Not much time for winter hikes or lengthy posts. I'm pretty much going to work all weekend except for some cards with friends for a couple of hrs tonight and my one little weekend treat, The Departed. I started it last night, will watch again while I do my physical therapy regimen, probably won't finish till Sunday. I'm excited to see if I will like it as much as Mega (i.e that much more than Babel). So far it's pretty solid--it'd certainly has more amazing actors in one film than I've seen in a long time. Too bad that this probably worked against any acting Oscars.
I'd be interested what you all think about the Oscar attention it got, especially considering the view that the attention was more about finally giving an Oscar to Scorsese than about this particular film.
8 comments:
Make sure you watch it more than once (my mantra), because it really holds up and the connections and the beauty of its structure really emerge. I am very anxious to hear what you think.
Just to further demonstrate my obsessiveness about this movie (which I love--did I already say that?)--here's a review that says some of what I feel about it:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061023/klawans
I know it was a Scorse flick, but when Martin Sheens character hits the ground, I darn near barfed. And, I have dissected human remains.
IT was a great show which reflected that real complexity reflected in the human condition. It was difficult to determine who was "the good guy" and who was "the bad guy." This is what it really is all about... behavior. Each action and circumstance really made me think about what was morally taking place. I often found my judgments very different than if I had taken a characteroligical stance rather than a behavioral one.
My 14-year-old really wanted to watch it. I told him no. What are your thoughts??
Travis
I would make your kid wait. My youngest son saw it at 17--that seems about right.
I was baffled by all the people who characterized it as a mere entertainment. I agree with you, Travis, that it provokes thought about our actions and the moral effects they have.
Well, I'm just thinking out loud here. I haven't gotten this all figured out and would need another view to even anything worth saying but blogs are for these kind of half-baked ideas.
I want to love the Departed, I really do, but I just can't. I liked it a lot but ... I feel sort of wimpy because most of my reasons (the brutal violence, no breathtaking moments, the claustrophobic and insulated plot--Scorseseland as the Nation article calls it) sound like the reasons people give who want a PG rated film world.
But it's not that. I mean I didn't want total redemption though it was tough to see the only character I cared about (DiCaprio) get shot without foreshadowing or warning. I don't want less violence, but more meaningful violence. I just felt like something was missing.
And maybe that means I wanted something from the film it wasn't created to give but that's how it played out for me. Still, I'm assuming even someone who loved the film had to wonder about the last scene and last killing: Wahlberg with medical booties shooting the Damon character. Why leave us with this silly scene in our head? It made no sense to me.
I didn't see the last scene as silly at all (and I have mentally edited out the rat, by the way).
I felt breathtaken throughout the film, so I wonder if the fact that you weren't is partly because you saw it on a small screen. (I realize the small screen/big screen may sound fetishistic, but seriously, some movies are so diminished on the small screen that it's hardly worth watching them.) I suppose you probably won't, given your first reaction, but I wish you could watch it again.
I do think that the fact that it is, or seems to be, a genre picture--double-crossing cop movie--makes it seem trivial.
Please explain mega--why is this last scene interesting?
I mean I think I get the possible moral ambiguity--Wahlberg's character is a total ass, a guy seemingly willing to manipulate vulnerable young wanna be cops, like Dicaprio, in order to get the big bust. Turns out he has some balls as he gives up his job and is on to Damon. But so what? Shooting Damon is some moral equalizer? I just didn't care about the last scene. And the rat?? Talk about hit me over the head.
Mega will be pissed at me but I think great, like I mean amazing, movies work on big and little screens. Remember I DID really like this film; it just wasn't amazing for me.
In the end, and I'm stealing a bit of this idea from a review I read, it wants to be a larger than life Shakespearean tragedy, the doorways littered with dead bodies, but to be tragically beautiful we must connect with the characters and make intimate in-roads with the emotional landscape. But for me most of the characters, esp Damon, his girlfriend, and Wahlberg, are ultimately emotionally inaccessible and the world Scorsese gives us is one I can't relate to. As Lear ravages his own eyes, I see him as a man, someone like me, but when these cop-men die I only see cops getting shot in the head, squirting THEIR blood on the wall.
(not pissed) I completely disagree about big and small screens. How could this be true? Movie movies are made on film to be shown on large screens. The small screen is a poor simulacrum of the large one. No way.
I think that last scene is a refusal of the elegiac tone that has been building since the death of the Martin Sheen character. I don't know that Scorsese was going for Shakespearean, at least not Lear-type tragedy (maybe Hamlet, a hero that also leaves me cold). I guess what was interesting to me all the way through, and persuasive, is the way identity depends so thoroughly upon enactment of the familiar, especially, obviously, for the Leonardo diCaprio character. I also found the Damon character understandable, especially in light of the beginning of the film, where it shows how he was formed. The film is flawed, in my mind, to the extent which Nicholson overacts. He doesn't always, but when he does, it's not good.
Okay, that's all I'm saying. I really loved this movie--loved its movie-ish qualities (great acting, suave technique, great writing) and its meditation on identity. That is the end of the story, for me. Wish you'd loved it, alas.
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