Best Martin Scorsese movie

Stone feeling compelled to give Pesci a blowjob, for ex.

Sharon Stone stole an Oscar nod from Nicole Kidman and that's all there is to it.

last time i saw it i was struck by how there's no breathing room on the soundtrack - the songs just keep coming and coming and coming

I love the wall-to-wall soundtrack in Goodfellas--it's like a throwback to Scorpio Rising--but yeah, again I think, "You've already done this." (On balance, I think there's less music in Casino.) Woods is definitely good and slimy--reptillian. I like Stone a lot. She's super glamorous early on, vulnerable and hysterical towards the end.

But if that was the year of To Die For, that'd be a tough call for me.

I love that Woods is also totally pathetic - fighting with the kid, etc.

The scenes with the kid are priceless. His coddling of Stone is a lot like the creepy sweet talk Sport lays on Iris in Taxi Driver--much creepier there, for obvious reasons.

OK, wtf?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1148205/

Fortunately, it may not happen.

Watched Alice last night on TCM -- Burstyn is great, but I had a huge problem with the script. So much of Alice's motivation is in Tommy's constant whiny bratty "when are we gonna get to Monterey, you promised we'd be in Monterey by my birthday, Monterey Monterey Monterey wah wah wah!" And then at the very end he says "what? Monterey was your deal, not mine!" allowing them to drop anchor. How convenient. Fuck a deus ex machina.

was 70 on Saturday

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-scorsese-70

rewatched casino pretty recently and i still think that cornfield scene w/pesci is probably the toughest scene to watch in any of his films.

SPOILER

the way he gets done in feels absolutely right for a movie which is basically from the perspective of the two main characters. we never see it coming, really, and neither does he. we don't know what happened for his crew to turn on him like that, but i don't think it's a drawback, it's pretty f'in chilling. super nightmarish, it's more "horror movie" than anything in 'shutter island.'

otm. the sound of the aluminum bats plinking off their skulls is so fucked up

Aka, Frank Vincent's Revenge (cf. Raging Bull and Goodfellas).

man I had no idea how many little details in this movie were based on actual events

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYBjOywJwLI

baseball bat scene still IMO the single most explicitly violent scene in a hit movie ever. by hit i mean something that made over a million dollars on release. can't think of anything else that comes close. would any other director have gotten away with it even?

what's great and fucked-up about the scene is the point of it isn't pesci dying a horrible death but being forced to watch his brother get beaten to death and his crew just revealing themselves to him like that, his whole life's meaning evaporating on every level before his eyes.

hell yeah

you make me pop your fucking eye out of your head to protect that piece of shit you dumb motherfucker

pesci's 'moddafuckas' in this are world class

That Spector clip was the highlight of a fantastic documentary. "Who's this guy Skeezy?"--cracks me up.

Get this through your head, you Jew motherfucker, you! You only exist out here because of me! That's the only reason! Without me, you personally, every fuckin' wise guy still around will take a piece of your fuckin' Jew ass! Then where you gonna go? You're fuckin' warned. Don't go over my head again, you motherfucker, you!

[Door Slams, Tires Squeal]

I'm Greek, Omar.

I always found the "head in vise" scene much more traumatizing than the cornfield scene. Scared the living shit out of my 15-year-old mind. I should not have been allowed to see that movie.

The "head in vise" scene also gets bonus scary points because it actually happened in real life. The cornfield scene did not. The Spilotro brothers were shot to death in a basement (if Wiipedia is to be believed).

one of my favorite MPAA-baiting stories is how scorsese so desperately wanted to have the vise scene as it appeared in the movie that he went OTT in the first cut and had the vise thoroughly crush the dude's head and then he "acquiesced" to demands to tone it down.

Jesus! Is that on the DVD?

before seeing casino i saw the vise scene parodied in a mad TV claymation sketch about rudolf the red nose reindeer. rudolph takes an elf and put its head in the vise and a clay eyeball popped out. i was like 10 and i loved it

this EW article is what i remember reading, made me so psyched for this movie:

Martin Scorsese is making the Las Vegas Mob story Casino, but who knew that the director was such a cagey gambler?

According to makeup and effects people who helped rig some of Casino's startling gory ''gags'' (that's what filmmakers call shots involving fakery), Scorsese has a few extra cards to play when the film goes before the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board this fall. He's contractually obligated to deliver a R picture, but should the board cry NC-17, no problem. The Oscar-nominated director of GoodFellas is ready to drop some of his most outrageous Casino shots because he never intended to put them in the finished film anyway.

It's a game directors play but don't talk much about, offering up sicko sacrifices to Hollywood's unofficial board of censors. The idea: Shock the MPAA in round one so that later trims will appear to make the difference. A Casino case in point: Enforcer Nicky (Joe Pesci) puts a hood's head in a vise and, as described in a script draft, ''spins the vise handle until suddenly the [man's] head explodes, splattering the room with blood and brains.''

''That was fun to shoot, but it was an exercise,'' says makeup wizard Howard Berger of Kurtzman Nicotero Berger, the firm that landed the exploding-head concession partly on the strength of earlier work done for Quentin Tarantino. ''Scorsese wanted to shoot it so there was blood spraying out of the eyeball, and then the whole eyeball would pop out. He said, 'It's ridiculous but I have to put it in so I can cut it and keep what I really need.'''

MS writing about home video in 1990:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/02/martin-scorsese-at-the-time-of-goodfellas.html#more

http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-fanmade-poster-captures-the-essence-of-martin-sc,93636/

http://media.avclub.com/images/426/426031/original/627.jpg?2308

they're all wearing pants = fail

Love yr hierarchy theory above

hard to rate his stuff in this way b/c some of the most stylistically accomplished stuff (e.g. raging bull, casino, even goodfellas to an extent) is among the more banal otherwise. i think his recent run has been pretty dreadful. he's had mediocre-to-terrible scripts to work with. hugo for me was an inert waxworks, scorsese going full-tilt Prestige, just dreary and awful. but for all that it's not even his worst movie...

The King of Comedy
After Hours
GoodFellas
Taxi Driver
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Mean Streets
The Color of Money (feel this might be a little underrated)
Who's That Knocking at My Door
The Last Temptation of Christ
Casino
Raging Bull
New York, New York (I still find this kind of fascinating, even though more than half of it doesn't work; I'd probably watch this again sooner than Raging Bull or Casino)
The Age of Innocence
Shutter Island
The Departed
The Aviator
Bringing out the Dead
Cape Fear
Hugo
Gang of New York

Not listed:
Boxcar Bertha (never seen)
Kundun (have only seen this once, 15 years ago, so I'm not really sure what my opinion is)

I wish it actually had been Gang of New York--I might have had some clue as to who was killing whom in the big final brouhaha. Agree with everything you've got near the bottom (except Hugo, which I haven't seen); I do think Raging Bull and Goodfellas are anything but banal. (Which we've discussed, so I also know who'll come on and say, "Yes, they're banal.")

ha, yeah i think "gang of new york" or perhaps "gang leader of new york" would have been better movies

well goodfellas is kind of sublimely put together as a narrative, casino too...

I have a soft spot for some of his recent stuff: Gangs, Departed, even the Aviator... although I tried to watch Shutter Island twice and turned it off before the 2nd act (I think... definitely <halfway)... rating Shudder Ibland (c)MorbiusMD above all of the films I listed is pretty bold imho.

Cape Fear reboot also not horrible, certainly not the 3rd worst Scorcese film.

i remember shutter island having some good build-up and i liked the use of music, the climax and resolution are crap though. maybe i'm just not remembering the other ones too well. i fell dead asleep during the aviator. one great scene, the rest felt like baz luhrmann or some shit. mostly shapeless, formless overbudgeted garbage.

i can't give any credit to hugo though, i wanted to bolt the theater after 30min and only stuck it out b/c i'm too polite. what a piece of shit.

i actually thought 'hugo' was quite good and was kind of shocked at how much everyone else seemed to hate it. agreed on the awfulness of 'gangs of new york,' though, and am more or less on board with your top 5 (would probably switch 'goodfellas' with 'taxi driver').

I haven't seen After Hours since it was first released, I think, but don't understand why ppl think it's more than a good little nightmare comedy. Back then you could have a much weirder RL experience any night in Soho.

(God knows it's better than anything he's done lately tho)

i actually thought 'hugo' was quite good and was kind of shocked at how much everyone else seemed to hate it. agreed on the awfulness of 'gangs of new york,' though, and am more or less on board with your top 5 (would probably switch 'goodfellas' with 'taxi driver').

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, June 15, 2013 1:09 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

everybody else loved hugo! it had great reviews!

i watched raging bull again recently. i appreciate it as pure cinema or w/e but i dont really connect to it. it was funnier than i remembered though

i actually like the aviator a lot

I like Cape Fear and Gangs. It's Casino I hate.

the only thing i really like about cape fear is the long scene between de niro and juliette lewis

I'm prepared to move The Age of Innocence into the low reaches of the top ten.

I'm with Morbius on After Hours. I rewatched it a year or two ago. It's well made--I heard Scorsese say somewhere that his objective was to make a movie quickly and bring it in under x-millions of dollars; it'd probably be a career film for lesser directors--but feels slight. Allowing that there are isolated moments that feel vintage, or that have some urgency to them (there's a striking shot when he goes back to Linda Fiorentino's studio...forgetting specifics), plus some great music (favourite: Robert & Johnny's "We Belong Together"), it feels slight; even more than Alice, it's the first genial Scorsese movie up to that point, and it represents the start of something new and (I think) lesser. Like a lot of people, I count Goodfellas as the only truly great film he made after that.

Apparently it feels slight, so I had to use that phrase twice.