense off the constant menstruation jokes.
The Departed is more than merely being there with your wazoo hanging out amidst the fray and fracas. Nicholson has never been more complex, Mark Wahlberg more convincing, Martin Sheen more expendable, DiCaprio more sympathetic, Damon more reprehensible. In short, the acting itself slams you like a slug from a .44. And this is important because these key players' characters all have the intellect and even charisma to make different choices. But their version of morality denies them those choices. To that end, this film comes close to being as cathartic as a Greek tragedy.
The other reason--the honest to God reason--is because of guilt. Ah, guilt: that five-letter curse word known to fallen Jesuits and Bible students everywhere. Guilt remains the earthly consequence of sin. And all men have sinned and thus have come short of the grace and the glory of God. Men can come lock you away, deprive you of the company of friends and family, whip you until your flesh wilts and dies. But none of that can break you with the same smiling vengeance as guilt. Guilt will bury you up to your nose and eyeballs, drop a bucket over your head and bang you with a club.
From what I've read, Scorsese grew up watching gangsters. Doubtless he learned a bit from their presumed style. How does one go about justifying an admiration for their self-possessed glow? I suppose a person with prodigious talent might make movies that deal with guilt while at the same time glamorizing the power those gangsters demonstrate. The director's most ardent fans would likely bray that I am oversimplifying this, or that by engaging in amateurish psychoanalysis, I am diminishing gifts greater than my own. To that I can only reply, "You bet I am, sweetie."
Having had the insides kicked out of me from time to time, I am in the happy position to assure you that those beatings we have come to expect in movies actually hurt. In my case, they didn't build character or teach me a lesson or toughen me up. They simply hurt.
I remember one time, decades ago, I got into a verbal altercation with some mountain of a man inside a bowling alley, said argument culminating in my suggestion that he might enjoy doing something inappropriate with a close relative and so should give it a try since everyone else with the means (and a few without) had done so. To this very day I can still recall how slowly time moved as he lifted me by my neck, high up from the thin carpet where moments earlier my feet had been safely perched, his right hand curling into a tentacled fist, his broken teeth pulling back against his gums as he fired off the cannon at the end of his wrist and knocked me across the room where a friend of his was nice enough to pick me up and then punched me in the chest with an unbroken soda bottle.
So, yes, beatings hurt. I suspect it hurt when the Martin Sheen character in The Departed (2006) was lifted up by Nicholson's goon squad and hurled off the roof of the building where he broke into pieces on the pavement. Probably it hurt when Leonardo DiCaprio smashed a wiseguy in the head with a beer glass. It appeared to hurt when Mr. French shot a deadbeat in the head and then set his house on fire.
Lot of pain.
Because pain is notorious for hurting, we have developed a tendency in this country to identify with those who dole out the pain rather than with those who receive it. The cost for the reward of that identification is supposed to be guilt. When we say to ourselves, "Better him than me," we are expected to kick ourselves for such sociopathy. But that is not the way one typically approaches a Martin Scorsese movie. We approach movies such as The Departed, Goodfellas, Casino, and some others, with the expectation--and because the director is an artist, that expectation is reasonable--of feeling as if we are right there in the midst of the action, hanging out with killers, coke heads, arsonists, mutilators, and wise guys. If you find that morally reprehensible, you are not alone.
So it pains me like a beating in a bowling alley that I must confess that The Departed is brilliant.
"Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints" could be the theme. The fog, blur, translucent overlay of motives of the characters here function as an ode to street confusion. This is not the world where some urban hood breaks into your house because he needs money to feed his habit. This is Boston, baby, and Boston, we are led to believe, ain't for small timers. This world is about power. This is the world where the Local Gun steals micro processors that can launch nuclear warheads and sells them to the Chinese. This crime lord has brains and balls and can smell a cheese-eater a mile away. We have DiCaprio playing a cop who infiltrates the mob and Matt Damon playing a criminal who infiltrates the police. Neither man is what he appears to be, just as neither is necessarily what he wants to be. When DiCaprio screams, "All I want is my identity back!" he means it.
None of that should be taken to mean that the director understands women any better than he ever did. We have here the usual assortment of whores and waitresses. Somewhat predictably, Scorsese gives us a female police shrink who exists to (a) create an anticipation for the cop and criminal to unexpectedly discover one another, and (b) to take the offense off the constant menstruation jokes.
The Departed is more than merely being there with your wazoo hanging out amidst the fray and fracas. Nicholson has never been more complex, Mark Wahlberg more convincing, Martin Sheen more expendable, DiCaprio more sympathetic, Damon more reprehensible. In short, the acting itself slams you like a slug from a .44. And this is important because these key players' characters all have the intellect and even charisma to make different choices. But their version of morality denies them those choices. To that end, this film comes close to being as cathartic as a Greek tragedy.
RAGING BULL
One may as well attempt a reasoned argument with an Armageddonist Christian about the propriety of a nuclear-free Iran as to take issue with most people when the subject matter involves cinematic violence. When artiste auteur darling directors tow their gratuitous violence through Styx and into the darker sphere of adult realism, claiming that the only way the audience can internalize the tragedy befalling a hero or his victims is with red-lens filters, slow motion shooting, and stop action precision, often as not those directors reap the celebratory accolades of their filmmaking brethren and of the critical community at large, all of which speaks not well for the movie directors but ill for the community that idolizes them. If, as I believe, one of the purposes of a movie that seeks to do more than merely entertain is to fill the audience's lungs with a new chemical that stirs dormant sensations and primordial recollections akin to remembering that sometimes for convenience we forget what it means to be alive, then the presumably cheap and tawdry efforts of directors such as Tobe Hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) fulfill this supreme mission far better than more "great cinema art" aficionados such as Martin Scorsese.
When Raging Bull was first released in 1980, I resisted seeing it for a couple weeks, mainly because a friend of mine kept insisting that I simply had to watch it, that Robert DeNiro proved himself to be truly beautiful and the natural precursor of all the great method actors who had preceded him, and that the director, this Scorsese fellow, had evolved from the city realism of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to the venue of great tragedians such as Aeschylus and Sophocles. Statements of that sort infuriated me because (a) I didn't believe them, (b) I sensed a profound misogyny in Scorsese's work (give or take Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), and (c) whenever I hear that so-and-so is the greatest anything, I tend to disbelieve it, especially when it comes to movies. So I sat back and read the reviews and listened to the talk about Raging Bull to the point where I felt I had already watched it several times. Despite more than a few invitations from people who had already seen it to join them for an encore presentation, for two full weeks I proudly and steadfastly refused to budge.
Then one Wednesday afternoon, instead of going to Geology class, I walked down to the one and only movie house in town, gave the ticket-taker a couple bucks for the matinee and muttered out the name of the movie.
I liked it. I did not love it, not by any means. But I liked it. I thought DeNiro radiated all the beauty that had been claimed for him. I recognized the classical tragedian structure of the story. I agreed that Joe Pesci would likely become the perennial sidekick in Scorsese pictures. Best of all, I was able to say to people whose lives appeared to revolve around little else that I had at long last watched this movie and now could people kindly leave me alone?
Flash forward to a couple weekends ago. A friend agreed to watch the movie with me on DVD. She made no bones that she wasn't too happy with the idea, but once in a while I have introduced her to a motion picture that she likes a lot and there was always the chance that this might happen again. So she put on a brave face. She leaned forward in her chair. She smiled in anticipation.
The smile did not remain for long.
"I liked Joe Pesci in it, " she said. "I didn't like the way it depicted the way men treated women. I thought it was way too bloody, even in black and white. I turned my head away."
My friend is not a child repulsed by the reality of a cruel world. Likewise she is not a blue-haired prude, leaping in terror at every falling branch. My friend is a decent, brave, respectable human being with strong feelings and love for her family. Why she wants to spend her time watching movies with the likes of me is anyone's guess. But she does. And when she ventures an opinion or reaction to a movie, I shut up, listen, and think about it.
For a movie that supposedly bookended an era in movie-making that merged reality with art (the other end of the shelf being the far superior Bonnie and Clyde), Raging Bull has aged less than well. One reason for the lingering stench lies in the efforts at making the boxing matches so authentic. What could be done in 1980 by masterful craftsmen can today be done by clever twelve-year-olds. So the violence becomes obsolescent. But the bigger reason for the movie's disappointment can be summed in an appropriately adolescent shrug: So what? Why should the audience--today's audience, or the audience of 1980--give a damn about Jake LaMotta? Was he the 1940s version of Macbeth, a single-minded individual who forced his closest allies to betray him while thumbing his nose at his closest enemies? No, he was a tremendous fighter who was possessed of a blind drive for violence, the source of which is never identified but which we are led to surmise has something to do with him being Italian. Since LaMotta is portrayed as a wife-beating, paranoid, belligerent thug, it's hard to give much compassion to him when he begins to slide somewhere along Act Three.
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." So said Dr. Sammy Johnson. Dr. Johnson, among other things, was an erudite snob reactionary prone to being long-winded and rude. He also contributed to eighteenth-century English literature in ways that few others did. Jake LaMotta used to beat people up very effectively. That may have made him some kind of an artist. Telling his story with realism does not do the same for the director.
When Raging Bull was first released in 1980, I resisted seeing it for a couple weeks, mainly because a friend of mine kept insisting that I simply had to watch it, that Robert DeNiro proved himself to be truly beautiful and the natural precursor of all the great method actors who had preceded him, and that the director, this Scorsese fellow, had evolved from the city realism of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to the venue of great tragedians such as Aeschylus and Sophocles. Statements of that sort infuriated me because (a) I didn't believe them, (b) I sensed a profound misogyny in Scorsese's work (give or take Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), and (c) whenever I hear that so-and-so is the greatest anything, I tend to disbelieve it, especially when it comes to movies. So I sat back and read the reviews and listened to the talk about Raging Bull to the point where I felt I had already watched it several times. Despite more than a few invitations from people who had already seen it to join them for an encore presentation, for two full weeks I proudly and steadfastly refused to budge.
Then one Wednesday afternoon, instead of going to Geology class, I walked down to the one and only movie house in town, gave the ticket-taker a couple bucks for the matinee and muttered out the name of the movie.
I liked it. I did not love it, not by any means. But I liked it. I thought DeNiro radiated all the beauty that had been claimed for him. I recognized the classical tragedian structure of the story. I agreed that Joe Pesci would likely become the perennial sidekick in Scorsese pictures. Best of all, I was able to say to people whose lives appeared to revolve around little else that I had at long last watched this movie and now could people kindly leave me alone?
Flash forward to a couple weekends ago. A friend agreed to watch the movie with me on DVD. She made no bones that she wasn't too happy with the idea, but once in a while I have introduced her to a motion picture that she likes a lot and there was always the chance that this might happen again. So she put on a brave face. She leaned forward in her chair. She smiled in anticipation.
The smile did not remain for long.
"I liked Joe Pesci in it, " she said. "I didn't like the way it depicted the way men treated women. I thought it was way too bloody, even in black and white. I turned my head away."
My friend is not a child repulsed by the reality of a cruel world. Likewise she is not a blue-haired prude, leaping in terror at every falling branch. My friend is a decent, brave, respectable human being with strong feelings and love for her family. Why she wants to spend her time watching movies with the likes of me is anyone's guess. But she does. And when she ventures an opinion or reaction to a movie, I shut up, listen, and think about it.
For a movie that supposedly bookended an era in movie-making that merged reality with art (the other end of the shelf being the far superior Bonnie and Clyde), Raging Bull has aged less than well. One reason for the lingering stench lies in the efforts at making the boxing matches so authentic. What could be done in 1980 by masterful craftsmen can today be done by clever twelve-year-olds. So the violence becomes obsolescent. But the bigger reason for the movie's disappointment can be summed in an appropriately adolescent shrug: So what? Why should the audience--today's audience, or the audience of 1980--give a damn about Jake LaMotta? Was he the 1940s version of Macbeth, a single-minded individual who forced his closest allies to betray him while thumbing his nose at his closest enemies? No, he was a tremendous fighter who was possessed of a blind drive for violence, the source of which is never identified but which we are led to surmise has something to do with him being Italian. Since LaMotta is portrayed as a wife-beating, paranoid, belligerent thug, it's hard to give much compassion to him when he begins to slide somewhere along Act Three.
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." So said Dr. Sammy Johnson. Dr. Johnson, among other things, was an erudite snob reactionary prone to being long-winded and rude. He also contributed to eighteenth-century English literature in ways that few others did. Jake LaMotta used to beat people up very effectively. That may have made him some kind of an artist. Telling his story with realism does not do the same for the director.
ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
Any motion picture with the decency to begin with a song by Mott the Hoople leaps into the world with enough credibility to sustain damn near anything, including a script by Robert Getchell that has not necessarily aged all that well, a performance by Kris Kristofferson which (while being his overall best acting job) does not bode well for his thespian future, and some issues that get raised while often cancelling out one another. While I must admit that I am not one of those film critics who genuflects every time the name Martin Scorsese is mentioned, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975) remains one of his best films, right up there with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas in the sense that as a member of the audience you believe you are right there in the thick of things, hurting and laughing and smacking your fists.
Ellen Burstyn plays Alice, a recently single mom who moves Arizona to start a new life with her young son. Alice is a singer and she plans to make it big in Monterey, California. She is also a realist, so she knows she will have to work some toilets and dives before getting discovered by the right talent scout. She is not a pessimist, however, and so she expects to at least get a shot at performing in divers and toilets. Instead she finds herself waiting tables at Mel and Ruby's Diner in Tucson. It is there that she meets Diane Ladd as her co-worker Flo, Vic Tayback as Mel, and Harvey Keitel as a snake in the grass.
Scorsese's contribution to the film's success lies in his willingness and ability to exploit useful realism while not getting bogged in pointless minutiae. So we find Alice and Flo sharing a laugh about Vera's boyfriend, Tommy the son belittling Kristofferson's love of "shit-kicking" music, and especially Jodie Foster's performance as a pre-teen seductress and shoplifter (and when will the retired Ms. Foster be recognized as one of the greatest actors of her generation?), any one of which episodes--much less all of them--so true to life that we struggle with the natural affinity between laughing and crying.
This movie recently played again on TMC's "Essentials" where hosts Robert Osborne and Sally Field repeatedly referred to it as Scorsese's first movie. It was no such thing. Discounting documentaries and shorts, there was still Who's That Knocking at My Door from 1967 with Harvey Keitel and Boxcar Bertha in 1972 with David Carradine, either one of which might be reasonably overlooked. But how could these two presumed experts not remember Mean Streets from 1973? Especially since that was the film that at long last put Robert De Niro on the map (another name intended to cause the audience to bow) and that most of its success was enhanced by the director's unauthorized use of Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes.
Beats me.
Alice remains a great movie. Also starring Valerie Curtin as Vera and Alfred Lutter as Tommy.
Ellen Burstyn plays Alice, a recently single mom who moves Arizona to start a new life with her young son. Alice is a singer and she plans to make it big in Monterey, California. She is also a realist, so she knows she will have to work some toilets and dives before getting discovered by the right talent scout. She is not a pessimist, however, and so she expects to at least get a shot at performing in divers and toilets. Instead she finds herself waiting tables at Mel and Ruby's Diner in Tucson. It is there that she meets Diane Ladd as her co-worker Flo, Vic Tayback as Mel, and Harvey Keitel as a snake in the grass.
Scorsese's contribution to the film's success lies in his willingness and ability to exploit useful realism while not getting bogged in pointless minutiae. So we find Alice and Flo sharing a laugh about Vera's boyfriend, Tommy the son belittling Kristofferson's love of "shit-kicking" music, and especially Jodie Foster's performance as a pre-teen seductress and shoplifter (and when will the retired Ms. Foster be recognized as one of the greatest actors of her generation?), any one of which episodes--much less all of them--so true to life that we struggle with the natural affinity between laughing and crying.
This movie recently played again on TMC's "Essentials" where hosts Robert Osborne and Sally Field repeatedly referred to it as Scorsese's first movie. It was no such thing. Discounting documentaries and shorts, there was still Who's That Knocking at My Door from 1967 with Harvey Keitel and Boxcar Bertha in 1972 with David Carradine, either one of which might be reasonably overlooked. But how could these two presumed experts not remember Mean Streets from 1973? Especially since that was the film that at long last put Robert De Niro on the map (another name intended to cause the audience to bow) and that most of its success was enhanced by the director's unauthorized use of Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes.
Beats me.
Alice remains a great movie. Also starring Valerie Curtin as Vera and Alfred Lutter as Tommy.
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is visually impressive. That is also the film's biggest problem. Released only in digital format, the film glistens and shimmers throughout inordinately numerous scenes of sex, drug use and tantrums which we intuit are intended satirically, although director Martin Scorsese gives us no particular reason to believe this is so. This movie is not the Return of A Clockwork Orange, although it might like to be. In order for the movie to be a satire, there would need to be some humor or wit attached and because of the utter lack of humanity expressed by real life sleaze-hole Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), the only way to find this movie funny is to dive head first into the lifestyle that is being offered.
Scorsese does make that head-long dive tempting, of course, because, as with any number of previous black comedy efforts (Goodfellas, for instance), the caricatures drag us in with the excesses of their actions. In one scene where a new employee in Belfort's scam of a phone room stops working two minutes early to clean the fish tank, second in command Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) publicly ridicules the schlep and then swallows the tropical fish in spite. We are also treated (or mistreated) to scenes of pitching midgets at bullseyes, dangling a gay chef out the window of an office building, and a drunken rape scene on an airliner. To the extent that anyone finds this funny depends on the extent to which that person can be led to identify with the Belfort character.
And that is where the other problem lies. Because we are denied any viewpoint other than that of Jordan Belfort--and because he ultimately gets away with his amazingly anti-human behavior (to the extent that he wrote a popular memoir about his life and also received one million dollars for the film rights, in addition to creating his own post-prison series of sales seminars), we never actually get to perceive the son of a bitch's actions from any place other than the lofty precipice Scorsese coaxes us onto.
The director, of course, is not obligated to dumb down his intentions in order to make them clear. So when the guy leaving the theatre ahead of me turns and says, "I wanna be Jordan. I wanna be that guy. Buying everything. Party time, man," I just shrug and figure there will always be idiots in the world.
But maybe I'm the real idiot. After all, what Martin Scorsese is saying here is that taking Quaaludes and snorting cocaine while lying to everyone about everything is a great way to get filthy fucking rich. (I beg your pardon about my use of the fuck word, but if you do see this movie, you will hear it uttered more than five hundred times, setting a record for people who concern themselves with such things.) Maybe I'm crazy to think that what Scorsese wants us to do is be aghast at the celebration of this kind of lifestyle. But let's consider the evidence to the contrary. In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin (DeNiro, natch) gets away with everything and becomes a star even after kidnapping Johnny Carson (Jerry Lewis) and getting arrested by the FBI. Henry Hill in the aforementioned Goodfellas gave up virtually nothing in exchange for being a rat. Even in the not particularly worthwhile Casino, DeNiro (again!) loses very little in exchange for the demands he makes on life. So a pattern begins to develop. But, hey, let's give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt. Let's pretend or imagine that the real message behind all these movies and several others is that people are collectively stupid and that is the deep down reason why all these charlatans the director "appears" to be celebrating get away with so much; therefore, the man is doing us a public service by playing up just how corrupt our society is as a whole. Even if one is willing to make that colossal concession, then what the fuck is the point in making ten thousand movies with the same actors over and over again, every frame in which those men appear serving to repeat the same tired goddamned point, unless, oh wait, maybe I get it at last! What Scorsese is really doing is he's so fucking smart that what he's doing is he's proving our collective ignorance and worthlessness by lulling us into accepting his ultimately misanthropic viewpoint of humanity itself. In other words, the more commercially successful a given digitally released Scorsese film is, the more fucked up we are as a society.
Whew! At last, after all these years, I finally get it. Thank God. Now maybe the motherfucking asshole can make a goddamned movie about some other fucking piece of shit thing, like maybe caterpillars in the Bronx or some such shit because you old bastard, we fucking get it! We don't give a damn that Jonah Hill worked for only $60,000 because he wanted to be near you. We don't care that you think DiCaprio is the next DeNiro. We don't fucking give a good goddamn what you think about anything because the last halfway decent movie you made was Taxi fucking Driver and that was damn near forty years ago, unless you think that swill about New York actually proved anything to anybody.
Only a few good things can be said about The Wolf of Wall Street. Margot Robbie is more than just beautiful. She can actually act and the male dominated bullshit of this movie is far beneath her ultimate talents. Also Matthew McConaighey just gets better and better with every film in which he appears and the only reason he has such a brief appearance in this garbage heap of a film is that if he'd stuck around, nobody would have given a shit about Leonardo.
The only other thing of a positive nature regarding this teeming load of bile is that the details of the boiler room work are one hundred percent on the money. Every last instant of every scene featuring telephones is so perfect that for those moments you can almost forgive the cast and crew for making what is in the final analysis a morbidly reeking slab of infantile detritus. Get the clap before seeing this movie. You'll want a dose of penicillin afterwards anyway.
Scorsese does make that head-long dive tempting, of course, because, as with any number of previous black comedy efforts (Goodfellas, for instance), the caricatures drag us in with the excesses of their actions. In one scene where a new employee in Belfort's scam of a phone room stops working two minutes early to clean the fish tank, second in command Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) publicly ridicules the schlep and then swallows the tropical fish in spite. We are also treated (or mistreated) to scenes of pitching midgets at bullseyes, dangling a gay chef out the window of an office building, and a drunken rape scene on an airliner. To the extent that anyone finds this funny depends on the extent to which that person can be led to identify with the Belfort character.
And that is where the other problem lies. Because we are denied any viewpoint other than that of Jordan Belfort--and because he ultimately gets away with his amazingly anti-human behavior (to the extent that he wrote a popular memoir about his life and also received one million dollars for the film rights, in addition to creating his own post-prison series of sales seminars), we never actually get to perceive the son of a bitch's actions from any place other than the lofty precipice Scorsese coaxes us onto.
The director, of course, is not obligated to dumb down his intentions in order to make them clear. So when the guy leaving the theatre ahead of me turns and says, "I wanna be Jordan. I wanna be that guy. Buying everything. Party time, man," I just shrug and figure there will always be idiots in the world.
But maybe I'm the real idiot. After all, what Martin Scorsese is saying here is that taking Quaaludes and snorting cocaine while lying to everyone about everything is a great way to get filthy fucking rich. (I beg your pardon about my use of the fuck word, but if you do see this movie, you will hear it uttered more than five hundred times, setting a record for people who concern themselves with such things.) Maybe I'm crazy to think that what Scorsese wants us to do is be aghast at the celebration of this kind of lifestyle. But let's consider the evidence to the contrary. In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin (DeNiro, natch) gets away with everything and becomes a star even after kidnapping Johnny Carson (Jerry Lewis) and getting arrested by the FBI. Henry Hill in the aforementioned Goodfellas gave up virtually nothing in exchange for being a rat. Even in the not particularly worthwhile Casino, DeNiro (again!) loses very little in exchange for the demands he makes on life. So a pattern begins to develop. But, hey, let's give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt. Let's pretend or imagine that the real message behind all these movies and several others is that people are collectively stupid and that is the deep down reason why all these charlatans the director "appears" to be celebrating get away with so much; therefore, the man is doing us a public service by playing up just how corrupt our society is as a whole. Even if one is willing to make that colossal concession, then what the fuck is the point in making ten thousand movies with the same actors over and over again, every frame in which those men appear serving to repeat the same tired goddamned point, unless, oh wait, maybe I get it at last! What Scorsese is really doing is he's so fucking smart that what he's doing is he's proving our collective ignorance and worthlessness by lulling us into accepting his ultimately misanthropic viewpoint of humanity itself. In other words, the more commercially successful a given digitally released Scorsese film is, the more fucked up we are as a society.
Whew! At last, after all these years, I finally get it. Thank God. Now maybe the motherfucking asshole can make a goddamned movie about some other fucking piece of shit thing, like maybe caterpillars in the Bronx or some such shit because you old bastard, we fucking get it! We don't give a damn that Jonah Hill worked for only $60,000 because he wanted to be near you. We don't care that you think DiCaprio is the next DeNiro. We don't fucking give a good goddamn what you think about anything because the last halfway decent movie you made was Taxi fucking Driver and that was damn near forty years ago, unless you think that swill about New York actually proved anything to anybody.
Only a few good things can be said about The Wolf of Wall Street. Margot Robbie is more than just beautiful. She can actually act and the male dominated bullshit of this movie is far beneath her ultimate talents. Also Matthew McConaighey just gets better and better with every film in which he appears and the only reason he has such a brief appearance in this garbage heap of a film is that if he'd stuck around, nobody would have given a shit about Leonardo.
The only other thing of a positive nature regarding this teeming load of bile is that the details of the boiler room work are one hundred percent on the money. Every last instant of every scene featuring telephones is so perfect that for those moments you can almost forgive the cast and crew for making what is in the final analysis a morbidly reeking slab of infantile detritus. Get the clap before seeing this movie. You'll want a dose of penicillin afterwards anyway.
BOXCAR BERTHA
Here is the final paragraph of the review Roger Ebert wrote in 1972 after viewing the American International Picture Boxcar Bertha. "[Director Martin] Scorsese remains one of the bright young hopes of American movies. His brilliant first film won the 1968 Chicago Film Festival as I Call First and later played as Who's That Knocking at My Door? He was an assistant editor and director of Woodstock, and now, many frustrated projects later, here is his first conventional feature. He is good with actors, good with his camera and determined to take the grade-zilch exploitation film and bend it to his own vision. Within the limits of the film's possibilities, he has succeeded."
Well, hey, well, hey. Yummy kudos from Roger Ebert. When the Big Ebe calls you out as a rising star, you can best believe your time has come, my friend. Of course, it helps to have Roger and Julie Corman backing you with finance and a nonsense story about getting the rights to radical labor struggler Bertha Thompson's story through the closed door of a bag o' fleas hotel, even though the story had already been written by anarchist physician Ben Reitman. It also really helps to have an unknown but interesting David Carradine and an unknown but fascinating Barbara Hershey starring in your film. But mostly it helps to be a young Martin Scorsese.
Corman was the mastermind behind AIP's most interesting crime-violence films, of which Bloody Mama was perhaps one of the more inspired. Even though RC may have made shoot-outs and death scenes art fodder for the drive-in set, it was MS who made it into Art and it happened with Bertha.
This film radiates the way the street scenes in Taxi Driver did, with the neon signs dripping their colors all over the Great Depression train rides. The film includes a couple of racy sex scenes between Hershey as Bertha and Carradine as Big Bill Shelly, yet there is a degree of tenderness and even sensitivity to these scenes that was unlike anything in the traditionally exploitative American International canon.
In the film, a young Bertha loses her father to the bullying greed of a capitalist exploiter. No one comes right out and tells us that this is the impetus for her life of crime, and indeed little mention is made of the event of her dad's passing. Big Bill and his African American friend Vox team up with Bertha and Rake (the world's worst gambler) to punish the railroad owner (played by father John Carradine), Bill constantly reminding all his robbery victims that he is not a criminal; he's a union organizer.
The story itself is highly fictionalized and probably even based on a compound of characters, but that matters very little. Scorsese gets the details exactly right, with even the music serving to carry along the camera from one adventure to the next.
I will tell you that even now, forty years after its initial release, the last ten minutes of the film are hard to take sitting down. All the same, the film does what few other movies--very few--had then managed with any degree of success. Boxcar Bertha aims reasoned reaction to the idea that the guys in white hats are necessarily the good guys. Of course, the early 1970s drive-in audience that flocked to AIP's movies already understood that and understood it well. Any high school greaser who'd ever been bullied by his principal, any rocker who'd been ridiculed by his relatives, any protester who'd been clubbed by the police, any girl who'd been pawed by her teachers, any black people who'd ever walked out their front doors--in short, everyone who was lined up to slurp down a bottle of Coke and a flask of rum at the Star-View Drive-In knew the self-righteous twinkle in the eye of the man holding the whip and each of us wanted not so much revenge as expiation and validation.
Look for the director making a cameo near the end of Bertha's scene in the bordello.
This remains a good story, well told.
Well, hey, well, hey. Yummy kudos from Roger Ebert. When the Big Ebe calls you out as a rising star, you can best believe your time has come, my friend. Of course, it helps to have Roger and Julie Corman backing you with finance and a nonsense story about getting the rights to radical labor struggler Bertha Thompson's story through the closed door of a bag o' fleas hotel, even though the story had already been written by anarchist physician Ben Reitman. It also really helps to have an unknown but interesting David Carradine and an unknown but fascinating Barbara Hershey starring in your film. But mostly it helps to be a young Martin Scorsese.
Corman was the mastermind behind AIP's most interesting crime-violence films, of which Bloody Mama was perhaps one of the more inspired. Even though RC may have made shoot-outs and death scenes art fodder for the drive-in set, it was MS who made it into Art and it happened with Bertha.
This film radiates the way the street scenes in Taxi Driver did, with the neon signs dripping their colors all over the Great Depression train rides. The film includes a couple of racy sex scenes between Hershey as Bertha and Carradine as Big Bill Shelly, yet there is a degree of tenderness and even sensitivity to these scenes that was unlike anything in the traditionally exploitative American International canon.
In the film, a young Bertha loses her father to the bullying greed of a capitalist exploiter. No one comes right out and tells us that this is the impetus for her life of crime, and indeed little mention is made of the event of her dad's passing. Big Bill and his African American friend Vox team up with Bertha and Rake (the world's worst gambler) to punish the railroad owner (played by father John Carradine), Bill constantly reminding all his robbery victims that he is not a criminal; he's a union organizer.
The story itself is highly fictionalized and probably even based on a compound of characters, but that matters very little. Scorsese gets the details exactly right, with even the music serving to carry along the camera from one adventure to the next.
I will tell you that even now, forty years after its initial release, the last ten minutes of the film are hard to take sitting down. All the same, the film does what few other movies--very few--had then managed with any degree of success. Boxcar Bertha aims reasoned reaction to the idea that the guys in white hats are necessarily the good guys. Of course, the early 1970s drive-in audience that flocked to AIP's movies already understood that and understood it well. Any high school greaser who'd ever been bullied by his principal, any rocker who'd been ridiculed by his relatives, any protester who'd been clubbed by the police, any girl who'd been pawed by her teachers, any black people who'd ever walked out their front doors--in short, everyone who was lined up to slurp down a bottle of Coke and a flask of rum at the Star-View Drive-In knew the self-righteous twinkle in the eye of the man holding the whip and each of us wanted not so much revenge as expiation and validation.
Look for the director making a cameo near the end of Bertha's scene in the bordello.
This remains a good story, well told.
