The Top 10 Martin Scorsese Films

With Martin Scorsese celebrating his 70th birthday today, what better time than to count down 10 of the greatest achievements of one of America's greatest directors? Unlike his contemporaries, Scorsese has enjoyed a typically stable level of quality over the course of his entire career, not flaming out like a Cimino or Coppola nor exploding beyond his initial, intimate scale the way Spielberg and Lucas did. A consummate craftsman, Scorsese continues to employ technical mastery on a level that up-and-comers can only imitate, and often through contradictorily old-fashioned means. Think the tangible recreations of Gangs of New York, or the lush Technicolor throwbacks of The Aviator or Shutter Island. And when presented with new technology, as with digital and 3D, the director looks not merely to replicate the feel of film but to explore how these technical aspects can influence new directions in storytelling.

Not content merely to provide the world with his own string of great and memorable films, Scorsese has devoted much of his life to the preservation of the movies that inspired him, keeping them alive to motivate the next generation of movie brats. It can be difficult to whittle down his impressive filmography, filled not only with features but documentaries, concert films, shorts, even music videos and advertisements. These 10, however, distill the best of my all-time favorite director.

10. Mean Streets

Both De Niro and Scorsese had made films before Mean Streets (De Niro had even appeared in a masterpiece in the form of Hi, Mom!), but that slo-mo scene of De Niro bouncing onto screen to the strains of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" feels like an announcement of arrival for both. Swathed in the Catholic guilt that would become one of Scorsese's trademark tics, Mean Streets refines the raw, Cassevetes-inspired work that preceded this third feature and funnels it toward an exciting, developed voice. The director would continue to develop his skills over the years, but the immediacy of this breakthrough still offers one of the best insights into the director's canon of self-destructive characters pursuing hollow, often dangerous dreams and paying dearly for them.

9. Shutter Island

As Roberto Rossellini once said of Chaplin's A King in New York, Shutter Island is the work of a free man. Having finally gotten his Oscar for an enjoyable but wan self-parody, Scorsese threw himself into some good pulp and produced this elegantly colorized, paranoiacally unsettled thriller. Sure, the twist can be seen from the boat pulling into the prison island's harbor, but it's the journey that counts, and Scorsese spins out a masterful yarn that plys his Im- and Ex-pressionist tendencies to their fullest use since Bringing Out the Dead. And after The Departed basically used a "Best Songs from Scorsese Films" playlist for its soundtrack, Shutter Island sources canonical and contemporary classical music and ambient noise to further trap its plunging crimsons and multiple image sources (several kinds of film stock and digital are used) in a time all its own. It even manages to revisit the irritatingly expository dénouement of Hitchcock's Psycho with a more devastatingly personal twist.

8. Raging Bull

Leave out Robert De Niro's overhyped weight fluctuations and Raging Bull still contains one of the all-time great performances for its complete understanding of character. Whether lean and mean or fat and broken, De Niro gives Jake La Motta the braggadocio, intensity and insecurity a boxer who came from nothing would feel, making it big and falling pray to all the impulses no longer restrained by income level. Scorsese more than matches his muse: the boxing scenes are a tour de force, aping the great ballet scene of The Red Shoes by occurring in the subjective experience of the protagonist, who gets in the ring not for the crowd around him but to pummel the poor son of a bitch in front of him. The fights take place against a black void of white noise, which makes the matches as disturbing as the astonishing prosthetic and makeup work that shifts features with every sick punch.

7. Goodfellas

So many position Goodfellas as the recipient of The Godfather's baton, but in nearly every way it is the opposite of Coppola's operatic saga. The Corleone family comprise a host of Greek tragic figures, perversely successful immigrants and wholesome American heroes turned fratricidal monsters. The characters of Scorsese's gangster masterpiece, however, are nasty, brutish and stupid, in the game solely to satisfy their id and dying suddenly when they make one wrong step. To put it another way, The Godfather sticks with the masterminds; Goodfellas stays with those the masterminds plot to whack when they get out of line. For sheer bravura filmmaking, the coke-soaked sequence of the FBI closing in on Ray Liotta's burned-out hood has rarely been matched by anyone, even Scorsese himself.

6. Gangs of New York

Unfortunately compromised with a tacked-on love story and a bit too unwieldy even without the influence of studio notes, Gangs of New York nevertheless serves as Scorsese's messiest valentine to his hometown and the legacy of blood that built it. Released in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Gangs demonstrates that xenophobia and carnage are inherent in New York's story, but so too is the desire to make a better life. The film suggests that some battles are worth fighting while others are merely worthless, and the opinion of the mob may not always see which is which. And though the film technically concerns Leonardo DiCaprio's avenging son of an immigrant, it hinges on Daniel Day-Lewis, an Irishman playing an anti-Irish gang leader whose extradiegetic contradictions manifest in the character. A brute whose preference of open conflict over democratic gentility anthropomorphize the Civil War that only intrudes upon the myopic street wars depicted here at the feature's end, Bill is equally capable of honor and dignity for those he carves so ruthlessly. One of Scorsese's messiest films, to be sure, but also one of his purest.

5. Life Lessons

Scorsese's segment in New York Stories (the only worthy one of the trio) returns to the Dostoevsky well that served him so well with his Palme D'Or winner, this time loosely adapting The Gambler rather than Notes from Underground. "Life Lessons" uses a painter's block and his strained relationship with an assistant who wants to break away with him in order to craft a vision of art as expansive and intimate as the vast canvas Nolte's character throws paint upon in brief, tightly shot fits of creativity. Deafening music, blinding stylistic flourishes and more turn the protracted hell of Dobie's emotionally wrought creative process into a larger portrait of how art inspires, torments and releases. In 45 minutes, Scorsese says as much about why he lives to create as much as his lengthy documentaries on the films that inspire him.

4. The Last Temptation of Christ

When I found it online shortly after watching the movie, the Siskel & Ebert review of The Last Temptation of Christ struck me as much as the film itself. In it, Gene Siskel noted that Willem Dafoe’s Jesus “knows it is harder to be a good man than a god.” That single line captured the whole film for me, an atheist who always felt awful watching Jesus walk to his death with the supposed foreknowledge of what he would endure. Scorsese uses that prescience as perhaps the greatest agony Christ faced, filling Him with Catholic guilt before the Church could even grow out of His sacrifice. By showing Jesus as a man (emphasis on man, not Son of God), Scorsese actually lends greater credence to the power of His words because Jesus wrestles with every teaching, every temptation. Sympathy, too, is spared for Judas, who knows the role he must play and is torn up by the awful responsibility placed upon him. The titular final temptation, in which Christ gets to live out a peaceful, happy life as he bleeds out on the cross, is Scorsese's greatest moment to date.

3. Bringing Out the Dead

Every so often, Scorsese cleanses his palate with a pure exercise in style. After Hours, Casino, Shutter Island and the like let off creative steam when the director gets too overheated. Bringing Out the Dead, however, mixes this glorious excess with a genuinely great script, messing with Taxi Driver’s components until that movie somehow morphs into a touching romance between two broken individuals and between a shattered Christ figure and his even-worse-off flock. Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances, wild but wounded, capable of playing to the sensory overload of the frame but centered enough to ground it. So many of Scorsese’s films are hallucinations. None is more pained than this.

2. Taxi Driver

So ensconced in the pop culture lexicon that it almost suffers for being put on a pedestal, Taxi Driver remains a singular achievement, as intimate as it is vast and so wrapped up in its protagonist that the man is, to this die, cited as both an anti-hero and a total villain. Scorsese's hell-vision of New York is repugnantly realized, Bickle's hatred transferred through the subjective lens onto the entire city. It no longer even resembles a metropolis but a state of mind, hissing steam, dripping grime and grinding innocence into pulp between molars. The only thing worse than staring at this world through Travis' eyes is the moment when Scorsese, unable to bear it any longer, briefly tracks away from the psychopath and the vacant hallway upon which he settles disturbs more than the sight of Travis' worst carnage.

1. The King of Comedy

The King of Comedy feels so unlike a Scorsese film, endothermic where his work usually burns will spare energy and static instead of vivid. Rupert Pupkin even erects a dream world around himself of unmoving cardboard cutouts, celebrities and a two-dimensional wall of an adoring crowd frozen in love for whomever stands in front of them. Bickle simmered until he exploded, but even Pupkin’s most drastic actions reveal an insularity as the anxious, fame-hungry loser collapses into his paper-thin fantasy. Among the film’s many ingenious, brutal reflections on celebrity, the best may be the anticlimax and denouement, almost entirely shown through the filter of a TV screen, reflecting how Pupkin’s triumph would be transmitted but also weakening the impact with soft video images. For Scorsese, the master aesthete, the inferior image quality clearly connotes the negative aspect of fame for fame’s sake, but as celebrities famous simply for being famous have exploded in recent years, The King of Comedy looks enduringly fresh in its analog conclusion.

Silent Hill: Modals for Possibility - MIGHT COULD MUST

The first scene of the movie is intriguing. You have a lot to speculate about. Ask your students to use their imagination doing the exercises.

I. Watch the movie segment and write 3 sentences for the questions below.

Use MIGHT and COULD (slight possibility), MUST (great possibility) or CANT (impossibility).

1. What happened in Silent Hill?

a .............................................

b ............................................

c ............................................

2. What kind of city is Silent Hill?

a ...........................................

 b ..........................................

 c ..........................................

3. What will happen if they go to Silent Hill by themselves?

a ..........................................
 

b .........................................

c .........................................

4. How will the child's father react when he finds out his wife and child went to Silent Hill

without him?

a .........................................

b ........................................

c .........................................

II. Work with the class as a whole. First, read your sentences with MUST out loud and decide which is the most plausible explanation for each of the questions.

III. Now read your sentences with the other modals and decide which one is the most far fetched for each of the questions.

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Dionysus in '69 (Brian De Palma, 1970)

I never got around to this in my De Palma retrospective, so when Spectrum Culture decided to do one of its own, I knew I had to cover it. The results are...middling, like so many early De Palma efforts, though as a concentrated experiment in sustained split-screen usage it remains an intriguing work. De Palma's highly cinematic techniques ironically enhance the theatricality of the filmed performance, though soon he would be employing the methods for even more lavishly stylized effect. Nothing more than a curio, perhaps, but De Palma has made far worse.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2012)

The contemporary prevalence of apocalyptic films reaches its apex with The Turin Horse. It contains the various dualities that have marked this recent spate of subject matter: ascetic and deeply aesthetic, primally raw and analogously mannered, ending the world with a bang (or at least a howl) and a whimper. If it is to be Béla Tarr's final film, it is a disturbingly appropriate one for an artist whose stately, enigmatic corpus comprises some of the most quietly yet profoundly horrific films in all of cinema. It is a film so bleak that musical collaborator Mihaly Vig's ominous cues almost offer relief despite their sinister tones, for at least they suggest that music of some sort still exists within this whiting-out world.

The title refers to the infamous, apocryphal story of Friedrich Nietzsche going mad at the sight of a horse being flogged, a tale related to the audience by a narrator. The speaker goes into some more detail of Nietzsche, though the specificity slips on other things, say, the name of the abusive cabman, now lost to time as only his occupation was needed to make the legend. "Of the horse," the narrator admits at the end of his introduction, "we know nothing." Tarr then opens on a horse, though it is not meant to be the one from Turin. Nor even is it a stand-in for the suffering beast; instead, one could argue that the film that follows could possibly be what Nietzsche saw in his collapsed mind after his final rush of incomprehensible letters and his final words, spoken 10 years before his actual death. But the closest Tarr's film (which credits editor Ágnes Hranitzky as co-director in keeping with his last few works) comes to Nietzsche is in its depiction of a world beyond, well, everything, not just good and evil.


With his characteristic long takes, Tarr follows that horse and its masters, an old man named Ohlsdorfer (János Derzi) and his unnamed daughter (Erika Bók), over the course of six days defined by an aggressively mundane routine set against increasingly strong winds that add a surreal flavor to the tedium. One's thoughts turn to Jeanne Dielman, especially when the centerpiece of each day's schedule is the boiling and eating of potatoes, the father and child's only sustenance. But Tarr and Akerman use their intense focus on the things omitted from most films in vastly different ways. Jeanne Dielman offers a fascinating deconstruction of domestic life along social and gendered lines, revealing the myriad ways society imposes itself even in the sealed-off space of the woman's home and informs her relationships with others and her sense of self. The Turin Horse, on the other hand, shows a parent-child bond as the last bastion of humanity as society outside their isolated hovel is wiped off the face of the Earth by the endless gales.

But as my friend Andreas noted in a brief conversation we had on Twitter about the vague Akerman connection, Tarr does not position father and daughter as our last beacon of hope. Far from it, their time together serves only to delay the inevitable, and the hardships they face simply to live their banal lives suggest that they would be better off merely surrendering to the storm. Tarr films them in unbroken takes, each shot ever moving outward as it gently curves with what could pass for action. What he documents are two people locked into almost animalistic instinct, not too discernible from the horse who shares their routine of drinking ice water, feeding on bare nutrition and carrying out heavy burdens. The first day's shot of the pair's meal starts close on the daughter's preparation of the food and her setting of the plate in front of her father, whose fingers reach into frame and clumsily, gingerly claw at the skin of the steaming tuber. The camera moves back to show the man's face and upper body as he feeds with instinctual remove, rapidly cramming his mashed potato into his mouth while his face remains unsettlingly impassive. His feeding is all the more bestial thanks to his paralyzed right arm, which comes off as a transference of abuse from Nietzsche's unseen horse to a parallel dimension where the driver suffers the wounds.

And if the driver in this realm exhibits some of the horse's traits, so too does the horse seen on the screen exercise a willpower more suited to a human than a beast of burden. After seeing it drag the cart along in the first shot, the horse decides it has had enough of that and refuses to budge when the humans harness it and the father attempts to set off for town. After that, they cannot even get the harness on; by the third day, it ceases to eat, and by the fourth, it will not drink. The humans continue on with their tasks, but the horse knows better. This makes for dark humor, with father and daughter eventually reduced to tugging their cart around themselves as the horse follows freely, subtly driving them on as they attempt to flee their increasingly inhospitable home, only to turn back after the shot holds on their trek for an excruciating length of time. The shot becomes the funniest joke of the movie, even over the visitors who occasionally intrude upon the isolated family with wild warnings and anarchic behavior. Tarr's style, so unsettling in its spatial distance and temporal length, becomes a single-shot shaggy dog anticlimax in which the most major variation in the action amounts to nothing.

Through it all, the wind blows, getting worse each day until the last, in which its absence may be the only thing scarier than its constant roar. Mirroring the story of the Creation, The Turin Horse uses its six days to slowly undo what God wrought, and by the sixth day, with food and water exhausted and only a small amount of brandy to ease the end, even the sun has left, plunging the home into a void. It is Tarr's last, sick joke, making the previous mise-en-scène seem relatively dense in retrospect compared to the table existing in infinite blackness. Might as well go out with a laugh, I suppose, even if the chuckle, like the characters on-screen, freeze into silent stasis.

The Comedy (Rick Alverson, 2012)

I've been more fascinated than consistently entertained by the likes of Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Gregg Turkington (a.k.a. Neil Hamburger), yet their performances in The Comedy seem almost a scathing rebuke of their own style even as they push it to new, rewarding limits. Heidecker in particular is incredible as a man who pours a bit of Rupert Pupkin into mumblecore heroes, amplifying that sociopath's incapacity for humor into a disgusting reliance on irony just to interact (and avoid interaction) with others. It is a harrowing film, though it also lives up to its title, wringing pained laughs out of its most nightmarish scenarios. One of my favorites of the year.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Prometheus: Asking Questions

I am a great fan of Ridley Scott's movies. This one is no exception. The story is wonderful, and it makes us think about the importance of knowing about where the human race come from.




I. Before you watch the segment, try to put the questions below in the correct order.


1. man / what / happened / to / that

.............................................................................?


2. aren't / why / you/ them / helping

...............................................................................?

3. die / why /did / he


............................................................................... ?


4. where / they / go / do

................................................................................ ?


5. know/ do/ it's beautiful / you / how

................................................................................ ?


6. you / what / believe / you

.................................................................................. ?



II. Write the number of the questions before the answers. One question does not have the answer listed below.


( ) That's what I choose to believe.

( ) He died.

( ) Heaven, paradise

( ) They don't want my help.

( ) Because sooner or later everyone dies.



III. Watch the movie segment and decide if the questions are written in the correct order. Then check if you matched both the question and the answer correctly.







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Answer key:




I.

1. What happened to that man?

2. Why aren't you helping them?

3. Why did he die?

4. Where do they go?

5. How do you know it's beautiful?

6. What do you believe?



II.

5, 1, 4, 2, 3

Arbitrage (Nicholas Jarecki, 2012)

To pinpoint the moment Arbitrage ceases to be plausible is to assume it ever established any kind of suspension of disbelief at all. And when Richard Gere fails from the start to make his billionaire hedge fund manager, Robert Miller, look remotely in his element with business talk, the commentary Nicholas Jarecki wishes to tie to his evil money-handler does not work. Hell, Gere's utter ineptness is but one of several early giveaways of the lack of care paid to the film. Unconvincing as a hedge fund guru, Gere is equally out of place with his family, with whom he has an unironically loving relationship yet looks like a total stranger around them. Perhaps that can be explained by his affair with an Italian artist, who enjoys the financial support of her lover yet lives in a flat that looks like an IKEA showroom.

Like the privileged child of a 1990s movie, the mistress throws a fit when Miller gets caught in a meeting and misses her important exhibition. After she gesticulates for a bit, the two head out and Miller passes out briefly at the wheel, leading to an absurdly oversized single-vehicle accident that leaves the woman dead and Miller terrified. Or maybe just extremely annoyed. Hard to say. Jarecki uses this involuntary manslaughter as a fatuous analogy. The man covers up his company's books to keep up appearances as the great hedge fund scheme implodes with exponentially increasing speed, and now he has to cover up his physical crime. This is an obvious, and common, method of tying more abstract, technically legal financial chicanery to that which people universally consider a violation of the law, and ostensibly it should make Miller seem doubly a villain.

But for a film that wallows so glibly in defeatist cynicism, Arbitrage's framing of this crime reflects its attitude toward Miller's financial transgressions. Gere's grating interaction with other people should peg him as a mean-spirited shark obsessed solely with himself, yet the actor looks like he simply read the technical jargon off the page without understanding a lick of the complicated legal shuffling required to pull off the tactics that lead to the economic crisis. And though he places his family, especially his daughter (who serves as his company's CIO), below his greed, he routinely claims, believably, that he wanted to provide for them. That has motivated many a villain, but the film inadvertently makes him sympathetic, as much a victim of his own design as the perpetrator. That he kills someone accidentally only compounds the sense that we should feel for this man.

Maybe he just seems sympathetic because those who seek to uncover his sins make even Gere's detached, clumsy performance riveting by comparison. Brooke (Brit Marling) notices the discrepancies in her father's books and proceeds to chase down answers like an old pulp journalist, not someone who would silently wish to make sure everything was alright within the company for which she is an executive. Her indignation when she learns the truth is laughable: Marling, barely 30, plays a character who enjoys a senior executive position at her father's multibillion dollar firm, yet she cannot fathom her dad's self-serving behavior? But for pure, stilted laziness, one cannot top Tim Roth as the detective on the case. Speaking in a Noo Yawk accent so thick he might as well walk around with a Nathan's Famous in his pistol holster, Roth's character instantly hones in on the billionaire as the prime suspect and speaks of taking down this rich, superior asshole as if getting even with the system on his lonesome. Yet Roth sleepwalks through this quest for roundabout social justice, failing to even muster up the will to truly intimidate the young black man (Nate Parker)—with priors, of course—who could hold the key to taking down Miller. Everyone in this movie acts with all the conviction of a bored high school student forced to read a passage of Shakespeare aloud.

Jarecki wraps their disinterested wheel-spinning in astonishingly banal direction; lighting has never stood out so powerfully to me for its mediocrity, and at no point does the director visually communicate that someone like Miller runs this country and makes the rules. Jarecki aims for shades of Chinatown with Arbitrage's conclusion, though it lacks any of the sick humor and committed nihilism of that film. Rather than depict an insurmountable system maintaining its status quo at all costs, this movie presents a handful of po-faced dopes who speak only to their own uselessness. No one truly pushes back against the powers that be, so the audience is left with no feeling that those powers cannot be bested. Like the center-right liberals with whom it aligns, Arbitrage plays at outrage with a societal evil but makes no move to attack it before declaring the situation hopeless and inalterable.