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Okay, I'm off to watch Martin Scorcese's new movie 'The Departed'. I'll post my thoughts on it when I get home, give you guys the scoop...
Not for any particular reason.... I just know how much hatrack loves Scorcese, and I want to stay close to hatrack tonight. It's a hatrack night at TL's house.
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Okay I'm really going now. That Mormon/Al Qaida thread distracted me by suddenly being fun for a few minutes.
Posts: 2267 | Registered: May 2005
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I'm back. Long movie. Although you gotta figure in drive-time, the time it took to thread the projector, have a brief chat with one of the assistant managers, who had some stuff he wanted to communicate... and then the time it took to watch 7 trailers.
This movie was in-freaking-tense. The most interesting thing was the way they set up these two parallel storylines of Leonardo DiCaprio being an undercover cop trying to get the bad guys, and Matt Damon being an undercover bad guy trying to get the cops, basically. It's a movie that takes place in a very dark universe... Nobody gets to be the hero in this movie. Everybody ends up with blood on their hands.
It is one wild ride. I loved it. Very violent, though, weirdly, a lot of the more adult, serious stuff seemed left on the editing room floor. Maybe it's for the best, but it does leave you with these odd little moments where something starts to happen, and then all of a sudden the camera cuts away way too fast, and you just think... Huh. That didn't feel quite natural.
The actors are all great, but two really stood out; Mark Whalberg (who is TERRIFIC in this) - and Leonardo. Man, sometimes it's easy to forget.... This guy is an unbelievable actor. For my money, Leo gives the performance of the year so far as Costigan. He doesn't for one second feel fake.
I won't say anything about the ending or how it all ends up. Maybe after the movie comes out and some of you guys get the chance to see it, this thread will come back to life. Who's to say? And if so, we'll chat about the ending then.
Cause it's.... it's.... It should be talked about.
I believe this film is better than Goodfellas, and history will remember it as one of Scorcese's classics, along with Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and -- is there an and? Something must be escaping my mind at this moment.
Posts: 2267 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Man, sometimes it's easy to forget.... This guy is an unbelievable actor.
I feel the same way. He's done such strange and cheesy projects that I forget how dynamic he is on the screen. I'm waiting for him to break his alliance with Scorcese (just for a minute!) and work under another director just so I can see him some more. I'm not a huge Scorcese fan, mostly because of the violence. Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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Scorcese produced an utterly beautiful adaptation of 'The Secret Garden.' Not much violence in that at all...
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Ummm ... has anyone else seen it? TL, wanna put *Spoilers* in the title so we can discuss it? I have to say, I think the ... uh ... part in the elevator was a bit anticlimactic. They set up a really intense and possibly gratifying moment and then ruin it, seemingly just for the purpose of prolonging the movie and working everyone back in. . Just my thoughts. Also, they didn't ever exactly say what was in the package Billy gave to the shrink. And I'll have more to say once the spoiler warning is up ... I think I've done decent at being ambiguous so far.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Yeah. The scene in the elevator is what I wanted to talk about with my cryptic references to "the ending". It's also what I was referring to when I said "no one gets to be the hero."
So. Man oh man. I was really upset when Billy Costigan got killed, because I was rooting for him so hard, and by that point I was so *involved* in the rooting.
Sullivan was such a scumbag, and I wanted to see him brought to justice. As the scene on the rooftop played out, I kept thinking, 'Where's Dignam?' I hoped he would show up at the moment Billy needed him the most.
Posts: 2267 | Registered: May 2005
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Yeah. At first I didn't mind it. I'm always coming out of movie saying "Everybody should've died". And in this movie everyone did. But the more I thought about it the more the presence of another rat bothered me. There was really no hinting at it or anything, just kind of "bang! I'm a rat too!". And then, I mean come on, the guy didn't think Sullivan would shoot him? Hasn't he seen any movies? .
Also, what do you think was in the package? I figure either proof that Billy was in the police or more proof that Colin was the rat. But it never explicitely tells us, at least not that I saw.
And ... I was hoping it would come out that the baby was Billy's. Since Sullivan was dead it didn't really matter, but that would've even out the justice of it all some.
Something I really liked though was the use of cell phones. The movie never made it a point to focus on cell phones and how much they have changed the way stuff is done, but throughout the whole movie, they were an underlying theme, at least to me. I liked how it reflected the changing of the times.
Overall, it was a great movie. The "twists" and plot devices that made the story work weren't really implausible (with the exception of the other rat), so I was able to reallllly get in to the movie, without those annoying instances of thinking "wait a second ... that's not right". So yeah ... good movie.
Oh, and I love the name too. Walking out of it, my friend said it should've been named "The Rat" or "Rats", but given the ending, I think "The Departed" fits like a glove.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
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One of the best movies I've ever seen. The movie wasn't about mobsters and cops. The movie was a lifetime achievement award to Force.
"that's what the (racial epithet)s don't understand, no one gives it to you, you have to take it."
The whole movie was about that: How we try to domesticate of force. You can have rules, codes, charts, economic graphs, but in the end Costello is close to being right, if you want something, you can always just take it, and that truism presents most of the problems in the world. It's true of mobsters and cops, sports teams, businesses, rival families, armies, classmates, whether it's Costello or my tweedy former business professor saying it, force works. The great issue is that if force works, why should we only use it sometimes?
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I loved the movie also. I thought it even surpassed the original, although maybe that's just because I'm an American. It's late, and there's so much that could be said about it, so I'll leave it at that. But if it's not at least nominated for best picture this year, along with a fair few other awards, I'll be very disappointed.
Posts: 563 | Registered: Feb 2006
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I also enjoyed this film immensely. I haven’t seen any other Scorsese films, but I will if they’re anything like The Departed.
My theory on why the film is so successful (from what I gather – my friends and the media are all raving about it) is that it gets all the little things right. The story is cliched and linear, but it’s done right. It’s polished.
I didn’t see The Departed as being particularly gritty or violent, but maybe that’s because I’ve been watching City of God and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In fact, most of the time the scenes took place in tidy offices and the streets of Boston - for a film following the lives of criminals and detectives, I thought it was relatively clean. In any case, I thought the realism of violence was just right for the atmosphere the film was aiming for.
One of the little things Scorsese got right – the mobile phones for example. Dr. Strangelove, you are spot on. This film isn’t about violence, about crime, about the devious tricks and clever devices criminals and cops use in their game of cat and mouse. It’s a simpler time (e.g. nobody knows what a microprocessor is), and the characters use the everyday technology available to them.
I’m not sure I’d go all the way with Irami saying this is a ‘celebration’ of (or mainly about) force, though. Certainly that's Costello's philosophy and a recurring theme, but I think the film is just a solid entertaining story and only that. It doesn’t preach to you – even the social commentary (segregation along racial and socio-economic lines, for example, especially in Costello’s opening monologue, the plight of Irish immigrants) is just a theme in the film’s backdrop with gives it that rich, textured feeling.
Also, I actually liked the ending. The other rat was a bit of a surprise, but was necessary for the shock value of that scene. Sure, we were all rooting for Billy and were stunned to see him shot, but shooting the hero is something you can get away with in the last 5 minutes of a film. Sullivan's death and the rat on the balcony railing really give it all poetic closure.
In a nutshell The Departed two and a half hours of excellent entertainment, told honestly and unburderdened by cinematographic experiments.
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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I thought it was neat how Costello applied principles we applaud in business and law, initiative and force respectively. The only difference is that he did it in ways in which we don't generally approve.
The same can be said about snitchs. It's okay that the police have an inside man, but it's horrid to think that Costello may have one.
Police are encouraged to lie to suspects, but it doesn't work the other way around. I loved how the movie shows how complicated it is to tame these principles. It's like trying to domesticate sin, we can use laws and stories and codes, but in the end, as soon as you give over to this chicanery and force, there wasn't that much of a difference between the cops and the crooks. Force won the day, and everyone else-- but Costigan-- was a reed drifting with the flow. There was one exception, for one night, where vulnerablity and truth got the girl.
The only person with the little kernel of character to stand up to withstand it was Costigan, and it ripped him apart. Awesome movie. ____
Admittedly, I have my head full of the Iliad and essays on the Iliad.
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I loved the film, but honestly was disappointed by the ending. It felt "just," but also felt as fake as the typical Greek tragedy. I couldn't help feeling that it would have been a more interesting ending had both leads simply agreed to go their own separate ways.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I loved the film as well. Saw it a couple of weeks ago. I think The Aviator is the only other Martin Scorsese film I've seen, and I liked that one too.
*** SPOILERS ***
I thought the revelation about the second informant in the police force was a little too pat. I felt like they'd written themselves into a corner, and rather than have a "happy" ending (I'd define that as any ending where Costigan lives, regardless of what happened to the others), they grabbed at the first possibility that came to mind.
I'm okay with the second informant. It just shows how sticky the whole widget is. What I don't understand is why, when Costigan figured it out, he didn't just scream it at the top of his lungs? He was in the middle of a police station.
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I saw it more than once, and I thought the same thing you did, Twink-that the ending was a bit of deus ex machina-ing (well, fired-cop-ex-machinaing?) way to handle the ending.
However, the second time I watched it I noticed that they did mention at least once that Costello had at least one infamahnt in the depahtment .
I wish they'd made a bigger deal out of it, so the ending didn't seem (initially, to me anyway) fake, but it did fit.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I was just going to ask, Irami, if you had been reading Thucydides' account of the war in Sicily recently!
Yes if I was Costigan I would have told everyone in the police station - it would take time to convince them, but if he did it quick enough and caused enough of a ruckus, Sullivan might not have had a chance to erase his file.
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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I've translated sections of the Peloponnesian War, the first hundred or so lines.
What really got me thinking this through was Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad and James Redfield's book, "Nature and Culture in the Iliad." There was a third article I picked up last week that mentioned courting and marriage as the "domestication of sex," and I thought that that was such a neat way of thinking about it. It made me think about how competitive sports, uniforms, and stripes can be considered the domestication of violence, not that this is bad, but I find it really interesting. It's not what these people do that is so bad, as much as they refuse to do it according to our established customs. The issue becomes, how do we cope with the fact that force works, and works well. How do we live in a world where taking what you want is a very effective way of getting what you want.
In the Iliad, Achilles' wrath is manifested in his not for using force in the appropriate way. He is called into question for not fighting, and then when he does finally fight, he is taken to task for not fighting according to custom. Force unleashed is not easily domesticated and it takes over. You can talk about different rules and codes you have to domesticate force, but in the end, people like Costello and Achilles are going to crop up, and it's hard to blame them entirely.
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I see. I don't want to derail the thread, but are you studying/teaching Classical Greek and history at college?
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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By this time, Costigan was so stressed out, potentially doped out, and frightened of lots of things. Queenan had been murdered right in front of him, and if anyone should've been safe from an overt murder it was him, right?
Costigan had no way of knowing how many people were with the traitor, or what the traitor had done. He went to the only other person he could trust, as soon as he could.
The part that seemed 'fake' to me was how...damnit, what's his name, Costello's primary informant...was surprised to see Dignam. He had to know that Dignam would be coming after him, and he knew that Costigan had called and told Dignam everything.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I just got around to seeing the movie tonight. And while I thought the movie was awesome, I was really dissapointed with the ending. Seriously. Up until the last ten minutes or so I was in love with the movie. Everyone was fantastic in it, ESPECIALLY Mark Wahlberg. He's really moving up on my respect-o-meter. And everyone who's anyone wants to move up on my respect-o-meter.
But the ending just felt like such a cop out to me.
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. Just my thoughts. Also, they didn't ever exactly say what was in the package Billy gave to the shrink. And I'll have more to say once the spoiler warning is up ... I think I've done decent at being ambiguous so far.
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