GO.
What I love about Martin Scorsese movies: the moment they begin, with those crazy swooping cameras locking on a face and that blast of pop music on the soundtrack smacking you upside the head, you know you’re in for a ride. You get a sense of the huge, thrilling world outside the screen. Over three decades after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver the man still gets a charge out of make movies, and you feel the voltage as you sit in the theatre, your hand poised to reach into a bucket of popcorn. When Marty’s really on, your hand doesn’t make it to the popcorn, it stays motionless in mid-air because all your faculties are engaged by the movie. Sure, sometimes the movie doesn’t live up to its opening sequence—I didn’t care for Gangs of New York and The Aviator, so I just blamed Leonardo Di Caprio—but so what. It’s the Cinema!
Watch The Departed, it’s in theatres now.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 6th, 2006 at 01:14
For the uninitiated, they may want to view Infernal Affairs first. The Hong Kong film is classic and shouldn’t be missed. If anything, catch it for the tense morse code/text message scene as done by Andy Lau and Tony Leung. Some of the more breathtaking cinematography work was done by Christopher Doyle (as a consultant, I venture to guess…no full-credit for him).
Otherwise, it would be a great exercise in comparing and contrasting the Eastern and Western versions of the same story.
Ironically, there’s a Village Voice article that pointed out that most Hong Kong action movies were influenced by Scorsese. It goes full circle, no?