Best Martin Scorsese movie

Just ask yourself, Soto: WWJCD?

Casino:
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Goodfellas was a much better movie, but the Pesci scenes aren't anywhere near as good. "You think I'm funny?" scene = way overrated.

Just ask yourself, Soto: WWJCD?

Hm?

I'm voting for No Direction Home.

What Would John Cassavetes Do?
xpost

He'd listen to Le Tigre.

All the Bringing Out The Dead lurve is pleasantly surprising. That's my pick. I've seen probably half of Scorcese's films and I generally find his stuff pretty underwhelming. I just think he's maybe not really my thing, and Bringing Out... is different enough from his usual shtick that he managed to move more into "my thing" territory.

Goodfellas and The Departed were "fun" enough. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are two of the most overrated movies of that era. I can barely remember anything about the other Scorceses that I've seen, aside from the fact that they didn't leave much of an impression one way or the other.

o man, 4 ilx posters like this movie. i can see why you needed to get out there and shake up the establishment, that shit is stifling.

OK, when the results go up and GoodFellas gets no more than 4 votes, you can feel free to throw that back in my face. And I'll take it back and say no it's not his most overrated. Just his worst.

That said, I'm no big Scorsese fan in the first place. Taxi Driver and Last Temptation are about the only two films of his I really love.

Say what you will about one Best Picture nominee being more overrated than the five other Best Picture nominees, but to call GoodFellas his worst? you crazy.

it's contrarianism gone amuck!

how about this: whichever wins this poll is his most overrated unless it's the one i picked.

wow, Eric being a real Paulette re Goodfellas!

(Kael was cold about it not having a "gangster hero," which is kinda wtf)

and yeah Kundun is his last interesting one (aside from the film-history surveys)

I watched it so many times that I doubt I'll ever be able to fully enjoy it again, but After Hours. Then King of Comedy. Then Mean Streets, which is a much better film and De Niro performance than Taxi Driver and I can't figure why it's not getting more love here.

mean streets is really good. maybe i'd upgrade it to "great" on my list. but taxi driver i think is the apocalyptic american movie that nashville and, uh, apocalypse now and various other '70s heart-of-darkness excercises aspired to. dystopian sci-fi without the sci-fi. i saw an interview with scorsese talking about filming night scenes at 42nd and 8th, how much he hated being there and how scared the whole crew was the whole time they were doing it, like they were filming in a war zone or something. probably excessive paranoia, but it comes across in the movie, it's so nervous and jangly. but funny too, especially the scenes with de niro and cybill shepherd.

Goodfellas just shading Taxi Driver, with Mean Streets third.

I'm voting for No Direction Home.

Apparently he had fuck-all to do with that, other than doing a brief voiceover and slapping his name on it.

no. The Dylan interview footage was pre-shot. He was chief assembler, is my understanding.

yeah he was basically asked to direct the entire editing process

wow, Eric being a real Paulette re Goodfellas! (Kael was cold about it not having a "gangster hero," which is kinda wtf)

Nah, I just don't think it's any good.

It's a movie that shows how a subculture works, so I love it for the same big reason I love Paris Is Burning.

i voted Goodfellas.
i've never seen King of Comedy but i'm thinking i prolly should.

um, yes

Voted "Mean Streets" in the end, ya mooks.

i'll take deniro as smartass fuckup (mean streets, king of comedy, er, jackie brown) instead of wise man (everything else) any day

i've never seen after hours but i "obtained" it a week ago - it's sitting there, lonely and unwatched.

i remember being crazy impressed by sharon stone in casino. is that the only outsized, convincing female role in all of scorcese's movies?

"After Hours" is great

i remember being crazy impressed by sharon stone in casino. is that the only outsized, convincing female role in all of scorcese's movies?

Haven't seen Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, but I suspect you haven't either.

Correct

Sandra Bernhard is def "outsized" and great in tKoC.

Miriam Margoyles in The Age of Innocence too.

although Taxi Driver is better and prob. the best, i'll go with Mean Street, cause it's less of a boring answer.
personaly, i adore Alice as well.and i wanna see The Age of Innocence again

that's true morbs. her character's not exactly.. multidimensional but she is at least interesting (though i chalk this up mainly to sadra bernhard)

I've always perceived Goodfellas as sort of a rough draft and incomplete tale that was later retold and perfected with Casino.

I've always taken it for granted that Scorcese's mobster movies were made with an intentionally hierarchical construction - "Mean Streets" is the little guys, the low-level hustlers, the bottom-feeders of the mafia; "Goodfellas" is the next level up, the foot soldiers; "Casino" is the "captains"/capos, the guys who run crews and larger operations. But in each of these movies there's the guys in the backroom, the dons at the top, who are never really brought into the spotlight... which has always made me think he's got one more movie in him, closer in tone and scope maybe to "The Godfather". I initially thought "Gangs of NY" was gonna be this movie, but then it turned out to be a costume drama with Lenny D and I tuned out....

I liked Casino, but it seemed a bit more, I dunno, contrived. Like Scorsese was trying to make a Scorsese movie (which he did quite well, unsurprisingly enough.)

foot soldiers > capos

maybe he's just waiting til DeNiro is suitably old/fat enough

is that the only outsized, convincing female role in all of scorcese's movies?

outsized + convincing female roles? what are other examples of this fantastical animal? also not sure if there's a simple answer to your question, given the depth + breadth of his filmography.

scorsese's work is concerned primarily with the psychology of men, so the women do tend to get short shrift. he doesn't go out of his way to construct realistic female characters, however he does get out of the way if a woman character has a strong presence. thinking of bracco in goodfellas, burstyn in alice.

as the story goes, alice was a vehicle for ellen burstyn and she interviewed the relatively unknown scorsese for the director slot. she asked him what he knew about women and he responded, "nothing, but I'm willing to learn." that wasn't completely true - I'll rep again for his first movie, who's that knocking at my door, which points a critical eye at men's attitudes towards women (particularly the guys from his neighborhood, and most likely himself by extension).

you can look at jodie foster in taxi driver and say that it's some idealized portrait of a child prostitute, but couldn't the same be said of de niro or keitel's characters? there's a grittiness to taxi driver that people take as realism, but it's more of a hypergrittiness with heavy conceptual compenents. I'm not sure if by "convincing" you mean "realistic" though.

Both Goodfellas (Wise Guys) and The Age of Innocence are great American books. With Goodfellas, Scorsese maybe took a little too much at face value in that long rat squeal (Henry Hill later admitted to doing much worse shit, including murder, than portrayed in the film) but Scorsese adds all sorts of much-needed darkness and tension not in the book, including pretty much all the scenes you remember. I guess I agree with Kael that it lacks a strong central voice (enter The Sopranos), but it's so much more fun than Casino, which is like a long purge.

The Age of Innocence is an unusually faithful adaptation until the end, which Scorsese botches. In the book, there's a subtly wrenching scene left out of the film, where this guy who's given up his chance at a "real life" goes to Paris and takes in the art and culture he's missed--it's obvious that he's crippled and unable to even embark on that longed-for affair, where in the movie he's almost presented as being somehow honorable, and I think it's telling that Scorsese dedicated the film to his father.

Scorsese's most perfect movie is American Boy: A Portrait of Steven Prince--absolutely great short doc subject, filmed in Rouch-verite style with Scorsese on camera, with the kind of fight that got fictionalized in Mean Streets, and that adrenaline needle anecdote that got stolen and fictionalized in Pulp Fiction.

There are a couple moments in Taxi Driver that throw me out of that picture's fevered viewpoint: One is that slow pan (is that the right word?) over the crime scene at the end, and the other is the final scene in the cab, which (I'd think) would be super uncomfortable, and by some contrivance isn't (I don't quite buy that he'd be taken as a hero). Pelecanos rewrote the whole scenario so much more convincingly in Hell to Pay that the source material suffers by comparison, but Taxi Driver is still an amazing movie to me--and it gets me so much more inside its loneliness, alienation, and racism than King of Comedy gets me inside its insecurity and social ineptitude.

Raging Bull has a more compelling romance-gone-to-shit than either Casino or New York New York, and La Motta is a more striking figure all around; ItalianAmerican and Mean Streets are affectionate intros to that whole milieu. I also love the New York Stories segment, and the thumb-sucking scene in Cape Fear, and a couple suspenseful set piece in The Departed. I'll keep an open mind about the rest, but I find myself actively annoyed by how overrated it seems: Scorsese should have made The Last Waltz about the Clash.

the final scene in the cab, which (I'd think) would be super uncomfortable, and by some contrivance isn't (I don't quite buy that he'd be taken as a hero).

I thought the common interpretation was that the the whole post-crime-scene pan was Bickle's fantasy (similar to the final scenes in KoC)

er post-crime-scene pan sequence (ie, the "hero" newsclipping shots, the final cab ride, etc.)

in re the new york stories segment, this hbo documentary about the artist who inspired it (whose paintings are used in it) is partly interesting and partly pathetic. imagine that nolte character as a real person, 20 years past his market prime, 20 years more of drunk, and just as egomaniacal, and that's pretty much the story.

more of A drunk. altho "more of drunk" is accurate enough.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

goodfellas is his masterpiece and i suspect people who are saying casino is better, saw casino first.

the first hour or so of casino is quite good, but i agree with the conventional take that, by the end, the whole thing seemed pointless and like a goodfellas redux with diminishing returns

Not enough support for "Life Lessons."

taxi driver is really the only thing on the list that i could honestly call a masterpiece. the soundtrack is outstanding and i can't imagine the movie without it.

all the stuff about how king of comedy is somehow a superior take on the same material makes no sense to me -- apart from the fact that they're both about two rather unpleasant people, the two films have nothing at all in common. if anything, KoC seems like a 'safer' film to me -- you're not at all asked to identify with rupert pupkin the way you are with travis bickle, and the film holds you at arm's length all the way through. not that it's not a good film, but yeesh, enough already.

Never been able to stomach KOC, and it's not for lack of trying. It's just a grind to watch. De Niro isn't convincing as a schlub (yet).

man i used to love his movies as much as anyone, read bios, interviews, etc but increasingly more and more my estimation of him and his films goes further and further down and increasingly raging bull stands out more and more as the one raw nerve, the one time he poked his head out the movie theater. i'm sure i'd still love and enjoy most of the movies i loved and enjoyed then but there's almost none of them i NEED to see, need to revisit, i don't think most of them would shake me in any sense beyond the visceral/sensational. this isn't a slam, unlike his progeny - the andersons, tarantino, insert a million other names here - he actually bases his shots, cuts, choices on elements in the story he's trying to tell as opposed to 'this is something neat i saw someone do in another movie once' (though obv that element's there in spades as well), he's not illiterate, he's not an idiot, his interest in cinema goes beyond 'the shit i grew up with'. so i'm voting raging bull, w/ 'life lessons' and the age of innocence - the only flicks he's made in the past twenty years that haven't felt like treading water or flailing against his limitations (kundun over last temptation here btw) AND both also manage to convey how desperate manic agonizing and powerful love/desire can be as opposed to telling you 'man i loved this girl so much but she drives me crazy wtf but i love her what are you gonna do right? *cue 'love is drug', slow motion shot of sharon stone*'). my superfun rollercoaster willyagetaloadofthat scorsese pic is afterhours over goodfellas.

i might take koc over taxi driver if only cuz one has sandra bernhard and one has cybil shepard (looking like 'mussolini in drag' in john simon's words).

raging bull i have such mixed feelings about. i don't think there's anything wrong with it exactly, it's probably his best-composed, most thought-out movie. but i think he tries to invest something in the story that i just don't buy as being there. jake isn't sympathetic, ok sure, he's not supposed to be. he's not totally unsympathetic either. he's more pathetic than anything. he's also not very interesting, but that's ok too. i think my problem is theological. jake is this very fundamentally catholic figure, his redemption and his suffering are all bound up with each other and he can't have one without the other. (and actual redemption never really comes, the hallmark of the lapsed catholic.) i respect scorsese's theological complexity, i think he's one of the great catholic directors. but i don't share his struggles, so all the angst and pain are a little foreign to me. in mean streets and taxi driver the martyr figures don't require identification, just interest. but raging bull pulls in so close that if you don't on some level identify with jake's inarticulate existential torment -- and i don't -- then it becomes sort of a lot of distant moral pageantry. the passion of jake lamotta.