Scorsese and DiCaprio return to Boston

[Big Magilla]

Wow. If ever there's been a thread that derailed so quickly I don't know what it is.

Getting back to the original topic, I think Scorsese and DiCaprio are a potent combination that gets better with each film. Leo was miscast in the turgid, phony Gangs of New York that had only two things going for it - the spectacular set design and Daniel Day-Lewis' over-the-top but can't-take-your-eyes-off of him performance. The Aviator worked because of Leo's performance. The Hollywood history was laughable - the Kate Hepburn and Ava Gardner characters, though well played, verged on caricature but Leo's Hughes was solid all the way through.

The Departed as one of last year's best films. I've watched it three or four times and like it more each time. It is as good in its own way as the original Infernal Affiars was in its. The performance that grows on me each time is Matt Damon's, but that doesn't diminish Leo's fine work. Whereas De Niro ws the right actor to embody the dark characters of Scorsese's younger years, Leo is the right actor to embody the more complex, mellower characters of his golden years.

As to Age of Innocence, rarely has a film been so ineptly made by a director clearly out of his league. The cotumes were nice and Winona Ryder was good playing against type as the WASP wife, but Day-Lewis and Pheiffer, as good as they may have been in certain scenes, were basically playing teh screenplays underwritten cyphers. I found the the narration by Joanne Woodward, used to cover up what was lacking in the script, to be quite jarring, and what was Alewxis Smith doing in this picture? An extra could have been cast in her part it was so embarassingly tiny.

As to Spielberg, I've always preferred his serious films to his "I'm just a child at heart movies". Because he is basically a child at heart, the most successful filmmaker of his generation who still can't believe his luck, all his films have that element of hope that charactized the best of Hollywood's golden age. As Oliver Stone, of all people, says in his commentary on the Executite Suite DVD, what's wrong with a happy ending? That's what made Hollywood great, he goes on to say, giving hope and inspiration to the world. We could all use a little more of that in today's filsm and Speilberg is the only major director not ashamed to give it to us.

I've never gotten The Color Purple bashing. If you want to see silly and embarassing watch the sugary Oprah Winfrey produced musical version. The Spielberg version is in teh tradition of the best of Hollywood, as is A.I.: Artifical Intelligence. No, it's not Kubrick, but as the man says, it is a film by Steven Spielberg not Stanley Kubrick and it would have been completely out of character for Spielberg to give it a bleak ending. The ending of the film as it stands is either hopeful or pessimistic depending on your view and depending on your mood. It can be taken either way.

Out of Africa had pretty scenery and good performacnes from Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer, but Robert Redrord's phoned in performance shoots it down faster than a missile to a bi-plane could. A mixed bag of a film if there ever was one.

There is a lot to like about The Piano, but I think its feminist man-bashing goes a bit too far when Sam Neill breaks Holly Hunter's fingers. Schindler's List was the superior film that year. At least that's the way I saw it, and still do.

[Uri]

What is a perfect casting? I guess what flipp meant, and rightly so, is that the casting worked perfectly in the contest of the film. Sean Connery is considered the best James Bond because his miscasting was so inspired he made Moore or Brosnan, who seemed as if they stepped right off the pages of Fleming’s books, look second best. According to Margaret Mitchell, Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful, yet Leigh is now universally considered the ultimate cinematic incarnation of the character as written. When I read The Age off Innocence, even though it was after I saw the film, I imagined the rather Amazonian, expert archer, blond May in the shape of Uma Turman. And the countess’ alienation would have been perfectly impersonated by a non American actress – the striking Gina Mckee, who physically and acting wise as well as her age at the time was just right, could have been great in the part. So what? Casting is part of the artistic interpretation and this is how Scrosese looked at the characters (he had the love triangle of Doctor Zivago in mind, hence Geraldine Chaplin as May’s mother). I would’ve loved to see Gone with the Wind starring Paulette Goddard, or Jean Arthur, or even Hepburn (a miscasting, if ever there was one), but it doesn’t diminish my ability to admire Leigh’s performance. It’s ok not to be mesmerized by the this film version The Age off Innocence, or not to be emotionally devastated by it – to each his own – but don’t rule it out based on petty technicality.

[flipp525]

Damien you are correct of course, but I think the thinking was Michelle Pfeiffer was ravishing enough that Newland would risk offending the social echelon, while Winona Ryder was boring enough to fit right into it.

I'm more along this line of thinking as well. See, Damien, I think there actually is a rather exotic quality to Michelle Pfeiffer (even with her blonde hair) that lent itself well to the character of Ellen Olenska. She has an other-worldly kind of beauty that's almost inhuman, certainly un-American looking, if called for. Ryder's May Welland had the plain janish, mousy quality I associate with her character and, therefore, also worked for me. Hair color aside, the attention to detail in the film almost perfectly mirrors several key scenes in Wharton's novel.

I'm sure you can find several examples of places where the book and the film diverge but there are certain tweaks that every director makes to the source material in order to a certain effect. At the end of the day, Day-Lewis and Ryder looked well-suited together from a purely physical standpoint, while Pfieffer, in her garish clothing, expensive feathered hats, and arresting beauty appeared as an outsider from almost the moment she stepped onto the screen.



Edited By flipp525 on 1193775862

[Akash]

Damien you are correct of course, but I think the thinking was Michelle Pfeiffer was ravishing enough that Newland would risk offending the social echelon, while Winona Ryder was boring enough to fit right into it.



Edited By Akash on 1193773659

[Damien]

The Age of Innocence is such a sumptuous feast of eye-candy, so true to Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and so perfectly cast.

How can you say it's perfectly cast, when Edith Wharton went to great pains to emphasize that Countess Olenska was a "dark" beauty (and, hence, exotic and irresistible to Newland) while May was a fair-skinned and blonde (i.e. "ordinary" in that she was the typical Northern European of Upper Crust New York society)? And then Scorsese reversed it in his film.

[Penelope]

For those sentiments, you are most certainly NOT a butt nugget, Uri.

Great, thank you, I guess. But - since I'm culturally chalanged - at least when it comes to American lingo - what the hell is a butt nugget?

Tiny pellets of poo.

Akash and the others are correct: the climax of A.I. is a devastating and powerful ending, much more dispairing and hopeless than the section that came before. It's the only Spielberg film to wring genuine tears from me. The Color Purple is an unbelievably silly film; Out of Africa isn't perfect, but it's vastly superior to The Color Purple. But I'm not in total agree with the board re Spielberg: I couldn't stand Munich, which is even more silly than The Color Purple, if that can be imagined.

[Uri]

For those sentiments, you are most certainly NOT a butt nugget, Uri.

Great, thank you, I guess. But - since I'm culturally chalanged - at least when it comes to American lingo - what the hell is a butt nugget?

[OscarGuy]

Sabin, I'm referring to the historical film genre.

Akash, you're welcome to your opinion (as is everyone else), but I can't help but see the film as a failure because of a final sequence that felt inappropriate tonally, tacked on and tried to hard to leave the audience at least feeling glad that he got to see his mother...it was a cop-out, IMO.

[Akash]

Gangs of New York is the one I liked the best – one hell of a mess, but the best parts had great flare and energy. The last one of his I really, but really, loved was The Age of Innocence, which, incidentally, is my pick for the best of ’93, with Campion as best director, so I can have a woman on my list.

For those sentiments, you are most certainly NOT a butt nugget, Uri.

And OscarGuy, you were "warm and happy" at the end of A.I.? I was moved yes but not warmly so - I was fucking shocked, enthralled, disturbed. It's the best thing Speilberg has ever done and I can't see how he could ever top it. Oscar baiting middle of the road fare like Schindler's List and downright awful films like Saving Private Ryan and The Color Purple are the kinds of cheap cultural "milestones" he will sadly be remembered for. But it's a film like A.I. - and most especially with its final 30 minutes - that really elevate his work to high art.



Edited By Akash on 1193761738

[Akash]

Basically Lame: Gangs Of New York

Two butt nuggets!

[Uri]

I realize it's revisionist in nature to say this, but I think Spielberg is doing the most interesting work of his career this decade. While most of the films he's done have not been as outright entertaining and conceptually delightful as the likes of 'Jaws', 'Raiders', and 'E.T.', he has never made movies with more substance. 'Schindler's List' is an incredibly powerful movie and a deft piece of filmmaking, but it doesn't say nearly as much about what it means to be a Jew or the nature of good vs. evil as something like 'Munich' by half. Movies like 'Minority Report' and 'War of the Worlds' are not perfect at all, but they have so much more on their mind both in outright intent (former: free will) or subversive afterthought (latter: terrorism) than anything in Spielberg's Oscar-baiting or pre-00's "rides".

I thought it was customary on this board to admire Spielberg recent creative phase as his greatest, god know why.

As for his Jewish movies - when I first saw Schiendler’s List, I found it to be a respectable effort by Spielberg to deal with the holocaust. This respect faded over the years, partly because the movies he made since only enhanced my discomfort with his infantile fascination with (gentile) hero figures, as opposed to a much more personal and sincere sort of self portrayal he offered in earlier movies when he used Richard Dreyfus as a frequent alter ago. If back then I defended his decision to make a movie about the person who had the choice, therefore could be morally judged and was an acceptable protagonist in a drama we, as modern spectators could relate to, while it was not legitimate for us to do the same with the victims. Now I’m afraid it look to me that he just found a way to avoid dealing with this position of complete loss of power which what being a Jew in these circumstances at that time meant, by focusing on the lone ranger aspect of the story. And they all lived in the end.

As for Munich – maybe cinematically it’s a great triumph. I’m sorry to say I couldn’t see it, for the thick fog of sheer cluelessness of what Israel is all about made it impossible for me (and practically all other Israelis) to take it seriously. It may be interesting to look at it as an evident to the distorted view of Israel American Jews do have, and as such it may be seen as a poignant statement of sort.

[Sabin]

And for the record, I think Minority Report is fascinating and I think Schindler's List is a masterwork of the genre.

What genre? A Holocaust genre? Doesn't that inherently state that all Holocaust movies pertain to the same set of rules and 'Schindler's List' just does them better? That's not a good thing.

[OscarGuy]

Spielberg's tendency is to resolve films where there's a victory. He's never really done a movie where there isn't one. That's what I call a Spielbergian happy ending. I'm not saying that his ending isn't tragic, but it's far more positive a conclusion, regardless of the finality of a character's life.

The difference between Spielberg's A.I. ending and Pan's Labyrinth's ending is that Labyrinth actually built appropriately to its conclusion. It didn't have a jolting stop point and then a sudden addition to its conclusion. It flowed perfectly to that ending, an ending foreshadowed far earlier in the film. All the foreshadowing in A.I. seemed to point to the bottom-of-the-ocean conclusion, not the "years later" conclusion.

[dws1982]

It's certainly less nihilistic than the alternative, but I'd argue that it's still not a happy ending. And I don't really care whether it's happier than the alternative. You accused it of being a typical Spielberg happy ending (a term that I don't agree with, but don't have time to go into right now), a statement that I take exception to.

And I hope those who call out AI's ending for being too happy/sentimental also call out Pan's Labyrinth for its last minute injection of triumph. It's just as ambiguous as AI's, but if you're going to stay on the shallow end with one, stay on the shallow end with both.

[Greg]

Count me in as another Out Of Africa lover.