The Departed (Infernal Affairs remake)

Started by MacGuffin, February 13, 2004, 02:09:12 AM

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RegularKarate

Right after the movie ended, the guy next to me asked his girlfriend, all pissed and confused "So who was the informant?"

grand theft sparrow

Quote from: JG on October 08, 2006, 11:08:08 PM
plus i hated that theme that scorsese uses, the one that comes up during the title and the one that is used in all the commercials.  what is that the dropkick murphys?  a rare example where scorsese just uses the completely wrong music. 

Yeah, that music felt like it was supposed to be in some Ed Burns Irish Scorsese ripoff but I think it would have worked if he didn't cut it off in such a jarring way.  It bugs me sometimes in films when the score gets cut off immediately and it's not playing from a radio or something.  It feels amateurish and almost comedic like a record scratch.  I can probably sit and think of as many examples in which it has worked but this isn't one of them.


Quote from: Lucid on October 09, 2006, 12:48:23 AM
The audience I saw it with was really into it, too: cheering, laughing, and one woman even let out a very loud shriek toward the end.

SPOILERS

The audience I was with was laughing at the wrong times, like when DiCaprio was killed.  It's like they were watching Scarface or some shit.  I'm sitting there in shock and half the theatre is laughing.  I'll chalk it up to nervous laughter but it seemed out of place.  And then the very end, some guy in the row in front of me yells out, "Yeah, Marky Mark!" when he shows up in Matt Damon's apartment.  That kind of pulled the punch for the ending for me but I still enjoyed the hell out of this.

sickfins

spoilers!

Quote from: othersparrow on October 09, 2006, 08:52:34 AM
The audience I was with was laughing at the wrong times, like when DiCaprio was killed.  It's like they were watching Scarface or some shit.  I'm sitting there in shock and half the theatre is laughing.  I'll chalk it up to nervous laughter but it seemed out of place.  And then the very end, some guy in the row in front of me yells out, "Yeah, Marky Mark!" when he shows up in Matt Damon's apartment.  That kind of pulled the punch for the ending for me but I still enjoyed the hell out of this.

the person i saw it with laughed at everything in the movie and turned to me for a reaction at virtually everything.  every dramatic punch was ruined, but i could still see it was amazing.

"just kill me"
"i am killing you"
BAM

the exaggerated sound effects were amazing.  right before the successful ambush on costello, all the police are being super quiet and their normally smashy car doors are almost completely silent.  the cellphones sounded like they had knives or blocks of wood in them when they closed.

macguffin's right about wahlberg.  i forgot he was in the cast going in and he surprised the shit out of me.

pete

one time I went to see the planet of the apes and when mark whalberg first showed up someone in the audience (my friend) yelled "yeah, marky mark and the monkey bunch!"  and the entire theater laughed that time and every subsequent time marky mark hung out with the apes, it really made the movie much better.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

MacGuffin

A history of violence
Martin Scorsese is still attracted to a world where morality doesn't exist, where it is impossible to sin - which may be why he's never won the Oscar he covets. Ed Pilkington was granted a rare audience with the king of American cinema
Source: The Guardian
 
For a director who commands such respect, it is surprising what a rough ride Martin Scorsese has had in recent years. But even with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to his credit, the going has not been easy. There have been run-ins with the studios, such as Disney's decision to pull out of Gangs of New York because of its violence, and Paramount's surrender to the religious right in pulling out of The Last Temptation of Christ just weeks before the start of filming.

When he didn't have the studios on his back, he suffered the opposite problem: an uninterested public. Both New York, New York and The King of Comedy were box office casualties. And sod's law decrees that when he does make a successful film, The Colour of Money for instance, he's accused of selling out to the studios.

Nor have his peers offered him formal recognition. Despite the superhuman efforts he has poured into his most intimately conceived films - Gangs of New York took him 23 years to wrestle on to the screen - he has not won the Oscar for best director, an honour he has unashamedly coveted and for which he has been nominated five times (for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Aviator). When Goodfellas lost to Dances with Wolves in 1990, that hurt.

The common thread in these disparate troubles is the dilemma of the movie director: how to combine commercial success with artistic integrity. Several of his 1970s films were both hugely popular and lauded for their art. More recently, he's ticked one or other box, seldom both.

So has Martin Scorsese come any closer to combining commerce and art with his new film, The Departed? Given the record of the past 30 years, he has reason to be nervous about its reception, and sure enough he is puffing on his asthma inhaler as our encounter begins. His body language is not good. He has pressed himself tightly into the corner of the sofa, both arms and legs crossed, in a textbook portrayal of Anxious Man.

As soon as the first question is asked, though, he relaxes, like someone coming up for air. He starts talking in a broad, slightly high-pitched New York accent and grows more and more animated. What's got him going is the acting of his current cinematic muse, Leonardo DiCaprio.

The Departed is Scorsese's third major film in a row with DiCaprio and the relationship between the two men has clearly grown into a central element of his work. For so long the world of Martin Scorsese revolved around Robert De Niro, from his first major feature, Mean Streets in 1973, to Cape Fear 18 years later. But the Scorsese noughties belong to DiCaprio. The baton has been passed, as Scorsese implicitly recognises when he talks about the intense experiences he has had with DiCaprio over the past seven years: "Having worked with Leo in Gangs of New York and the Aviator, I sense something about him. There's a great deal emotionally going on inside of him. For me it was interesting - I felt comfortable with the emotional process he was going through, and it reminded me very much of De Niro. It was a different frame of reference: I'm 30 years older, but he approached emotional subjects in a very similar way and he also thinks about things in life the way I do."

The Departed, the latest product of the Scorsese-DiCaprio Years, as they may come to be remembered, is a cop versus gangster movie set in contemporary Boston. DiCaprio plays an undercover police officer who has infiltrated one of the city's most notorious gangs. He gives an intense performance, thoroughly putting behind him the baby-faced Leo so beloved of teenaged girls and replacing it with a mature Leonardo capable of conveying layers of anger and darkness unthinkable in the younger man. In short, DiCaprio has grown up, and he has done so under Scorsese's tutelage.

"I didn't realise that at the time," Scorsese says, when I ask if he was aware of this coming of age. "There's no doubt that he was a boy when we did Gangs of New York, which is what I wanted. But when he did Howard Hughes in The Aviator, that changed everything."

By now Scorsese is flying. His hands are moving as excitedly as he is speaking. One second his fingers meet as if in prayer, the next he is open-armed and embracing the world. He is conducting the conversation as he might, well, direct a movie. And then there are his eyes, which have their own power, framed by two shockingly black eyebrows set behind his red and thick-rimmed glasses. Even in a blank hotel room you feel his force. He is a hurricane of energy, a breaker of levees.

So when did this transformation in DiCaprio take place? Scorsese's flurry of words is briefly halted, but after a pause he starts to talk again at bullet speed about the moment of metamorphosis. It was during the filming of a key scene in The Aviator, in which Hughes has locked himself into his movie screening room and is descending into madness. "By the time Leo got into that room where he had to face himself, naked, in that white leather chair, we had got into a whole other realm and I knew he could go further. Something happened that night."

On the other side of the locked door Cate Blanchett, playing Katharine Hepburn, is pleading with DiCaprio to let her in. They filmed take after take of the scene, Scorsese explains, but something just didn't feel right. "About the 12th take I said to Leo maybe you are thinking too much about yourself, think about her at this point. What do you want her to do? 'Cut her off, cut her dead,' I said. 'She shouldn't be part of that life.'"

The result was formative: Scorsese's intervention helped propel DiCaprio's acting to a new level. His part in the process was crucial, the mark of a great director, though he plays that down by implying that it happened almost by chance: "We just stumbled upon it. But it made him more aware of how to play other things too."

The anecdote is telling. Scorsese is known as an actors' director because he nurtures them and gives them space to grow. And this fluid style of directing is stamped over The Departed, despite its origins and evident commercial appeal.

The film is a remake of the cult 2003 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. Screenwriter William Monahan has transferred the storyline from Hong Kong to the ganglands of South Boston, or Southie as it's known to locals.

A cop (DiCaprio) infiltrates a notorious Southie gang in order to expose its ruthless leader (Jack Nicholson), while gang member (Matt Damon) is sent by the same ruthless leader to infiltrate the cops. Two moles, negative images of one another. Their paths collide and a get-the-other-mole-before-he-gets-you struggle to the death ensues. In the process everyone is compromised, good and evil converge, darkness reigns.

'Good and bad become very blurred," Scorsese says. "That is something I know I'm attracted to. It's a world where morality doesn't exist, good doesn't exist, so you can't even sin any more as there's nothing to sin against. There's no redemption of any kind."

The script follows the Hong Kong original quite faithfully, and yet the final product is quintessential Scorsese. The Catholic elements of the morality tale are accentuated by him, as befits a man who came close to entering the priesthood in his teens but chose instead to take up film studies at New York University. Sexuality and male virility - also favoured Scorsese themes - are teased out through the role of the woman therapist (Vera Farmiga) who loves both moles, and through Jack Nicholson's improvised use of an enormous prosthetic penis.

Movie addicts will find their cravings richly satisfied by Scorsese's allusions to past greats. Watch out for the letter X that he scatters through the film in a homage to the 1932 gangster movie Scarface (producer: Howard Hughes) or the cocaine scene with Jack Nicholson that nods its head to the 1983 film of the same name. Like Scarface, violence is integral to The Departed, another of Scorsese's calling cards. By my count, the film depicts at least 10 executions, one garrotting and the graphic splattering of a body that has fallen from a great height.

Being Scorsese, there's a Catholic take on the violence, too: "It's about the reality of being a witness to violence. Let's say you have a close friend who you have known for 25 years. Even if you are not in the underworld, if they are hit by a car they are dead, gone, finished, over. Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film."

But what marks The Departed out as core Scorsese above anything else is the anger. Not that of an angry young man, though, which is best seen in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. Instead it's a more reflective, public anger with the current state of the world, which he reveals in our conversation quite unexpectedly.

You could view The Departed as a commentary on America today, in which good and evil have become so intertwined they are now inseparable and mutually self-perpetuating: a US president commits an act of violence on a foreign country in the name of good against evil, thus unleashing dark forces which can only be controlled through yet more acts of violence. When I suggest that to him, he leaps on the thought with alacrity. He says his feelings about this were crucial to his decision to make the film in the first place - they sustained him even when he had (here we go again) difficulties getting the movie off the ground.

"There were a lot of big names getting involved, a lot of different schedules to marry, a lot of pitfalls we could have fallen into. And yet I stayed with the film," he says. "Because I guess there's an anger, for want of a better word, about the state of affairs. An anger that hopefully doesn't eat at yourself but a desire to express what I feel about post-September 11 despair. My emotional response is this movie. It became clearer and clearer as we did it, more frightening. It came from a very strong state of conviction about the emotional, psychological state that I am in now about the world and about the way our leaders are behaving."

So all the elements are there. The Departed will surely be no box-office flop, but neither can it be dismissed as a studio sell-out. In it, Scorsese comes closer to achieving that elusive compromise between art and popular appeal than he has in years, arguably since Goodfellas.

There's just one bit of unfinished business remaining. Without it Martin Scorsese cannot lay his ghosts to rest. Come on Academy, give him his blasted Oscar.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Pozer

Quote from: Ed Pilkington on October 09, 2006, 11:41:00 AM
There's just one bit of unfinished business remaining. Without it Martin Scorsese cannot lay his ghosts to rest. Come on Academy, give him his blasted Oscar.
i can honestly see it happening with this one.  of course it's going to happen with a film less deserving of his others, but the performance level alone makes the chance more reasonable.

grand theft sparrow

Quote from: pozer on October 09, 2006, 02:23:12 PM
Quote from: Ed Pilkington on October 09, 2006, 11:41:00 AM
There's just one bit of unfinished business remaining. Without it Martin Scorsese cannot lay his ghosts to rest. Come on Academy, give him his blasted Oscar.
i can honestly see it happening with this one.  of course it's going to happen with a film less deserving of his others, but the performance level alone makes the chance more reasonable.

After this year, I don't see how an Oscar could possibly mean anything to Scorsese anymore.  He's in better company now.  But yeah, it looks like this is his year, especially considering 3/4 of the Academy acted in the movie.

Derek237

As far as Oscars are concerned, I can honestly see Jack winning #4 for this. If any living actor on the face of the earth deserves it, it's Jack. Not only does he have a helluva lot of fun with the role, but it was something that was at the same time uniquely Jack Nicholson but brings something new to a character, even after several decades of roles. I thought his was the most interesting character in the film because he lacks the vulnerabilities that the others have so obviously stamped right on their foreheads. He was likely in a similar place emotionally as Damon's or Dicaprio's characters when he was younger but had the benefit of staying alive, so in a way, he's corrupted, jaded, repressive, and well, borderline insane all at the same time. And he does it all with the Jack Nicholson trademark charm, and once again, Scorsese has been able to collaborate with an actor to create a villain that you can't help but love, hear out, and understand (maybe even agree with to an extent). So, yeah, I think he'll join the likes of Max Cady and Bill the butcher in infamy. Anyone else think his "What's the difference?" line is already beginning to be another classic bit of dialogue? They may have pushed it a bit too much in the trailer, but I can see that line being quoted a lot in the future.

Anyway, if Jack doesn't win the Oscar, he's at least a definite lock for the supporting actor nomination as far as I'm concerned. I'd love to see Scorsese get the director nod, don't get me wrong, but I don't think he should win for it, and unless he makes his best movie ever sometime soon, I think the best we can hope for is an honorary award, like Hitchcock's or Altman's.

modage

unfortunately i think the film is probably too popcorn (fun/awesome) for the oscars.   most likely they'll be looking at more serious minded crap.  i hope i'm wrong.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

matt35mm

Quote from: modage on October 09, 2006, 08:48:03 PM
unfortunately i think the film is probably too popcorn (fun/awesome) for the oscars.   most likely they'll be looking at more serious minded crap.  i hope i'm wrong.

No, you're right.  Jack Nicholson will get a supporting nod with no win.  That will be all.  I guess it's possible that Scorsese will get nominated without the picture being nominated, just because of everyone always saying that they oughta give him one.  But he will not win.  Same with the screenplay.

I always feel like I'm gonna get shot after I see a Martin Scorsese movie with guns.  Very on edge.  I liked this, but it did feel very popcorn to me most of the time.  I wouldn't say anything like "Scorsese back in form," since directing-wise, it was the same quality as Gangs and Aviator.  It just had a screenplay that he could work better with.  I think there was room to go deeper into some of the themes and I think some of the on-the-surface references (i.e. "You're not a cop," with DiCaprio, Whalberg and Sheen in the office at the beginning, "You're a cop," with the two gansters to DiCaprio later on, and there was more in there somewhere) could have been lessened.  But I had a lot of fun.

Kal

I loved it. Ever since I saw the original in 2003 and I heard that somebody bought the remake rights I was waiting for it, and it was everything I would have want it to be. The acting was excellent, especially Jack and Damon. It was cool to see Leo beat the shit out of some people too.

I love the way Scorsese adapted the film and he took all the ingredients that make the original good and added his own touch to make it great. I think the dialogue, the music, everything went very well.

The ending in the original is different though. Well, the DVD has two endings. The original one, and one that is more politically correct. I dont want to give it away in case somebody wants to see it (which I recommend). But part of it is because the Wahlberg-Sheen character are actually one guy in the original, so it makes that a little different. Also, the shrink and the guys girlfriend in the original are two different women.

I hope it gets nominated. Its very early in the 'Oscar season' to predict if Marty could get his Oscar, but I hope he does. This is not his best film, but they should just fucking give it to him already.

pete

nicholson was pretty fun in it, but how was he any better than any other good fun sadistic villains out there?  I know denzel won an oscar for having just as much fun, but I didn't think that was the year's best performance.  neither was this, it was a hell of a spectacle, but what more did it do than fuel the imagination and the testerone of dudes?

I saw Match Point a few hours after coming out of The Departed.  Matchpoint felt very much like a remake of Woody's own Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Like Infernal Affairs, Crimes and Misdemeanors had an essentially out-of-tone (there must be a better term for it), heavy-handed ending that attempted to moralize and articulate the entire movie.  However, I found the endings in both originals to be much more satisfying than the remakes.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

cine

best film of 2006.. even the best film of 2007. oh, and this is scorsese's year.

Quote from: Weak2ndAct on October 08, 2006, 11:18:49 PMLoved the 'Third Man' wink at the end-- nice touch.

totally.

grand theft sparrow

Quote from: matt35mm on October 09, 2006, 10:38:03 PM
Quote from: modage on October 09, 2006, 08:48:03 PM
unfortunately i think the film is probably too popcorn (fun/awesome) for the oscars.   most likely they'll be looking at more serious minded crap.  i hope i'm wrong.

No, you're right.  Jack Nicholson will get a supporting nod with no win.  That will be all.  I guess it's possible that Scorsese will get nominated without the picture being nominated, just because of everyone always saying that they oughta give him one.  But he will not win.  Same with the screenplay.

Oscar nod predictions for The Departed:

Best Director
Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio)
Best Actor (Jack Nicholson)
Best Supporting Actor (Mark Wahlberg)
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Editing

Jack will get a lead nomination because he's Jack but he will not win.  Leo will.  Scorsese will win because Clint Eastwood already has two.  Screenplay, Editing, and Wahlberg will lose.

It's really sad that we can predict the Oscars with some degree of confidence a full six months ahead of time, and before all the films have been released.

Kal

Leo wont win. I dont think he will be nominated, althought it would be great. I think Damon stands out more than Leo here too. At least from the "Academy" point of view (kinda like Ledger-Gyllenhall last year)

If he didnt get it after The Aviator, he will have to wait until the next movie where he is the only main character to get it.