Best Martin Scorsese movie

Stay resolute!

Maybe you and I are being conflated

More likely I'm conflating Coppola and Scorsese. Anyway, my mistake.

I rewatched Raging Bull a few months ago for the first time in about 17 years. I do think it's slipped down a bit in the canon and I'd always put it off as a lesser Marty as its such a downer and Jake is such a pos but it's up there with his very best on the rewatch. The levels of ridiculous machismo are darkly comic like when he's asking his brother to punch him until his stitches come out.

I must rewatch Bringing Out The Dead again. I didnt like it at the time. It felt overdriven to the point of incredulity.

Marty's classics imo (in no particular order) - Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street, After Hours, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Irishman, King of Comedy, Raging Bull

Bringing Out The Dead is good - and it’s close to my heart since I watched MS film a scene from it one night for over an hour - but it’s the only one that often feels like a slog to watch.

Look, I think we can all agree that, if you enjoy a movie, fuck all the other noise

Even if that movie is Raging Bull

"Floundering Bull: A Cinematic Fiasco"

quiddities and agonies of the ILX film community

i always found raging bull too offputting a prospect for all of the usual reasons but made myself sit and watch it last year and yeah no doubt there's elements that if youve seen done once youve seen done enough but im not sure the beauty and the hardness of it still dont earn it all the plaudits it tends to get, it is a capital M masterpiece that knows it in every frame

I've seen raging bull several times but I should probably see it again to reconsider it.

Love Bringing out the Dead, it's definitely a weird one, off-kilter humor and a Schrader VO-laced screenplay adapted from a novel, really frenetic and colorful. I wouldn't say it necessarily always works but I've always been enthusiastic about it.

xp to xxxyzzzzzz both are great, especially imo as studies of scorsese doing exactly what he does but in a different mode than he might usually do it

i still remember an ilx post about mean streets/goodfellas/casino/irishman being essentially a walk through of the mob from street level to serious players and imo it absolutely works

and gangs of new york is his hobbit trilogy

Its funny how DDL basically played the same character in Gangs and There Will Be Blood

and my left foot

and in the name of the father

one of the things I really admire about The Irishman is the genuinely bleak emptiness at the end of it, no deadpan flippancy with faux gallows humour - just: I've lived an empty, amoral, servile life and now I'm going to purchase my own coffin ... lol classic!

fucks sake calz no spoilers

The Colour of Money is a seriously underrated one. The camera twirling around the pool table and Tom Cruise with perfect hair showing off to the sound of Werewolves of London. PURE CINEMA.

The pure cinema of an Eric Clapton theme!

phew, I'm glad you were joking there d-mac. Because the whole concept of "spoilers" in movies is ABSOLUTE bollox anyway. Especially when said movie is based on stuff that might have happened more than 5 decades ago and the whole screenplay has been built around a lurid best-selling US mafia non-fiction book.

mods pls pre emptively ban this man from the titanic (1997) thread

spoiler: he pushes her off

wringing out the dead

Titanic Driver.

the departed

I remember reading a Badshaw review of The Departed where he was hailing the dialogue in this movie as being so fucking razor-sharp - it's absolutely abysmal

You don't wanna dip into ILX's The Departed thread then.

Gangs of New York his worst, if only for having a theme song by U2.

Rewatched GoNY recently and the entire thing feels like cosplay. I like it less each time.

phew, I'm glad you were joking there d-mac. Because the whole concept of "spoilers" in movies is ABSOLUTE bollox anyway. Especially when said movie is based on stuff that might have happened more than 5 decades ago and the whole screenplay has been built around a lurid best-selling US mafia non-fiction book.

― calzino, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

When I'm at home I often start reading the plot section of the Wikipedia page halfway through. Doesn't everyone do this?

Yes, I also used to read the last few pages of a book first (not so much since I went 100% e-reader).

ppl really rating new york, new york itt. I had the same reaction to it that I did to Raging Bull - "christ it's boring to hear these terrible people shouting at each other" - but I was an impatient teen, perhaps there were Formal Aspects I was missing.

"Silence" is on Kanopy, btw

Kanopy

yes

You both still have access to that?

After I typed this I tried to watch something on Kanopy and ran into some sort of block - “your library is limiting access.” Are you getting that too?

I got that several years ago

Was just reading the NY-er piece on Marvel, earlier. The Marvel Scorsese says it's "not cinema". There is a continuity: the dominant form of Hollywood filmmaking for its time, like the epic might have been in the 50s, as detailed in the Scorsese doc.

Except that Hollywood doesn't make the huge profits back then (when TV came along), it has been one of a number of entertainment options for a long time. Still, you can see why MS said "it wasn't cinema". No directors, stars don't really count (except Robert Downey Jr.), acting seems more of a degraded form. Even so I think MS could talk about the role of visual effects in the way the NY-er piece does. Both the tech and the brutal working conditions have bought the costs down.

*said what he did

someone should ask MS abt animation-as-cinema, as that seems pertinent (all of MCU is basically in the tradition of bedknobs and broomsticks)

Yes I've seen the parallel between MCU and 50's biblical epics mentioned before and it makes sense to me (partic in how both are so fucking tedious).

I don't know that "not cinema!" is ever a useful lens of critique, same as "not music!" or "not art!".

I'd say there's some more stars that kinda "count" beyond Downey Jr: Chris Pratt (for better or worse), Chadwick Boseman, ScarJo to some extent. The parade of blonde hunks called Chris hasn't got much star power but then it's not like classic Hollywood was above blank whitebread white man protagonists.

I'd be amazed if MS didn't love Miyazaki.

xp - yes the NY-er piece went through all of those actors though Downey Jr. He is the one that kept coming up through the phases of Marvel -- and the description of what Downey Jr. bought to those films sounded like he was having fun (which is often like acting, to me). The others don't register as much.

Having said that they weren't like "stars" of old. The piece had a quote from someone talking about how all their non-Marvel films bombed.

lol i do actually have a theory abt why e.g. chrises hemsworth and evans can both be effective and funny actors within the MCU ensembles, doing good close-up facework against greenscreen backdrops they can't see as they act, and then can't transfer this to films without greenscreen or their usual foils (it's not even a very elaborate or contrarian theory)

Can you please share your theory with the rest of the class?

not right now

Fair enough?

You'll have to suscribe to the patreon

i feel like "not cinema" was a gut reaction to a dull question and probably doesn't bear more analysis than that

probably yes, and also in a weird way an attempt at diplomacy - "this doesn't really have anything to do with what I do, don't ask me about it" as opposed to "this is a bad and inferior example of the medium I work in". obviously tho if his intention was to avoid outrage that didn't work out.

It was very brief and general a comment so we can say it wasn't thought through.

From this doc though we can say MS' take on cinema is very auteurist, it's maverick directors who go against the studio bosses. Or studio bosses that are mavericks. Marvel only appears to have the latter. All of it appears to be quite calculated to cut out the role of a director.

In the NY-er it talks about several comic book films which had a life before and after the MCU. So it talks about Branagh's Thor and then the later ones. I hate Branagh, but he would've stamped some Shakespearian bollocks to it (I haven't watched it so). It seems like a one-off.