DVD Review | The Departed

Old Jack City

by Thomas Delapa


Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and a cast of seven robbing hoods. The Boston underworld. Director Martin Scorsese. Now that you've seen the bad-ass ads for The Departed, I know what all youse wiseguys are thinking: a mob movie in the tradition of GoodFellas.

Well, you can fuhgetaboutit. Redolent of four-letter words, Scorsese's flatulent Boston massacre doesn't amount to hill of beans. Count me among those who wished to depart from The Departed before it was over.

Perhaps still smarting from The Aviator's Oscar snub, Scorsese has landed with bloody vengeance back on his home turf in the gangster flick. But this is easily his worst film since Cape Fear. How bad is GoodFellas Does Boston? So bad that even Jack Nicholson is a deadly bore.

When we first see Nicholson as sleazy gangland boss Frank Costello, he's slithering into a dark cafe, sporting a grizzled goatee and armed with insinuating sexual language. Nicholson's accompanied on the soundtrack by the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," helping to cue us in that Costello is, by golly, the devil. At least Scorsese mercifully delivers us from "Sympathy for the Devil."

In William Monahan's script—lifted from the 2002 Hong Kong hit, Infernal Affairs—Boston is a ratty hellhole where you can't tell the difference between the crooks and the cops. That's literally true when it comes to Billy Costigan (DiCaprio), a troubled rookie policeman who's assigned to infiltrate Costello's gang. Costigan's cop doppelganger is Colin Sullivan (Damon), who in actuality is Costello's top mole in the state police.

Scorsese and Monahan pile on the bodies and four-letter words with a nihilistic glee that might even cause Tony Soprano to run to confession. Somewhere among the scumbags, dickheads and fucksticks (that's a new one), Monahan's lamebrain script wants to connect the corpses in a study of how gangland crime is rooted in a perverse sense of family obligation. Gee, and I thought I was just watching a Scorsese snuff film.

Beginning with his miscasting in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio has let his own fixation with Scorsese as his screen daddy take him down a dark Steadicam path. With the exception of an admirably subdued Alec Baldwin, all the actors in this movie seem to be juiced on testosterone shots from Floyd Landis' doctor. The unwritten mobster dialogue here isn't "Top of world, Ma!" but rather, "Look how tough I am, Ma, I'm in a Scorsese movie!"

Not only is Scorsese repeating himself in self-parody, but even his usual flair for pop music sounds a death knell. Alongside "Gimme Shelter" (twice) and Patsy Cline's "Crazy" (twice), composer Howard Shore can only contribute a limp background score. Veteran cinematographer Michael Ballhaus' camera is as dead as Costello's numbing parade of victims, including one who falls splat from five stories up at DiCaprio's feet.

Buried within Monahan's script is a relevant 9/11-era theme about the absurd turf wars waging between city, state and federal crime agencies. In one attempt after another to collar Costello, the police bungle the arrest, looking like the Keystone Cops in plainclothes. That Costello may be an FBI informant further blurs the lines of cop and criminality, adding to the witches' brew.

But Scorsese lets his cast play everything at a fever pitch in overheated confrontations that boil over with random acts of brutality. Loosely based on the notorious mob exploits of "Whitey" Bulger, The Departed is no departure for Nicholson, who riffs on all his past Satanic-majesty roles, from The Witches of Eastwick to The Shining.

An ugly 2 1/2-hour whack-fest, The Departed left me hoping that Scorsese will never darken the screen with another gangster movie again.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 10/12/06
[Postscript: The Departed won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for 2006.]

The 84th Academy Awards -- 2012

Midnight in Hollywood

by Thomas Delapa


And now, the envelope please for the best morning-after Oscar lead: Silent Night ... Silence Was Golden ... Let’s Hear it for The Artist. ... For Hugo, it was a basic Paint It Black.

Zut alors! The Artist, a loving Franco-American tribute to silent cinema, spoke the loudest at the 84th Academy Awards, winning gold in five categories, including Best Director and Best Picture. There were few surprises in Hollywood’s genial, but generally lackluster annual tribute to itself. The biggest winner might have been the worldwide audience, which at least didn’t have to endure a return performance from last year’s tinny Gen-X teaming of James Franco and Anne Hathaway.

Meryl Streep may have pulled off a small upset for her victory as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, besting Viola Davis in The Help, and Streep might have even won over the crowd for her disarming acceptance speech. “Streep fatigue”? After a record 17 nominations and three wins, you bet. Hollywood’s reigning grande dame (at the age of 62), Streep has steeped into the Starbucks of the movies—omnipresent, rich and creamy, and not without a bitter aftertaste.

Nostalgia, not Grease, was the word the long night, starting with Billy Crystal’s ninth role as host. Crystal was drafted when Eddie Murphy bowed out in allegiance to foot-in-mouth producer Brett Ratner, whose salacious and homophobic remarks last November got him the boot. In the 3-hour-plus event, Hollywood preferred to look back, not forward, focusing on its glittery past rather than its uncertain future in the age of thinning audiences and the multi-media challenges to its dominance—not unlike its slow fade in the made-for-TV 1950s.

With box-office attendance down significantly in 2011, the studios continue to bet on overstuffed technology and novelty, not talent, especially 3-D. Even New (now Old) Hollywood film purists Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg joined the 3-D parade in 2011, though not with big hits. While the $150 million-plus Hugo did grab the lion’s share of technical Oscars, it barely meowed in the major categories, which won’t much help its so far one-dimensional ticket sales.

In Hollywood’s own backyard at the sponsor-less (nee Kodak) theater, The Artist was masterful, leaving most American nominees French-fried and tongue-tied. Best Director Michel Hazanavicius thanked the late, great Billy Wilder three times, while gushing Best Actor Jean Dujardin said he loved our country and gave a shout-out to Douglas Fairbanks, one of his models for his role as silent star George Valentin. Among the hunky also-rans, George Clooney had to be content with statuesque supermodel Stacy Kiebler on his arm, while Brad Pitt seemed satisfied to be clutching Angelina Jolie, whose slit gown (and vampy podium pose) tied her with a full-breasted Jennifer Lopez for best (un)dressed star.

While Billy Crystal did yeoman’s work in a substitute lead role, ringing in with a few zingers ("Nothing can take the sting out of world economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with gold statues"), his schtick seemed a déjà vu rewind, sort of like the Oscars as whole. The Artist became the first silent movie since 1927-28 (and Wings) to win for Best Picture. The fact that a low-budget, nearly wordless, black-and-white movie stomped its well-heeled competition speaks volumes about how much loud, mainstream Hollywood has lost its way, if not its voice.

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2/27/12

Film Review | War Horse & The Adventures of Tintin

War and Oats

by Thomas Delapa


Less is often more in Hollywood movies, but don’t tell that to screen general Steven Spielberg, director of two, count ‘em two, major holiday releases. In the case of War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg had an uphill battle before the first shots.

According to the Associated Press, Hollywood’s 2011 box-office numbers will hit a low not seen since 1995. With no blockbusters on the scale of Avatar or The Lord of the Rings, few summer smashes and most A-list directors taking a holiday hiatus, election-year adult audiences ought to be asking themselves, “Where’s the beef?” Instead of hefty films with bite, Spielberg and fellow auteur-in-arms Martin Scorsese (in Hugo) served up candy-coated corn.

Based on a children’s novel by British author Michael Morpurgo that grew into a hit play, War Horse is a handsome but skittish crossbreed between Black Beauty and All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a boy-and-his-horse story about young Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and Joey, a spirited colt who marches from the green fields of Devon to the bloody World War I battlefields of France. Forcibly separated from Albert, Joey passes from one owner to the next, finally arriving in the beastly trench warfare of the Somme.

Perched in the no-man’s-land between kiddie-lit and anti-war tract, Spielberg’s dramatic terrain is tricky, and he never quite finds his footing. As a plow horse, Joey saves the family farm from a mean landlord (David Thewlis), the melodramatic load lightened by Disneyfied comic touches and John Williams’ mickey-mousing score. Though Spielberg aims at making a heartwarming family film, War Horse only pulses during the few battle scenes, led by a David Lean-like British cavalry charge, bayonets drawn, against the Germans.

In the novel, Joey himself narrates his story as he’s yanked along under the reins of a string of good and bad owners. But with that voice gone on the screen, we’re left with the anthropomorphized sight of woeful, mistreated Joey, a mute Mr. Ed. Except for a kindly captain (Tom Hiddleston) who drafts the horse as his mount, Joey’s human co-stars have even less to say, surrendering to a script that comes up lame in the backstretch.

Whether affixed with bumper stickers that say War Is Hell or Be Kind To Animals, War Horse plods through a well-trod turf. Throughout Joey’s journey, we watch his human handlers making and breaking promises to each other and him, resulting in separation, loss, and death. The nadir of the fable is a mawkish vignette that drops Joey into the arms of a French farmer’s sugar-sweet granddaughter who seems airlifted in from a 1930s Deanna Durbin movie.

By the time the climax is dragged in, the battle for the audience’s minds, if not their hearts, is over. In the thick of a battle between the British and Germans at the Somme, Joey becomes the catalyst for the most improbable wartime plot turn since McHale joined the Navy.

For the bottom-half of his 2011 double feature, Spielberg drafted the Eurocentric Tintin comic-book series written by Belgian author Hergé. Like Scorsese in Hugo, Spielberg takes his first flying, in-your-lap leap into the world of 3-D fantasy, enhanced with motion-capture visual effects. If War Horse might claim partial victory on looks and animal magnetism, the retro charm of Tintin is conspicuously missing in action. For all the millions spent on this production, it’s hard to picture how anyone could generate such a generically lackluster teen hero. Only HAL 9000 might warm up to Tintin, a carrot-topped boy journalist who stumbles into a mysterious plot thick with thieves, treasure and ships in bottles.

Despite his G-rated retorts ("Great snakes!"), this kid also bizarrely packs a handgun, setting off a slew of frenetic chases and shootouts befitting a low-caliber action movie. For a director who went so far as to digitally delete the guns in his E.T. re-release, Spielberg seems to have sailed off into a weird new dimension, and a shallow one at that.

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1/4/12

Film Review | The Last Waltz (1978)

And the Band Played On

by Thomas Delapa


Was the greatest American rock ‘n’ roll band, gulp, (mostly) Canadian?

Before you start waving Old Glory or invoke the Patriot Act, consider the case of the Band, one of rock’s most influential groups and arguably the most musically virtuoso. If the Doors, the Grateful Dead and the Beach Boys represented the cream of West Coast classic rock, the Band was the best from the American Heartland.

Whatever your affections, the Band’s The Last Waltz still may be the last word in rock-concert documentaries. An exuberant, star-studded record of the band’s 1976 farewell concert, it’s one rockumentary that still rolls, nearly 35 years later.

On San Francisco’s famed Winterland stage on Thanksgiving Day, the Band got together to say goodbye after 16 years as a group. Among Canadians Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, Arkansas-born Levon Helm was the lone Yank when they were first incarnated as the Hawks. It wasn't until the mid-sixties that “the Band” moniker stuck, and by then they had emerged as Bob Dylan’s backup group. Robertson (guitar) and Helm (drums) were with Dylan at his tumultuous Forest Hills, N.Y., concert in 1965, when he shocked his folkie fans by plugging in and going electric.

It was during those heady days that Dylan and the Band collaborated on one of rock’s most celebrated underground recordings—eventually released as The Basement Tapes in 1975. In 1968, the Band came out with their heralded debut album, Music from Big Pink, containing such signature tunes as “The Weight.”

As rock critic Greil Marcus once wrote, the Band “brought us in touch with the place where we all had to live.” No other U.S.-based band was so immersed in such an eclectic array of musical sources. Rockabilly, country, the blues, jazz, gospel—and classical—were among their touchstones; in retrospect, they also formed the leading edge of burgeoning “country rock,” along with Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Allman Brothers. The Band’s roots in bygone musical Americana go way back, so deep that one critic observed that they were the only rock group that might have played at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration.

And now we can be nostalgic about the Band, which has sadly unraveled since its official 1976 swan song. A long-running feud between Robertson and Helm (over songwriting credits) resulted in Helm’s absence when the group was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Rick Danko died in 1999, while Richard Manuel took his own life in 1986.

What remains, as always, is the art and music, and fans should be grateful that director Martin Scorsese conducted The Last Waltz with a polished, first-class elegance, shooting it like a feature film with multiple 35mm cameras. Scorsese—then in the midst of his own triumphs with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—sandwiches the 20-odd songs with brief backstage interviews with the band members, a pool table and a Confederate flag acting as dissonant backdrops. Scorsese’s own backup included a trio of star cinematographers in Michael Chapman,Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs.

What gives The Last Waltz its shake and shimmy isn’t just the songs but the cavalcade of guest stars that are practically a primer of three decades of popular music. While Neil Young, Dr. John, Emmylou Harris, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, the Staples Singers, Muddy Waters and, yes, Neil Diamond all drop in, it’s a spangled Van Morrison who burns up Winterland, pumping up the volume on “Caravan.” To top it off, a cool Dylan strolls in for his own fancy footwork, leading the ensemble in the anthem-like “I Shall Be Released.”

The Last Waltz was released on DVD in 2002, and includes a commentary track by Scorsese and Robertson, bonus footage and a "making-of" featurette.

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2/19/11

Film Review | Shutter Island

Two flew over the cuckoo’s nest

by Thomas Delapa

“It was a dark and stormy night...”

Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s opening line is so infamously portentous, even Snoopy dug spoofing it.

But dog-eared clichés obviously didn’t stand in the way of Martin Scorsese in his direction of Shutter Island, a waterlogged psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Be afraid, be very afraid. Just remember, it’s only a movie. And yeah, DiCaprio sees dead people.

Collaborating with his Aviator star for the fourth time, Scorsese battens down the hatches for a blustery and tempest-tossed B-movie overblown into 138-minute, A-movie scale. Up the coast from Cape Fear and a few miles from where he left us in The Departed, Scorsese and crew sail to the lunatic fringe of Boston harbor, where a maximum-security asylum ominously sits like Alcatraz for the criminally crazy. Fantasy Island it’s not.

Landing into the doom and gloom is DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels, a hard-nosed 1950s federal marshal, and his dutiful new partner (Mark Ruffalo). They’ve been assigned to the case of a missing axe murderer, who one night vanished from her cell “as if she evaporated.”

Cue the furious wind, sound the lightning, and bring on the blaring fog-horns. As soon as the pair set foot on the grounds of Ashcliffe Hospital, the night gets darker and the storms get stormier. Production designer Dante Ferretti pours it on, flaunting (and floating) every sort of Gothic convention and summoning up the ghosts of monster-horror-chiller movie past.

There’s no escape from Shutter Island, little buddy, nor from its mad grab bag of WWII-era historical buoys, including, but not limited to, Cold War government conspiracies, concentration-camp atrocities, Nazi lobotomies, brainwashed spooks and old-fashioned American mass murderers. It’s also drenched with arch film homages, from 1940s “B” film master Val Lewton to Sam Fuller’s 1963 loony-bin thriller Shock Corridor, and zigzagging all the back to 1920s German expressionism.

Call me crazy, but Scorsese’s script (from a book by Dennis Lehane) is so overstuffed and campy fantastic, it would send Freud himself back to the couch. It’s gimmicky, too, since it’s one of those thrillers that cheats by making unknowable—in retrospect—what’s real and what isn’t. Once on the island, Daniels is haunted by ghoulish visions of his dead wife (Michelle Williams)—as well as his horrific memories of liberating a German death camp. From the outset, he butts head with the hospital’s placid director (Ben Kingsley), who just has to be hiding something. If Kingsley isn’t suspicious enough, lurking in the shadows is a German doctor (Max Von Sydow) with a fondness for Mahler.

In these choppy but shallow waters, Scorsese tosses in a school of red herrings, each more lurid than the one before. Whatever 1950s social comment the film seems to be making, it’s yanked out of the picture by an undertow of gruesome sensationalism.

Over the course of Scorsese’s long, much-honored but schizoid career, he’s listed wildly between artful, deeply felt movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and pulpy commercial rust buckets like Cape Fear and The Departed. Despite (or because of) a crazy plot twist, you can find Shutter Island in the latter. In the final analysis, it’s all wet.

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