Reviews
lena, Peanut, Yapi, u4ik & josephc...
THANKS for more reviews!
LOTS of reading here tonight...& some GOOD stuff. 8)
Love this part from Scott Renshaw's...
it's totally the way I feel & I've expressed similar here:
This is what you must understand about the people who decide what will appear on your multiplex screens: Hollywood executives, as a rule, have no imagination. It could be the result of some unholy cocktail of too much sun, cell-phone radiation and leather office chairs—or, more likely, the distilling effect of an industry that rewards not those who green-light good films, but those who green-light profitable films. Whatever the reason, studio bosses generally find themselves baffled by anything that isn’t something they’ve already seen before. That is why we see so many sequels, remakes and cannibalizations of foreign films: Because those are things they can visualize selling. And because so many of these films are born out of a marketing plan rather than a creative plan, we who love movies justifiably approach them with fear and trembling.
Really enjoyed reading Capone's review & this has been EXACTLY my view of Billy & Colin from waaaaay long ago...so it's good to read that someone's who's seen TD feels it too :lol: :
DiCaprio and Damon are tougher and more intense than I’ve ever seen them before, and while Costigan acts on instinct and emotion, Sullivan is more calculating and clever. He sees every angle and every possible way he could get caught before he makes a move. Damon allows us to see the wheels turning in Sullivan’s eyes, and it makes us fear him more because he’s so cunning.
And I'm still working my way through some of the other reviews here.
ONE DAY THREE HOURS!!! :wink:
Yapi
Raves for sure !!!!!
Love this comment....
But while they share equal billing, it's really DiCaprio's movie. Cortigan is more sympathetic. Having grown up with mob connections, he desperately wants to forge his own identity by joining the police force, only to find himself in an impossible, increasingly panic-fuelled position when his superiors (played by Martin Sheen and an electrifying Mark Wahlberg) inform him to stop deluding himself and place him under cover with the criminals he was exposed to as a kid. In this circle of hell you can't escape your past. Mercifully, that doesn't apply to DiCaprio. For anyone who still won't accept him after Titanic, just watch the way he deftly shifts between his fracturing identities in scene after scene and you'll understand why people have been comparing him to De Niro since he was 16.
Another rave review..the year's BEST !!
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/movies/15679777.htm
Do I love this quote or what !
Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), for the job. His recruitment is handled by Sgt. Dignam, a pathological corkscrew played by Mark Wahlberg, who leaps into his lines as if someone had just set him on fire.
Dignam has made a study of Billy's twisted family tree, and at their first meeting almost immediately comes unhinged. ``What's a lace curtain'' matriarch-loving Irishman ``like you doing in the Staties?'' Dignam demands indignantly.
He and his boss (Martin Sheen) want to send Billy into the very thing he joined the force to get away from: the thug life that was expected of him. DiCaprio shows why Scorsese has chosen him to fill the roles that Robert De Niro once played for him, first in a furious, but almost wordless, confrontation with Dignam, then as he renounces his ties to his family. Telling off Billy's corrupt uncle and moving toward the brutal bastardom
that Costello has waiting for him, DiCaprio practically levitates right off the screen.
Another good one.....and love his final comment
One of the decades BEST films !
Mantas
Love this review......thanks !
Love this description of interview scene between Costigan/Dignam
A separate and more secretive unit, run by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and foul-tongued, cynical veteran Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), interview another up and coming recruit fresh out of academy training, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio). But by the time they haul him in for an interview, they know all there is to know about him and his sordid background -- enough to attack him viciously enough to knock his survival instincts back to the stone age and destroy any self-respect that may linger. But it's only because they know he's the man with the dedication to law and the balsiness for the job of penetrating Costellos' ring.
After a scene of mental conflict such as we've rarely if ever seen before, the stage is set for writer Monahan's splintering dialogue that elevates conflicts between allies at least as much as between enemies. All the better for the subterfuges ahead. Costigan gets arrested for a staged, minor infraction to earn enough on a rap sheet to interest like minded hoodlums who will eventually bring him to Costello's extremely sly and self-preserving attention.
Also love these final comments
Thankfully, Scorsese isn't doing "Gangs of Boston." Here, he masterminds twisted motivations among symbiotic, explosive characters with enough pace and grip to make the ending, when it arrives after 2 1/2 hours, come as an unwanted surprise. Not that you want or need more in this round -- the drama is satisfactorily resolved -- but what you may be wanting more of is the same by way of excitement and performance from Scorsese's renewed and most creative self.
The soundtrack and photographic contributions lead the technical credits for brilliance. If this was a canvas it would have to be painted from a palette of Irish, Italian and Asian fireworks
Another great review....talks about political symbolism
http://www.theherald.co.uk/goingout/71353.html
Having set up the game, Scorsese lets the cast make their moves. And what moves they are. Damon is first-rate as a man consumed by ambition and the terror of losing it all. Martin Sheen, as the head of the special investigations unit, is back in JFK mode – all stretched vowels and integrity. Mark Wahlberg, his deputy, is a gloriously coarse counterbalance, and Alec Baldwin does an outrageous turn as Ellerby, the sardonic police chief who wants to "smash, or marginally disrupt" organised crime in the city.
Credit is due also to Costello's muscle – Ray Winstone and Pollok-raised actor David O'Hara, who transfers to tough south Boston as though to the manor born. A word to the wise for anyone not in this picture who hopes to win a best supporting actor Oscar: don't bother having the tux cleaned.
The mephistophelean Nicholson gets the best lines in William Monahan's screenplay. Costello to an acquaintance: "How's your mother?" Acquaintance: "Ah, she's on her way out." Costello: "We all are. Act accordingly." Costello to the young Sullivan: "You do good in school? I did too. That's what they call a paradox." Though Scorsese keeps Nicholson on a tight rein, Jack, armed with his shtick, occasionally gets loose. In the end, the picture belongs to DiCaprio, now in his third film with the director after Gangs of New York and The Aviator. When he is in a scene, the camera barely leaves his tortured little baby face. Scorsese has found his Cagney.
The departed of the title is a priestly term for the dead. What
is striking about this film is not
who is present, much as they are a joy to behold, but who is missing. There's only one woman (Vera Farmiga) in the ensemble, yet references to women as the givers of love and life keep surfacing, like life rafts to rescue drowning men, all over the place. DiCaprio and Damon are the orphan and the lost boy; Nicholson is the old king in search of an heir. Scorsese offers them redemption knowing, as we do, that for some it is too late.
The Departed is a huge, sprawling opera of despair. At two and a half hours, it's too long. It's extremely violent and at times wanders close to self-parody. Overall it has the feel of something that was ripped from its director's hands as the release date approached.
Its brilliance lies in what it has to say about contemporary America. Scorsese's characters exist not in Boston but in purgatory, and purgatory, he is saying, is where America, with its Patriot Act, its racial politics, its violence, its "have or be had" mentality, is heading. As an Asian shopkeeper shouts when he witnesses DiCaprio smashing someone's head through a door: "What's wrong with this ******* country? Everybody hates everybody!"
Freud said that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis. It's a grim joke, and one Monahan uses to perfect effect in his script.
Scorsese hasn't just put the Boston-Irish on the couch here, but his countrymen – and he's not kidding around. On his reckoning, help can't arrive fast enough.
* * * * Dir: Martin Scorsese; With: Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone
Martin Scorsese's first cinematic offering since The Aviator comes with a heady sense of deja vu. It's another gangster film, albeit one that trades the mean streets of New York for those of Boston, and Italians for Irish. In its look it echoes Goodfellas, which is not surprising since the same creative team worked on both. And the plot has been lifted lock, stock and submachine gun from Infernal Affairs, the 2002 Hong Kong thriller. Yet to call The Departed just another mob movie from Scorsese is like saying Caravaggio's subsequent efforts with the paintbrush weren't half bad, either.
Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, a rising star in the Massachusetts State Police who is also working for mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson, in his first film with Scorsese). While the department can't do enough to help Sullivan, they have a different future in mind for another police cadet, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio). Told he will never be accepted into the brotherhood of cops because of the criminal side of his family, Costigan opts to serve undercover to bring Costello down.
Costigan and Sullivan pay a high price for their duplicity. Sullivan gets a fancy home with a view of the State House. He's arrived, just like he always dreamed, yet he can't relax for a second. All Costigan has for comfort is a cheque and a shaky conviction he is doing the right thing. None of it makes up for being in Costello's cancerous orbit. In Goodfellas, Scorsese took the time to show how an impressionable boy could look at a gang of hoodlums and see something attractive, romantic even, in the life they had chosen. From the moment we see Costello executing a couple and laughing over the way the woman "fell funny", there's no pretending he is anything other than a psychopath. At 70 (a year older than Nicholson), Costello doesn't need the money any more; what he needs is to find the traitor in his midst.
Having set up the game, Scorsese lets the cast make their moves. And what moves they are. Damon is first-rate as a man consumed by ambition and the terror of losing it all. Martin Sheen, as the head of the special investigations unit, is back in JFK mode – all stretched vowels and integrity. Mark Wahlberg, his deputy, is a gloriously coarse counterbalance, and Alec Baldwin does an outrageous turn as Ellerby, the sardonic police chief who wants to "smash, or marginally disrupt" organised crime in the city.
Credit is due also to Costello's muscle – Ray Winstone and Pollok-raised actor David O'Hara, who transfers to tough south Boston as though to the manor born. A word to the wise for anyone not in this picture who hopes to win a best supporting actor Oscar: don't bother having the tux cleaned.
The mephistophelean Nicholson gets the best lines in William Monahan's screenplay. Costello to an acquaintance: "How's your mother?" Acquaintance: "Ah, she's on her way out." Costello: "We all are. Act accordingly." Costello to the young Sullivan: "You do good in school? I did too. That's what they call a paradox." Though Scorsese keeps Nicholson on a tight rein, Jack, armed with his shtick, occasionally gets loose. In the end, the picture belongs to DiCaprio, now in his third film with the director after Gangs of New York and The Aviator. When he is in a scene, the camera barely leaves his tortured little baby face. Scorsese has found his Cagney.
The departed of the title is a priestly term for the dead. What
is striking about this film is not
who is present, much as they are a joy to behold, but who is missing. There's only one woman (Vera Farmiga) in the ensemble, yet references to women as the givers of love and life keep surfacing, like life rafts to rescue drowning men, all over the place. DiCaprio and Damon are the orphan and the lost boy; Nicholson is the old king in search of an heir. Scorsese offers them redemption knowing, as we do, that for some it is too late.
The Departed is a huge, sprawling opera of despair. At two and a half hours, it's too long. It's extremely violent and at times wanders close to self-parody. Overall it has the feel of something that was ripped from its director's hands as the release date approached.
Its brilliance lies in what it has to say about contemporary America. Scorsese's characters exist not in Boston but in purgatory, and purgatory, he is saying, is where America, with its Patriot Act, its racial politics, its violence, its "have or be had" mentality, is heading. As an Asian shopkeeper shouts when he witnesses DiCaprio smashing someone's head through a door: "What's wrong with this ******* country? Everybody hates everybody!"
Freud said that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis. It's a grim joke, and one Monahan uses to perfect effect in his script.
Scorsese hasn't just put the Boston-Irish on the couch here, but his countrymen – and he's not kidding around. On his reckoning, help can't arrive fast enough.
* * * * Dir: Martin Scorsese; With: Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone
Martin Scorsese's first cinematic offering since The Aviator comes with a heady sense of deja vu. It's another gangster film, albeit one that trades the mean streets of New York for those of Boston, and Italians for Irish. In its look it echoes Goodfellas, which is not surprising since the same creative team worked on both. And the plot has been lifted lock, stock and submachine gun from Infernal Affairs, the 2002 Hong Kong thriller. Yet to call The Departed just another mob movie from Scorsese is like saying Caravaggio's subsequent efforts with the paintbrush weren't half bad, either.
Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, a rising star in the Massachusetts State Police who is also working for mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson, in his first film with Scorsese). While the department can't do enough to help Sullivan, they have a different future in mind for another police cadet, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio). Told he will never be accepted into the brotherhood of cops because of the criminal side of his family, Costigan opts to serve undercover to bring Costello down.
Costigan and Sullivan pay a high price for their duplicity. Sullivan gets a fancy home with a view of the State House. He's arrived, just like he always dreamed, yet he can't relax for a second. All Costigan has for comfort is a cheque and a shaky conviction he is doing the right thing. None of it makes up for being in Costello's cancerous orbit. In Goodfellas, Scorsese took the time to show how an impressionable boy could look at a gang of hoodlums and see something attractive, romantic even, in the life they had chosen. From the moment we see Costello executing a couple and laughing over the way the woman "fell funny", there's no pretending he is anything other than a psychopath. At 70 (a year older than Nicholson), Costello doesn't need the money any more; what he needs is to find the traitor in his midst.
Having set up the game, Scorsese lets the cast make their moves. And what moves they are. Damon is first-rate as a man consumed by ambition and the terror of losing it all. Martin Sheen, as the head of the special investigations unit, is back in JFK mode – all stretched vowels and integrity. Mark Wahlberg, his deputy, is a gloriously coarse counterbalance, and Alec Baldwin does an outrageous turn as Ellerby, the sardonic police chief who wants to "smash, or marginally disrupt" organised crime in the city.
Credit is due also to Costello's muscle – Ray Winstone and Pollok-raised actor David O'Hara, who transfers to tough south Boston as though to the manor born. A word to the wise for anyone not in this picture who hopes to win a best supporting actor Oscar: don't bother having the tux cleaned.
The mephistophelean Nicholson gets the best lines in William Monahan's screenplay. Costello to an acquaintance: "How's your mother?" Acquaintance: "Ah, she's on her way out." Costello: "We all are. Act accordingly." Costello to the young Sullivan: "You do good in school? I did too. That's what they call a paradox." Though Scorsese keeps Nicholson on a tight rein, Jack, armed with his shtick, occasionally gets loose. In the end, the picture belongs to DiCaprio, now in his third film with the director after Gangs of New York and The Aviator. When he is in a scene, the camera barely leaves his tortured little baby face. Scorsese has found his Cagney.
The departed of the title is a priestly term for the dead. What
is striking about this film is not
who is present, much as they are a joy to behold, but who is missing. There's only one woman (Vera Farmiga) in the ensemble, yet references to women as the givers of love and life keep surfacing, like life rafts to rescue drowning men, all over the place. DiCaprio and Damon are the orphan and the lost boy; Nicholson is the old king in search of an heir. Scorsese offers them redemption knowing, as we do, that for some it is too late.
The Departed is a huge, sprawling opera of despair. At two and a half hours, it's too long. It's extremely violent and at times wanders close to self-parody. Overall it has the feel of something that was ripped from its director's hands as the release date approached.
Its brilliance lies in what it has to say about contemporary America. Scorsese's characters exist not in Boston but in purgatory, and purgatory, he is saying, is where America, with its Patriot Act, its racial politics, its violence, its "have or be had" mentality, is heading. As an Asian shopkeeper shouts when he witnesses DiCaprio smashing someone's head through a door: "What's wrong with this ******* country? Everybody hates everybody!"
Freud said that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis. It's a grim joke, and one Monahan uses to perfect effect in his script.
Scorsese hasn't just put the Boston-Irish on the couch here, but his countrymen – and he's not kidding around. On his reckoning, help can't arrive fast enough.
Review gives great info about the characters=songs they are matched with...love Costello=sweet dreams
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/news/popwire_post/6088/film-review-the-departed/
The real Frank Costello was a New York Italian mobster who died in 1973. Interesting that Scorsese and his screenwriter would give their Boston “Irish Mob” boss that name. Old habits are hard to break.
Scorsese’s stock-in-trade techniques are here. He inter-cuts deftly between points of view. His deadly characters play deadly fake anger scenes - variations of the Joe Pesci “Do I amuse you?” bit. He textures the whole with his beloved pop and rock. Billy’s scenes are often set to “Gimme Shelter,” with a judicious phrase from Badfinger here ("Guess I got, what I deserved"), Van Morrison there (his version of “Comfortably Numb"). And Frank’s theme is “Sweet Dreams.”
Still, the performances crackle with smart casting - Damon’s affinity for too-smart-for-his-own-good villainy, Wahlberg’s street cred, Sheen and Baldwin’s natural authority and DiCaprio’s arrival as a leading man-in-full, vulnerable and paranoid. The movie’s an embarrassment of acting riches, so much so that not everybody has enough to do.
But “The Departed” is Scorsese’s most entertaining picture in years, dense, violent (more of his screen sadism played for laughs), and satisfying. It’s as funny as an oddball ring tone (Irish mobsters, “Scotland the Brave”?), as abrupt as a lost call.
And it’s a statement. As in “Sopranos”? Fuggedaboutit. Let the master show you how it’s done.
An A from the Boston Herald... nice. Thanks, stuckonlife.
Good fellas: Scorsese scores with mob drama ’The Departed’
By James Verniere
Boston Herald Film Critic
Thursday, October 5, 2006
The Departed
Movie Rating: (R) | Critic: A
To a list including ”The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973) and ”Mystic River” (2003), we can now add ”The Departed.”
A great, Boston-set crime drama and a ”GoodFellas”-like return to form for Martin Scorsese, ”The Departed” - the title refers to the ”dearly departed ”- is a wonderful example of genre filmmaking, another triumph for Jack Nicholson and an adeptly rooted transplant of a 2002 Hong Kong action flick.
In the Whitey Bulger-like role of gang lord Francis Costello, Nicholson wears a devilish goatee and mustache and makes his entrance practically trailing clouds of fire and brimstone.
Shaking down a Southie shop owner, Costello ogles the man’s barely adolescent daughter. Costello also bends altar boy Colin Sullivan (Conor Donovan) to his will, buying him candy and a comic book. A Shakespeare buff, Costello impishly tells Colin of the motto James Joyce attributes to Satan, ”Non serviam” (I will not serve).
In a series of gory, haikulike scenes accompanied by the Rolling Stones’ ”Gimme Shelter,” we see Costello’s rise to power, using a saw, hatchet and several bullets to several heads.
Sent by Costello to the police academy to be his mole, a grown Colin (Matt Damon, resplendent in a bad-guy role) is promoted to the ranks of Boston’s elite anti-crime unit.
At the same time, troubled Billy Costigan (a strong turn by Leonardo DiCaprio), another young Bostonian whose life choices can be summed up as cop or criminal, has chosen to become a policeman in spite of his family’s many felons.
When hothead Billy is recruited by the film’s other surrogate father, the pontifical Capt. Queenan (a fine Martin Sheen), and Sgt. Dignam (an amusingly barking-mad Mark Wahlberg) to infiltrate Costello’s gang, Billy experiences growing fear and panic and seeks the aid of police counselor Madeleine (Vera Farmiga).
The film pits the undercover men in a blind struggle with each other with Costello as Joker-cum-puppet-master, pervert and blood-drenched killer.
What’s great about ”The Departed” is its riotously profane dialogue, fabulous cast, including terrific turns by Ray Winstone and Alec Baldwin, and writer William Monahan’s relevant references to the city’s racist reputation and pedophile priest scandal. A scene featuring Costello at his breakfast table will remind some of James Cagney’s famous grapefruit moment from ”The Public Enemy,” but with another, grislier prop.
Granted, the finale boasts more corpses than a Jacobean drama, and the cell-phone-jockeying doppelganger plot of the Hong Kong original weighs a bit around the movie’s neck.
That aside, ”The Departed” is a welcome addition to the growing list of must-see Scorsese films.