First Video Games Post: GameSpot

I hope this doesn't completely turn off my avid viewer base, but I'm talking video game stuff today.  

Today it's about GameSpot.  A very well established site that gets tons of viewers and tons of content.  What they also seem to get is tons of controversy in terms of their reviewing of games.  There seems to be rather clear circumstantial evidence suggesting that they don't exactly do the unbiased part of reviews so well.  And of course that's not completely possible to do anyway, but here's the story in a sentence for everyone.

One of their most notoriously critical critics (even downsizing the fantastic Zelda: Twilight Princess) was fired a few months ago for giving a genuinely bad game a bad review because the Spot was making money off their publisher.

Adding to that sentence, there's matters to consider like a mysterious anonymous editor posting about it in the forums talking about how wrong his termination was.  Another is that the entire visual theme of the place, at the time, REVOLVED around promoting that one game.  See what I mean?  It's fishy.  Of course they denied it, but I still think at least a modicum of bullshit is in that denial.

A more recent instance has popped up, causing me to start writing in this here journal again.  It involves the infamous Grand Theft Auto IV, which as we speak is getting more perfect scores than any game preceding it.  It's absolutely impressive, and in my eyes even a bit ludicrous.  These reviewers are pointing out flaws, and yet it's boundary-pushing and all that happy horse shit.  I think timing has a lot to do with it.  This game is released when there's literally NOTHING ELSE COMING OUT and everyone's high over the last November, chock full of amazing shit like Mario Galaxy or Call of Duty 4, is worn off.  It's been a relatively wan influx since then and then all of a sudden BANG, a stellar title rolls out.  I just find it a little superlative to score this game 10's, but so it goes.  I've never played it, maybe it will be the first game to make me cry, but I doubt it.  It's fucking GTA.  You commit crimes for people or yourself in a better looking city and with multiplayer.  But I digress. (and don't get the wrong idea, I'm still excited as dick to play it)

So of course the suspense comes when we all wonder what the fuck GameSpot is going to give it.  Mind you, I was only going to hear what the score was, as I have not visited the site since the past controversy.  There's enough there to tell me it's fucked up.  Anyway, the score rolls out.  And it is... a 9.5!  a 10!  A PERFECT 10 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!  HURRAY THE TRADITION CONTINUES!  EVEN GAMESPOT LOVES IT!

Fuck that site.  They actually CHANGED their fucking rating after it was published.  Sure, it's entirely possible the reviewer had a change of heart and decided yes, this game is amazing and deserves a 10.  What's more likely is politics upped that score.  GTA4, too, has ads about the site, and I'd imagine an angry fanbase is just so hard a thing to deal with.  Jokes I tell you, nothing more.

What really bothers me most about this is that, really, it's hard to single just these guys out, and it's also hard to single out just video game sites.  The potential for this kind of shit going into reviews is sadly high.  What's even more sad is how utterly unsurprising it is.  It just backs that age-old "money talks" thing.  That or just being a bunch of pussies about dealing with disagreement.  I can understand the latter, considering that even I bite my tongue when confronted with someone who loves something I hate (Across the Universe being a choice exception).  But this is different.  This is a task laid unto you, and social pleasantries or whatever shouldn't factor in.  A review is there to inform people who have not experienced a work (of art or otherwise), or to those who have give something they can use in comparing their own opinion or even augment it.  That's not happening if money or politics are getting factored in.

What sucks is that it's tricky to find good honest ones, and this is especially true in video games, I feel, where reviews are ostensibly a bunch of rattling off of mechanical elements of the game and not so much about the feeling one gets while playing.  Adding to that is that everything about reviews is bullshitable.  Anyone can write glowing praise about something they hated.  Go back and read an old book report you wrote to see what I mean.  So imagine how easy it is to say you love or hate a bunch of mechanical elements about a game without even lying about how you feel about the goddamned thing.  So petty and easy to lie about it's ridiculous.  

So really it boils down to an issue of trust on the reader's part.  We choose to trust the thoughts and ideas of certain people and their taste in things.  We trust that they're well read/watched/played (haha)/listened/jerked off (porn) and we trust that they have a good discerning eye/ear/dick (porn)/hand (video games/porn).  On top of that, they have to have a good writing style.  You also have to WANT to read what they're saying or hear in this day and age.  But that comes after the trust, because if you don't trust the source, you could give a shit what they're saying.  The only exception is if you trust their untrustworthiness, like the Onion or SomethingAwful I suppose.  

GameSpot, unfortunately, is no exception.  They're unveiling their practices, and it's both laughable and sad.  I'm sure they're in good company, but they slipped up and made it known.  It sucks because it throws into question what earns trust.  I used to read their reviews because of their penchant for being particularly harsh, even when it went against my own thoughts on a game.  I just can't anymore, and it kind of sucks.  Maybe I'm being unfair, considering GTA4 is a high profile game that would cause that kind of tension, but I don't think so.  The previous title, Kane & Kynch, was high profile as well, but definitely not on the level where it warranted payola to get involved and get a critic fired.  I suppose it's worth noting, though, that they did keep his score up.  But to counter that, Jeff Gerstmann's firing led to the departure of at least five other GameSpot employees.  I mean shit's just gotta be all kinds of retarded, right?  I don't feel like I'm being unfair.  What makes me wonder if I am, though, is the fact that I may well trust someone who does the exact same thing, only are a little more crafty.  Perhaps the thing to do is read it/watch it and decide for ourselves the value of their opinion.  It's just hard for me to not hold a grudge to a group that takes the whole review thing so lightly and likely sees it as more of a business opportunity.  And besides that, like I said, there's plenty of sites reviewing in that mechanical style anyway.  To lose one is not a significant thing.  I may change my mind on this, but for now I just can't support a site that functions this way.

I suppose I can go ahead and say that Zero Punctuation is probably one of the better game critics out there today.  Watch his silly reviews.  That's him talking, and that's his thoughts about it, it's clear and it's funny.  If it's all bullshit, he's spectacular at it and he's worth a view on that alone.

Blah, whatever.  I'm posting it and leaving it here.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson is one of those people whose work I love so much it rouses concern in me that I just might be a hipster. What also rouses concern is how each time I watch it, The Life Aquatic becomes a better and better movie to me, and it's generally regarded as his weakest one yet.

But no film has had Bill Murray with as much time on screen completely topless, and this MUST count for something, shouldn't it?

Having been utterly and emotionally crushed by the fact that I can find NEITHER my Flight of the Conchords Season 1 dvd's NOR Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I resolved to watch this film, which was oddly placed upon my bookshelf. Given the way this film seems to want to act as a sort of play on screen rather than fully explore the elements unique to film moreso than other Anderson films, I find it, while overlooking that it was probably my indolent self putting it somewhere, droll and ironic. So it's no longer there, and it was played, further justifying my purchase. Thumbs up.

My girlfriend at the end: "It was ok." Oh yeah? Well you like Kevin Barnes of Of Montreal and he LOVED it! So yeah! That proves nothing!

The truth is she's absolutely right. I feel that Wes aims far and wide with this one, and with many stylishly sparse and tight long shots hopes to not only offer us an epic overseas adventure, but a deep exploration of the emotions spanning a breadth of characters. For Wes here, it's ambitious as hell, and while it's all guessing since I have not seen it, it looks like he narrowed his focus a little more for his followup The Darjeeling Limited. I don't blame him, because Zissou and Crew just didn't hit it out of the park. What they did accomplish, though, was at least a two-base run that's totally worth watching in my mind.

Again, this is maybe my third or fourth time watching it, and it's one that grows on me. Given that the reach is so wide, you really absorb little on the first viewing but a gist of the story and a breadth of humorous characters. Watch the journey again, and you may soften up to Steve Zissou, played by Bill Murray with the dolor that got him award talks in Lost in Translation, and his desperation for finding someone still rooting for him. Actually, to tell you the truth, he's probably the only character that I've grown attached to at all, but it's become a fun thing to watch his journey. Steve would hate to hear me say it, but I seriously like the film.

That doesn't change the fact that I walked out of the theater after my first viewing feeling a little underwhelmed compared to how I felt walking out of Royal Tenenbaums, which was equally dense and increasing in value on repeat viewings. So why is that? Well, Royal and Steve are two main characters with a lot in common. Both are old men with past glories and they're looking for reasons why they went away and also finding a way to regain them. Both have reached a point of desperation when we find them. What Steve has that Royal does not, though, is 1) thinner characters. Most characters are only seen through the lens of their interactions with Steve. The only real deviations are incredibly brief and both involve Ned. It gives a little depth to some other characters, but not a lot. Royal, on the other hand, gives a good amount of focus to troubles facing Royal's children completely out of his control. It's truly a broader ensemble piece and goes far in giving everyone a purpose beyond reflecting ONE character's troubles. 2) Thinner side plots. I wanted to care more about Willem DaFoe's Klaus, but it just never came up. He's just desperate for Steve's regards and it's never really explained why since he's essentially a right hand man. I keep comparing to Royal, and I don't know if that's completely fair, but in that one you have a sort-of-incestuous love affair, a drugged out friend, and some other stuff that doesn't completely tie together but it's there and interesting on some level. At the very least, again, it gives some flesh to his characters. Zissou's side crap is interesting too, but not as much so. 3) No big adventure to worry about. This may be the biggun' because this part was actually really cool in this movie. Completely unrealistic, we have Steve flip out on Filipino pirates to the Stooges' "Search and Destroy" and a very awkward yet awesome shootout/chase on their hideout island. It's funny and fun in an Indiana Jones kind of way, but stylistically anything but. It's actually pretty entertaining and is something new for Anderson. But it does pull away from time that could be spent developing characters. Thus everything is left feeling a little half-baked.

But fuck you all, sometimes the doughy bread is the good shit. It's soft and mushy, but there's some substance there. And style, which doesn't fit the bread analogy but Anderson's style is in top form here. From those strange jump cuts that feel abrupt but totally work somehow, to a full setpiece of all the ship's (the Belafonte) decks leading to very impressive long takes that make for almost a comic book feeling. My girlfriend didn't feel comfortable at all during these, though, so your mileage may of course vary. And it still amounts to something. Again, it's not as good as it could have been, but come on now. The ending does kind of get to me. I'm happy to see the redemption and I do feel it.

The added focus on action has other perks as well. Here we have Wes throwing in visuals of the deep sea. With CG and claymation he does, to an extent, capture the sense of wonder of his audience. This is new territory for him, and again the high aim means it doesn't get all the attention it deserves, but it does offer a level of aesthetic captivation that's worth noting. But it does even more. It actually proves itself to be a neat little symbol of Steve's own vitality, first being something taken for granted to something that completely halts the film. It all comes together at the end to remind Steve that, as he puts it, "this is an adventure." This viewing is the one where I finally begin to understand what the hell he might mean.

Maybe it's forced. Maybe it's the dedication of a Wes Anderson fanboy, but if I really am one, wouldn't I have seen Darjeeling Limited by now? Wouldn't I have been excited for it rather than concerned that he's rehashing themes he's revisited several times over at this point? And again, I didn't feel this way when I first watched it. For some reason I started caring more as I re-watched. Perhaps it's one of those things where you're better able to sort through the pieces, and the pieces just aren't as well organized this time around. So what I'm here telling you is this: there's some really pretty, very worthwhile pieces here. You can sift through them and make something special of it, but it is a little broken up and not as well put together as Wes's other gems. I still give it a recommendation.

One Hour Photo

First of all, to discuss the newfound joy in watching movies on television. I would have never gotten up and watched One Hour Photo on my own, but there it was. The main motivation to watch this movie again was the fact that my girlfriend, who hates Robin Williams, had not seen it, and I wanted her to see him at his utmost creepiest. Bless her heart for putting up with my adamant pushing for watching particular movies, but I still have not dragged her into a Lord of the Rings viewing, but rest assured... IT WILL HAPPEN.

Anyway, another reason was, for the first time in a long time, I came upon the movie as it was starting, which is fantastic. It was still on FX, meaning everything is edited to hell, but fortunately this movie remains relatively clean, and ironically the one scene with any nudity at all is pretty much there entirely. What's NOT there is the word "fuck" and some pictures of someone's amateur porn that Sy, Robin Williams' character, develops. But anyway, the movie on the whole is there.

And that movie, overall, was kind of disappointing on this viewing.

So here's the deal, this is a Fox Searchlight picture, which usually means those slightly off kilter movies that aren't HEAVILY subversive or stylistically unnerving on the viewer, but they're also awkward enough to not earn a spot with the Fox label. Think Juno or Little Miss Sunshine for the humor section, this film for the suspense/horror.
That being the case, this movie gets a little more artsy than most, and it makes for interesting contrasts to the typical "follow the creep" and being that photos are the setting, most those contrasts are visual. Rather than live in the dark and be a generally murky man. Sy Parrish is a man who looks clean and pristine. His apartment is almost entirely white barring things like stove grills which I'm sure he'd make white if he could help it. To color things a little bit, he may wear a blue tie or blue messenger bag to match his bright blue eyes. It's neat because it shows man who's empty, neurotic as hell, and of course weird with a hint of well-wishing. But what primarily makes him creepy is his obsession with a specific family that frequents his One Hour Photo counter at their local SavMart. As it turns out, he makes duplicate copies of EVERY roll of film they bring in and keeps them for himself to place on a wall of his. Creepy and dorky all in one. As it turns out, this is the one colorful part of his apartment, and it doesn't even really belong to him. Everything about it screams creepy lonely longing motherfucker.

So what happens when he learns that this family he idolizes is far from perfect? When he learns that the story in the photos is basically a lie? Watch the film to find out!

Now, had Robin Williams not played this character, it's very possible this movie would go down in flames. First of all, he does creepy extraordinarily well, walking that line of decency/inappropriate work interactions uncomfortably well. He behaves like a normal miserable person at home and lets his surroundings do all the talking. It's subtle, it's pristinely disgusting, it's great. Everyone knows him to be funny (Mork & Mindy) or incredibly useless and stupid (RV). He's not often given these roles, and I think we're about due for another one. I enjoy it, and I bet if he weren't famous, he would be this creepy to people. Actually, most actors would.

But it's an understatement to say he could've ruined the movie if he didn't perform well. Even if he did a moderate job, this movie would, in my eyes, tank. First off, the plot holes are a series of small things that after a while grew grating. Things like the mother character telling her boy she's just dropping off some photos so don't take long in the store, and then saying that she'd like to pick up the photos that very same day in an hour. It's a minor oversight, I know, but it's there. Some others seem to have more to do with keeping the movie stylish rather than logical, but whatever. That's the small nitpick. The bigger one has to do with that style. The film uses its distinct visuals EVERYWHERE and it's a huge part of the film, and it goes over the top when it starts to just film shit and let the viewer make symbolism out of it. Once in a while it's witty, like a mirror looking like a photograph, but often it's just stupid. "Let's film a lone coin-op rocking horse outside the shop running with no one on it! Yeah, that's lonely!" It gets a little much.
I bet writer/director Mark Romanek hoped this to be significant. He hoped it would be his Taxi Driver or something, and I can see how he could have succeeded. The imagery shows a static lifeless world filled with shelves of crap in stores, and Sy's home reflects it to an extent. And being a byproduct of a materialistic world, he himself is almost like a robot seeking affection with only images of it to have any understanding, and then the ideal image is shattered leading to a breakdown. I get that, but for some reason I just wasn't all too shook up at the end of this film. There was just a guy I felt sorry for because he was lonely and honestly didn't do much about it. At least Travis Bickle tried to establish relationships. One Hour Photo is more about the look of the world and Sy himself, and not enough on the world itself or the characters around him who offered decent performances but whose fairly prominent presence away from Sy just made him even more of a creepy guy than an antihero.
But I have to bear in mind that Romanek is primarily a music video man, so of course it's heavy on the visual side. A lot of this shit looks like it'd come right out of a music video or TV commercial, the photos themselves are a horrible victim of this, actually.
Again, Robin Williams turns in a great enough performance, and you do get a moral quandary at the end, but it's just a few elements short of sheer greatness. However, it's also much more stylish than a lot of great movies. If there were a scale with one end stating Style, and the other stating Substance, it would lean toward style, but closer to substance than many similar films. I'd say that's worth something. It's still a fun creepy guy thriller at its heart.

Now, I've seen many a Seagal film.  And I've seen Under Siege before, which is very likely the best movie to come out of the Steven Seagal canon.  That alone doesn't say much considering his reputation for churning out complete shit, but still as an action flick this doesn't completely blow chunks.  Now, while this did not stop me from falling asleep on the film, I am still comfortable saying this.

I should also warn everyone that I am basing this review on my "sleep through" viewing, which was aired by TNT and means that almost all the violence and cussing was shoddily edited out completely.  My dubiously high mark of Steven Seagal's best work involved me filling in the bleeps and cuts with what I remember to be the actual unadultered film.

I'm not entirely sure where to start on reviewing this.  See, I think this is my first go at the shallower waters of cinema, and that's hollywood action flicks.  Ok, I'm hitting a stride now.  These movies require no level of intelligence, defy reality at all points, and, if done right, are a lot of fun for all said reasons.  If not, they can be a complete chore to get through.  

There is a key exception to the chore rule, though, and that is the age of the audience.  When I was in my early to mid teens and even probably a little before that, these movies were pretty much the finest examples of cinema to me.  I was a child whose first viewing of a Mortal Kombat arcade machine threw me into a frenetic fascination with all violent media.  Never once, mind you, being violent myself, I did find violence to be pretty much the greatest thing the world had ever known.  Many years later, something happened to me.  I went to watch films like XXX and Collateral Damage and thought they were pretty much the worst thing to come along (research post-writing shows these were both made in 2002, the year I graduated from high school).  All of a sudden I was, more and more, seeing these films as brawny smatters of retardation masking a complete lack of story or interesting characters with big explosions and guns.  When I revisit the movies I loved as a kid, I see that, for many of them, this is the case.  So in my growing up, for better or worse, my tastes changed dramatically.  Now, I'm guessing that I'm not alone.  There are others that went through a similar progression.  But not all, for I know people that still get excited about new movies starring Stone Cold Steve Austin, and the man I have in mind was indeed older than me.  All the same, I know I'm not alone. 

I WILL say this, though: Martin Riggs, John McClane, and to a lesser extent Casey Ryback here are far more entertaining characters than the action protagonists filmmakers are coming up with today.  Why do you not see more XXX sequels?  Not a whole lot of action film franchises springing up on the whole, are there?  They're just getting dumber and less valuable.  I daresay that these movies, while they're also brawny and stupid, still had something about them.  Riggs and Murtaugh of Lethal Weapon would joke around and bicker and argue and it was charming and funny.  The camera often even took us into their personal lives, over the films getting us familiar with Murtaugh's family and Riggs' start of being a complete suicidal mess to someone coming back to his good side with his partner's help.  It's the buddy cop movie blueprint and it still hasn't been topped.  People still try because it gives the audience a little something more to care about if done right.  John McClane of Die Hard had all kinds of personal problems, but then he gets stuck in pretty much the shittiest situation a cop can get in, and he has no star-studded past so he just inexplicably wants to do the right thing.  Incidentally, the right thing involves kicking more ass than any normal man could handle, and really character development doesn't go as far, but it's there, and it's enough where you start to think McClane is pretty funny.

And finally, after all this, we get to Under Siege and its protagonist Casey Ryback.  On the surface, it can be looked at as a sort of anti-Die Hard.  It throws away the personal woes, keeps the wit as best it can with a non-actor like Steven Seagal, and keeps a keen focus on badassery.  Where McClane had you concerned because quite he had some stupid ideas on getting out of certain situations, Ryback left no concern at all.  Being an ex-SEAL with tons of medals and shit, you weren't worried about him.  The journey is more about seeing how he's going to fuck with the bad guys and cheering him on as every single scheme works.  Only one character with more than a couple spoken lines gets killed on camera making you feel bad, and even he's off to the side enough where you don't care.  This is Ryback's show, SPOILER INCOMING he severs limbs on table saws, rips out Adam's Apples with his bare hands, and even pushes in poor Tommy Lee Jones' eye and then stabs him in the head with a cooking knife.  SPOILER DONE but while it is a spoiler, it should be no surprise that the good guys win.  Still, behind all this, it's just a Die Hard ripoff.  A contained space with something of particular value is hijacked by an unusually smart and subtly wealthy team of sociopaths and thieves and one man, the overlooked detail, fights on because he's the only hope for everyone.  

The truth is, you can look a this film as the transition point to the action genre that now thrives.  A super badass that is cool to watch, but hard to care about because he does everything right.  He's essentially not human.  This is why sequels don't work.  Look at Under Siege 2 and XXX: State of the Union.  And when I'm honest with myself, those greats are better than what we get now.  There are four Lethal Weapons and four Die Hards because we liked the characters.  That's gone, and I miss it.  They're no fucking French Connection or Chinatown, but they're fun, and their characters are likable.  Now the characters are disposable and the flash is getting too much focus, completely destroying its value.  Who cares about a big explosion killing all the bad guys if we never got a chance to hate them to begin with?  A big part of that is that they want to kill heroes we don't give a shit about.

But I'd bullshit you if I said I've outgrown it.  Those flashy action sequences can still get me going if done well.  That second X-Men movie kicked all kinds of ass, and I love ALL THREE Spidey flicks.  I guess the Superheroes get all the love nowadays?  I also want to praise Die Hard 4, but it's such a throwback with modern day effects that it pretty much epitomizes what action movies ought to be.  It cheated, though.  It had John McClane.  Trump card, y'know?  Still, I loved it.  Other stuff is just shit.  Jason Statham, who I loved in Snatch, is churning out cookie-cutter style over substance action movies that no one should care about.  So is Angelina Jolie.

I'm greatly blaming the Matrix for this, even though that first movie was pretty good.  I will stop there because that trilogy is a whole other mess.

Not all hope is lost, though.  As I mentioned, superhero movies can really nail it sometimes as they're dealing with characters that have had years of fleshing out.  But there's new blood I like.  The Jason Bourne movies are flat out awesome, even with the nauseating editing and cinematography in the latter 2.  They're still compelling stories and a very unique protagonist with his nice guy demeanor and surprising depth with his confusion.  More like that, and we're in great shape.  Plus, the trend seems to be agreeing with me, as I haven't seen as much press for these movies lately.  Unless it's Michael Bay making dogshit like Transformers.  Fuck you, Michael Bay.  Go blog about blu-ray and stop making movies. 

Scorsese Pinch

I'm seeing this blog fast become a sort of film reviews thing. That's alright with me.

Tonight I'm going to talk about the Scorsese bits I've (re)watched over the last week: The Departed and GoodFellas. Both of these are superb film making for a variety of reasons. The obvious suspects are razor-sharp editing, brutal imagery and cinematography, and a cast that's at the top of their game at all times. This, of course, doesn't factor in that the stories are both compelling and really really cool. There's something else here, though. I think it's safe to say that Scorsese, for the most part, makes pretty brauny and masculine movies. Of course, if you look at his most-used editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, you really wouldn't expect this kind of stuff at all. But there it is, ripe with rapid cuts, wild camerawork, and sometimes what seems like glee-filled nutbaggery. What's more, this is art. There's a compelling statement being made in all this blood and guts and guns and gore and mobs and wiseguys and crime and uses of the word fuck. It's rare, but Marty, as he seems to be called by people in making-of docs, seems to have found the art in all this shit. He's legitimized the action and violence, and the trick, apparently, is in focusing on everything around that action.

Watch either film, or hell watch any number of his films. The action sequences are tight, but they're hardly the focus. A shootout in an old factory doesn't have half the suspense of the two main characters silently connected via cell phones waiting on each other to speak. It's everything else, and Marty sees that. That's why he's considered a great film maker.

In my Scorsese bug, I want to share a dream I had last night. It involved the John Woo film Face/Off, which is what a film like The Departed could have been in a lesser director's hands. It's interesting to note that Departed is based on a Hong Kong film and John Woo came from there. Again, Scorsese sees something that many others seem to completely miss (and it should be noted that Hong Kong cinema has a wholly different eye that's worth seeing as well). But anyway, my dream involved the plot of that film, but unfolding in a way that was more akin to a Scorsese or like-skilled director telling the tale. I will not share it here, because the idea's not terrible if it is in fact a huge knockoff.

But my main point is to show what HE would've done. Back to the two films...

Where GoodFellas focuses on this one world, it doesn't have the conflicting realities going on that, in my opinion, makes Departed the more powerful and, yes, superior film. This is a hard statement for me to make, but being completely honest, it seems the more fair statement to me. HOWEVER, GoodFellas may well be the more enjoyable film.
What it does, essentially, is give quite possibly the ultimate portrait of a foreign world right within our very streets. It humanizes a regular goon in organized crime and through his eyes glorifies and denigrates that world. On the surface, it's a classic portrait of a treehouse club of guys who have it all, but shows that the treehouse itself is pretty unstable and about to collapse, while at the same time showing that it's the members that make it that way. That's the easy stuff. From fun social stuff to gritty and unbelievably horrific violence that is apparently not at all far off the mark. The more interesting part is the protagonist who's right in the thick of it and not as some outsider we can fully identify with because of his unfamiliarity, but as a guy who we can fully identify with because of his humanity. We're painted a portrait, basically. And there's no specific wording going on, and maybe that's where I'm thrown. Through the classic Rise and Fall plot we're shown a lot of things that shows the mob like only a TV series several seasons long has managed to really compete with since. Even The Godfather series had a message in its carnage. This one leaves it to the viewer. Perhaps that's what makes it the greater artistic achievement, though? Like life, it offers pieces, and we can piece them together however we like, and what we make of it becomes a sort of reflection of our selves. A truly sinister person could look at this film as a mere cautionary tale of what happens when you work behind your boss's back. This all is delivered via charming characters and colorful scenarios of all kinds that you can't help but watch. All the violence is counterbalanced with oddly delightful social banter and shenanigans that you can't help but still kind of like them in some way. It doesn't hurt that it's stylish as all hell, either.
But does that diminish something like The Departed with its punch to your face dissertation on how fucked up and absurd the world is? It's not exactly new territory for Scorsese, but the way it's shown here is, where he basically takes a classic good vs. evil story and twists and swirls it into something where those distinctions mean almost nothing. Where bad guys do good for bad ends, good guys to bad for their good ends. Is it excusable on either side? The film raises such questions and they're almost impossible to answer. These themes are flawlessly tied in with a plot that is so gripping and intriguing, though, that by itself it's totally worth watching. The story is carried by two main characters who undergo about as much distress as you likely will watching it, and rather than throw in a stupid amount of arbitrary plot twists, it's all saved for the end when the tension hits a fucking apotheosis in madness that would indeed look stupid had it all been in someone else's hands. Here, though, we have it presented where the themes and story leave you with those questions and then tying them to any of characters in a number of ways. It's the kind of intricate jacked up shit you probably have going on in your own life but a whole lot more stylish and a whole lot more significant, possibly causing another kind of reflection. Extra props go to Jack Nicholson's performance as Frank Costello. Holy shit that's some fun glib evil! The film does, however, get a little much on the church and rat symbolism. The man can get indulgent, for sure.

Or, of course, you can accept these movies as shining examples of just really fucking cool movies. It's short sighted to stop there, but it's not unreasonable. However, if you ask what makes The Departed or GoodFellas so badass despite a lack of common crime movie elements, you may find why Scorsese's able to legitimize machismo in a whole other and wholly more constructive way.

Clearly, I'll give either movie an immediate recommendation. I was immediately quick to conclude that he was playing it safe by going back to a gangster setting with Departed, and I still do to an extent. It is his comfort zone, but he's looking at it from several points of view, and at completely different aspects, making for what is still a very fresh and worthwhile film. Plus, when I'm honest with myself, departures like The Aviator just don't come off as good, but still good y'know?



Side Shit:
I want to kind of rave about Martin Scorsese as a director too. He's not perfect. As I mentioned, I wasn't crazy about Aviator, Gangs of New York just felt lacking in a lot of ways, and while I haven't seen his entire catalog, I can see myself disliking others as well. What I love, though, is the undying passion the man shows for the medium. The dude still talks about movies as if he was in his 30s working on Taxi Driver, just full of energy and excitement about what can be done. It's ridiculously admirable and is a statement to finding that something you really truly love. For him, it's film. For the rest of us, who knows. We can only aspire to find that one thing though, huh?
While I can be completely wrong, he also just seems like a likable grandpa in his current look. Being the ex-coke head he is, that's kinda cool. Though I can be totally wrong about him. I've never spoken with the dude. It's all just guesses. He has gone through 4 divorces.

PLUS he's in New York, which, as far as my limited frame of mind is concerned, is the greatest city in the country. Call me fucked up, but I wish I saw it the way Travis Bickle did.