25 Years Ago This Month: March 1989

As always I start with what I've seen...

Three of the great filmmakers of the 70s and 80s (Woody Allen; Francis Ford Coppola; Martin Scorsese) collaborated on the omnibus film New York Stories which encompasses three short vignettes. The first and best is "Life Lessons" (Scorsese) starring Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette about an artist living with his former lover, whose sexual escapades with other men fuel jealousy and a spark of creativity. Coppola's segment is "Life Without Zoe," a sort of fantasy about a girl living in a luxury hotel. "Oedipus Wrecks" is Allen's contribution, about a New York lawyer (played by Allen) haunted by his overbearing mother, who appears in the New York skyline to tell the whole city about her son's personal problems.

I reviewed it last year after taking a second look many years removed, but the cult classic Heathers was released a quarter century ago.

The Wolf of Wall Street Movie Review

These guys who work on Wall Street and idolize characters like Gordon Gecko and live by the credo that “greed is good,” who make every decision based on how much money, power, drugs, or sex it might get them are the subject of The Wolf of Wall Street. Previously it was Boiler Room, which was meant to show the consequences of living that life, but became, like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street before it, a clarion call for a new generation of upper crust wannabes who took entirely the wrong lessons from the movies.

Shine a Light Movie Review

It’s only natural that Martin Scorsese would have made a Rolling Stones concert film. He was one of the first film directors to employ rock music on the soundtrack of his films and has continually returned to the Stones, even using “Gimme Shelter” three times, although it is sort of ironically absent from Shine a Light. But also Mick Jagger is a quintessential Scorsese protagonist. Watching him preen, gyrate, strut, and bounce on stage calls to mind Tom Cruise winning at pool in The Color of Money, the explosiveness of De Niro in Mean Streets, or his unpredictability in Taxi Driver, and the ferocious energy of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. At the risk of sounding grandiose, there’s even a comparison to be made to Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation of Christ in Jagger’s ability to lead the crowd in The Beacon Theater, a historic temple of performance. Archival interview footage even reveals Jagger’s self doubt prior to performance – feelings that Defoe’s Jesus would find familiar.

25 Years Ago This Month: August 1988

Cheers, Jesus.

The films I've seen

The most significant movie release of the month was The Last Temptation of Christ. Martin Scorsese had been trying for a decade to adapt Kazantzakis' controversial novel and finally got it made with Willem Dafoe in the starring role and Harvey Keitel as a Brooklyn-accented Judas. Of course it was idiotically boycotted by Christian groups, most of whom had probably not even bothered to watch the film to find out exactly what they were objecting to. It has since become one of the more important films in Scorsese's body of work and has been canonized by Criterion into their collection.

The biggest money maker was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which I reviewed last year. It made nearly $50M at the box office and finished 19th for the year.

Now I loved Young Guns when I was a kid. I only ever saw it on cable, but it remains to this day a serious guilty pleasure of mine. Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid and then there's Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Casey Siemaszko, and a young Dermot Mulroney as his friends. Terence Stamp and Jack Palance add a veneer of respectability, but just a little.

From My Collection: The Departed Movie Review

When Frank Costello asks a man how his mother is and he replies that she’s on her way out, Frank’s rejoinder, “We all are. Act accordingly,” sets a tone for the film. As the title suggests, death hangs like a pall over Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. It is a film in which most of the characters live with the fear of death around them at all times. They are cops and they are criminal mafia.

The story is of two young men, played by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, who become embroiled in an elaborate plot to take down Costello’s crime organization from one end and infiltrate the Massachusetts State Police Force from the other. Damon plays Colin Sullivan, the mole inside the State Police investigative unit for organized crime. He is recruited by Costello as a boy in an extended prologue that introduces most of the major players. Then there’s DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, a new police recruit fingered for a special deep undercover assignment to help bring Costello down.

Hugo Movie Review

This review is based on the 3D version of the film. As this is only the second film I’ve seen in the contemporary 3D style I don’t feel I’m familiar enough with its uses and implementations to 100% accurately judge whether it’s any good or not. However, I have taken the liberty of commenting on my reaction to the 3D as I believe it is the critic’s duty to report his response to a film as completely as possible.

When I read that Martin Scorsese was going to make his next film in 3D and it was also going to be an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s children’s picture novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, my first reaction was to be simply dumbfounded. Why would the director of so many dark and violent films that deeply explore the human condition venture into such new territory? And why would the man who still insists on using film stock, a man who supremely values film history, shoot in 3D? Surely this must have been some kind of total commercial sellout. Well, the final judgment is yet to be determined as it often takes years for the critical and audience response to render a final verdict on a piece of pop culture’s place in the canon, but after seeing it I can say it makes a lot more sense now that Scorsese was drawn to this particular story and this particular use of 3D technology to make Hugo.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1986

25 Years Ago I was probably just beginning to learn my multiplication table in Mrs. Hansen's third grade class. I don't remember much else about what I learned that year. I remember studying European geography, learning the countries and possibly their capitals. Yugoslavia was still a unified country and I remember, even at age 8, that my classmates were immature in laughing at the name because it was like, "You go slav." The things that stick in our memories.

I certainly wasn't going to the movies so much, but I've seen a half dozen or so of the films that opened in October of 1986. There's little that's particularly notable. The list of releases contains the usual mix of prestige projects aiming for the awards season and popular fluff (action and comedy, mainly) to keep the investors happy.

Classic Movie Review: Raging Bull

Raging Bull is the full realization of the promise Martin Scorsese demonstrated with Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. And to refer to those two seminal films as somehow less substantial than Raging Bull should automatically suggest its magnificent power.

This was the fourth of eight collaborations between Scorsese and Robert De Niro. I would say neither artist has topped himself since. It is Scorsese at his virtuoso best and for De Niro it is a complete performance, lacking nothing in terms of emotion and physicality. And I don’t say that simply because he first turned his body into that of a champion boxer and then gained 60 pounds to play the aging and overweight Jake La Motta, but because he leaves nothing on the table. This is full tilt De Niro. It’s the impulsiveness and rage of Johnny Boy and the fierce tenacity of the psychopathic Travis Bickle. Although we may occasionally get flashes of De Niro’s brilliance in some of his recent performances, nothing he’s done in at least twenty years has come close to what he brought to Raging Bull.

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island Movie Review

It’s hard to avoid seeing the parallels between Shutter Island and Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s two films from this year. Both deal heavily with illusion versus reality and the way we perceive the world. They both deal with madness, the former more than the latter. In both films the driving force behind DiCaprio’s characters’ actions is the tragic loss of his wife. And the soundtracks of both films are characterized by the droning sound of low horns in the orchestra, which in this film is a reminder of a ship’s foghorn. Although the two films have similarities in their subject matter, they could hardly be more different in terms of tone and directorial approach.

25 Years Ago This Month (September 1985)

It seems there was hardly anything worth mentioning in September '85. Personally, I remember it was the month of Hurricane Gloria hitting the Atlantic coast - my first hurricane experience. I remember we had to put tape on the sliding glass door to keep it from shattering if it should have been hit by flying debris. I recall lots of tree branches coming down and I remember going out on the front lawn when the eye of the storm passed over.

Movies of note that opened this month include Martin Scorsese's After Hours, a weird wild trip through the NYC underworld during a single night, and Agnes of God, a mostly forgotten film now that earned Meg Tilly an Oscar nomination.

In historical news:
- An earthquake of magnitude 8.1 struck Mexico City killing some 10 - 12 thousand people.
- Robert Ballard located the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland.
- Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb's hit record.
- The first of five deaths occurred from Tylenol laced with cyanide.

There weren't even any really notable celebrity deaths or births. Well, the Yankees' Joba Chamberlain turns 25 this month.

The Age of Innocence Movie Review

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence, has not really received its due praise. Perhaps because at the time it seemed such a departure for the director of quintessential New York stories of Italian Americans, often involved in crime. Now that 17 years have passed and Scorsese has gone on to create a body of work with much broader settings and themes (Kundun, The Aviator, Shutter Island), it’s fair to say there is little unusual about seeing it as very much a Martin Scorsese Picture.

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is one in a long line of Scorsese male protagonists trying to escape from the clutches of a world not of his own choosing. Consider Charlie in Mean Streets coming to terms with his lack of faith; Travis Bickle trapped in a sewer of crime; Jesus of Nazareth wrestling with the forces pushing him; Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island a prisoner of his own psychosis.

Martin Scorsese to Go 3-D

It seems not even Martin Scorsese (film historian, cinephile, archivist) is immune to the allure of making a 3-D motion picture. His next film will be an adaptation of the Brian Selznick children's book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" about a boy in 1930s Paris who fixes his father's broken robot.

Lest you fall into the mistaken belief that Scorsese is merely bowing to studio pressure, the film is, in fact, being independently produced. It will be distributed by Sony and is currently slated for a December 2011 release.

I'm both truly astonished and somehow not all that surprised by this move by Scorsese. He's a filmmaker who understands how to tell a story visually. He can exploit the medium better than 99 percent of film directors. I think he's a guy who is interested in how 3-D can help him tell a story in a new, different and possibly better way. Unlike the studios, who love it because it's basically pirate-proof, and theater owners, who love it because they can add a surcharge for the special glasses. Scorsese is even on record saying he thinks Precious should be in 3-D.

I don't want to go on a tirade now about 3-D movies (that will come at a later date, I'm sure), but I'm dismayed by the move toward more and more 3-D. Especially when it comes to the films shot in 2-D and then later converted in order to capitalize on the fad (Clash of the Titans and Alice in Wonderland). The only modern 3-D film I've seen is Avatar, which I saw in both traditional 2-D and then the 3-D version. I have nothing to compare that experience to, but I can say that I much rather prefer the 2-D version.