“C’mon, blow real hard and your chest buds will pop out!”

Yaaaaaaawn–EXPLODE.

Who knew the end of the world would be so boring? With such good acting?

And apparently the soundtrack to the world ending is soft rock. Soft rock, people. The preferred music of societal chaos and megalithic destruction. So keep those Dan Fogelberg and Herb Alpert albums at the ready.

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, the first writer-director effort from Lorene Scafaria, is as cloying and maudlin as its title suggests. An asteroid is about to vaporize Earth in less than 3 weeks, and humanity takes this news in surprising, yet not surprising, ways. Whilst one man, on a quest to find his true love, finds true love on his quest.

We meet Dodge (Steve Carell) as he and his wife hear the news on the car radio, and she just ups and runs. In these first moments, we realize Carell is doing some grand underplaying, and his performance will continue to amaze throughout this meandering tale. The fact that he looks actually gaunt and handsome means he really worked hard for this movie in many ways.

There are comedic asides with Rob Corddry being his usual riotous ass-face, Patton Oswalt as a hilarious sex-perve, Adam Brody as the incognizant boyfriend (“I love you. I want to take care of you!” – then the shooting starts and he immediately uses her body as a shield!), TJ Miller camping it up as a waiter sporting champion flair, with Carell basically playing straight man to all of them. Yet stealing all their thunder elegantly. His roles in DAN IN REAL LIFE (2007) and CRAZY STUPID LOVE (2011) were leading to this pinnacle. END OF THE WORLD is his best performance on film yet, as he sells each scene with realistic “small” reactions (nothing cinematic or showy), and almost unbearable sadness, futility and pathos. (It is this performance that would enable him to move on to the darker and more showy FOXCATCHER, 2014.)

The first act is enjoyable, as Scafaria poses a comedic scenario rarely seen in doomsday movies: to most people, life would go on the same as always; we are too ensconced in our pursuit of self-centered pleasures to let a small thing like the end of existence ruin our plans. But it’s all tinged with fatalism: dinner parties that turn into heroin parties, screwing a different girl every day, who (as Oswalt notes) “don’t care about getting pregnant, don’t care about diseases, don’t care about… a small dick, or – whether you’re related…”

Then the predictable love story kicks in. Oh god! Wake me when the yammering’s over.

Because as soon as the weeping Penny (Keira Knightley) enters through Dodge’s window with the cutesy line, “I won’t steal anything if you don’t rape me,” the end is surely upon us. Firstly, she’s implying that she thinks she’s worth raping, but no danger there, honey; not with that man-jaw and ironing-board chest. Secondly, even if we harbored any stray designs on those boy-like buns, they’re dashed to pieces as soon as she opens her non-stop yammering gob. Your boyfriend kicked you out? Nowhere to go tonight? These are well-understood clarion calls to the male of the species that gratitude-panty is imminent. Of course you can sleep at my place – but first let me get you a pillow and a nice hot cup of shut-the-fuck-up. I mean, really, maybe some guys just rufie chicks to get some frickin’ peace and quiet.

Dodge receives a dated letter from his high school sweetheart Olivia: “You were the love of my life.” With his wife gone, he decides to drive cross country to reconnect with her, taking Penny along to help her reconnect with family overseas. So it is quite obvious it never is about finding his sweetheart, but how to plausibly connect the two stars.

Though this is the movie’s planned direction, it has now completely lost its way. Comedy has ceased, replaced with a cynical cheerlessness. A late meeting with Martin Sheen as Dodge’s estranged dad skews the tone even more into uncomfortable.

Over the course of Dodge’s and Penny’s journey, they both come within grasp of their separate goals, but end up turning them down to be with each other. I guess the soft rock soundtrack was just too insistent, filtering them through a montage where they hold hands on a beach, and laugh and play like young lovers. The quiet moments between travel are filled with vanilla humanizing patter – more like she won’t stop yammering about irrelevancies and he won’t stop looking at her man-jaw and where her chest should be.

Enough of this yammering and he realizes he must be in love with her because hells bells he’s a 40-Year Old Virgin and there’s no one else around wearing a skirt.

A good aspect: this R-rated movie allows its protagonists to have sex before they achieve their goals. Most movies hold sex as a sacred threshold of true love; at least Scafaria respects these people as adults, saying that sex is not the reason they are together as the sky falls. However, this gives away the ending, as we now know Dodge is not going to end up with Olivia: you see, if the story was truly aiming him at Olivia, he would not have been “allowed” to have sex with anyone before Olivia, or his character’s ethics would be compromised. Immature but true. Ask any Gutless MPAA official.

An annoying aspect: No one on Earth is doing anything remotely noble EXCEPT DODGE AND PENNY – because they’re in love. Everyone else trying to fulfill their fantasies in a flash is painted as wrongheaded. Why is Oswalt screwing a different woman every day regarded as a desperate, ugly man, whilst Dodge’s parting mewl to Penny, “I love you desperately,” is regarded as something decent and righteous? (In fact, Oswalt is doing something more noble for humanity by propagating the species, whilst Dodge is the desperate one who “doesn’t want to die alone” so creates this illusion called “love” to pretend some kind of connectivity. Let’s see how not alone you are when the skin starts searing off your bones and your thinking organ is vaporized.)

Penny is a “hypersomniac,” which means she can sleep through anything. When it comes to this movie, so should you.

END

Another good character study cloaked in superhero duds.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is the latest RE-imagining/ RE-boot/ RE-working of Spider-man canon. RE RE RE… Here’s my word for it – REally? Did we really need to sit through 40 minutes of another origin tale – again? In this very well-made movie, over half of it is wasted plying us with Spider-Man’s Same Ole geek-bitten-by-spider-acquires-spidery-powers exegesis. (In a cool move, director Marc Webb – no, really – and writers James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, throw in Peter Parker’s never-before-seen dark origins as well, lending more angst to his troubled teen.)

Why not hit the ground running? May I propose that Marvel and DC create one-minute bumper montages for each of their superheroes, outlining their origins? And run these bumpers before the opening of each respective film; maybe put them in song, like GILLIGAN’S ISLAND? “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale / A tale of a fateful bug…”

Really?… Really?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is so well-made (with such a gritty look and suave production design) that I look forward to seeing this team’s sequel, where they are not hobbled by origin tale.

Andrew Garfield makes an excellent angst-ridden, irresponsible, bumbling, stuttering teen – Peter Parker/aka Spider-Man – uncomfortable in his own physics-genius skin, raised by Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field – yes, Sally Field in a Spider-man film!); suddenly having to deal with acquiring super powers, discovering his science mentor, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) has become a murderous nine-foot lizard, and then further figuring how to touch Gwen Stacy’s panties (Emma Stone) without her police captain father (Denis Leary) castrating his websac.

And Spider-Man’s head is, once again, the exact perfect roundness.

It’s a less campy vision than the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire SPIDER-MAN, and – like all the modern superhero movies post-BATMAN BEGINS – trying to squash the square characters of the comics universe into the round holes of the real world. With our willing suspension of disbelief, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN amazingly succeeds.

Welsh Rhys Ifans does such a convincing American accent as Dr. Connors, I thought they were dubbing his voice at first. In trying to find a “cross-species genetic formula” to grow back his missing arm, he experiments with lizard DNA (because some lizards have the ability to grow back tails and limbs) and inadvertently transforms himself into a scaly naked bipedal reptilian – no, not Dick Cheney – The Lizard. The injection of genetic serum is played more like an addiction than a criminal mastermind plot, to the filmmakers’ credit.

Incidentally curbing small-time crime in his hunt for Uncle Ben’s killer, Parker starts to feel a responsibility to do so after awhile. (There is no melodramatic pitch: “With great power comes great responsibility.” That concept is more subtle here.)  When Parker takes the advice of those around him – to leave the apprehending of perps to the police – he finds that Leary’s police captain will not believe him about the Lizard, so takes that task upon his own skinny shoulders. (Spidey’s build has always been more whipcord than Herculean. Garfield’s rail-thin build suits Spidey perfectly. And due to the better technology, we feel Spider-Man’s litheness and athleticism more during his web-swinging than in the Raimi films.)

The Indian Gary Sinise, Irrfan Khan (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE), is a scientific colleague. The great Campbell Scott has too little screentime as Parker’s father. Stan Lee in another of his hilarious cameos – as an oblivious librarian. There is no J. Jonah Jameson. Really? No loudmouth public nemesis to play off? But the film doesn’t need that complication – it’s already provided by Leary.

Playing police captain, Denis Leary does a bangup job as a straight man with a sardonic sense of humor, whose monologues about vigilantes (such as Spider-Man) once again shows us the thoughtfulness that went into this production, firmly entrenching it in real world environs.

I find the scene of Parker over Uncle Ben’s dying body a little disingenuous, as Parker yells, “Somebody call an ambulance!” We’ve grown used to this scene in movies – a dramatic high point. But – waitaminute! – they’ve set their movie in the modern world where everyone is communicating quite nonchalantly on cell phones; and Peter, weren’t you just messing with your cell phone not two minutes ago? Why don’t YOU call an ambulance?!

The two best scenes in the film are when Spider-Man builds an actual spider-like web in a junction of sewers, and reclines in the middle, waiting for his prey to send a telltale shockwave through one of the strands; and his first “save” of a life.

Up to that point, Parker had never considered he was anything more than a genetically-enhanced teen in a mask hunting his uncle’s killer; never considering himself the flamboyant name the public were tentatively calling him. When he saves a little boy on a bridge (whose father is B-Movie megastar, C. Thomas Howell), the father asks, “Who are you?” Parker replies, hesitantly, yet we see even through the mask an acceptance of identity, an answer to one of the film’s questions ‘Who am I?.’

“I’m… Spider-Man.”

It’s the most tearjerking Grand Moment in the movie. Though the filmmakers make him take off his mask just a little too much (as usual, for the emotions on his face to be seen), this moment with the mask ON is the most powerful, where he owns up to his identity, purpose and responsibility, in one fell swoop realizing his powers could be put to more use than just punching small-time bad guys.

Superhero movies became a vehicle for A-List actors ever since Brando’s Jor-El mumbled his way through SUPERMAN (1978), but now they are no longer playthings in which great actors seek refuge from “serious” roles, not least because of the massive economic cog they have become; superhero movies are now as much a showcase for great actors to show off their acting chops, as any movie featuring cripples or retards (cough–Oscar roles): consider Ben Kingsley in IRON MAN 3, Michael Caine in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES or Kevin Costner in MAN OF STEEL. And with the gamut of nuanced emotions he runs in this latest “realistic” superhero movie, I would gladly admit Garfield to that pantheon of choppers. And let’s not forget – Sally Field!

Really.

END

Up against The Wall.

Veteran stockbroker Gordon Gekko wakes upstart stockbroker Bud Fox in the middle of the night with a phone call, to remind him the Hong Kong markets are open: “Money never sleeps, pal!”

WALL STREET is a powerful albeit slightly cheesy look at the inside of insider trading. Co-writer/ director Oliver Stone, with his characteristic insider knowledge on his filmic subject, conveys another wider world out there that we are not always privy to; amongst the cloying office environments, frenetic relationships and insecure personalities, the people of Wall Street do that mysterious thing they do with imaginary money that isn’t theirs – illegally, unethically and with a plastic 80’s soundtrack.

Bud (Charlie Sheen) is a hungry young stockbroker in a bull pen who dreams of breaking out into something more substantial. Like TWO AND A HALF MEN. Rampant charging corporate bull Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is on the pedestal Bud would like to inhabit. Through persistence, Bud gets a five-minute meeting with Gekko, to try and land a position as broker for him. Gekko is unimpressed – until Bud lets slip some “insider information” about an airline company that piques Gekko’s buy-and-chop-up instincts.

Bud’s dad, Carl (coincidentally, Martin Sheen) is a union boss at that airline, which is how Bud “just knew” it was ripe for the picking. The elder Sheen brings a stately ease to his role, paternally looking down his nose at Sheen The Younger, both in real life and in character, calling him a “salesman” when Bud insists he is an “account executive, soon to move onto investment banking.” When young Bud asks Carl for a loan, Carl inquires of Bud’s $50K Manhattan job, “Where does it all go?” Bud breaks down his payments on car, apartment, suits, etc. to make him look like the richie he aspires to be, ironically adding, “There is no nobility in poverty any more, dad.”

WALL STREET truly is a snapshot of WASP life in the 80s; young fantasizers throwing themselves into the river and hoping they don’t sink. It’s ultimately what we’ve all become used to doing with our lines of credit and the powerful agitprop of capitalistic culture. Wall Street: convincing Americans that in order to grow your money you have to risk it. And dumb cluck Americans buying into the Orwellian dream.

Gekko is under no illusion how he retains his 1% status. He tells the naive Bud that insider trading (the corrupt kind) is the difference between riding in a private jet and owning a private jet. He’s brash (“I’ll talk atcha!”), he spouts the most amusing axioms (“A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place”); he rationalizes his unethical practices (“Money itself isn’t lost or made. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another”); he coaches Bud in Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War. In essence, Gekko tempts Bud like a modern Mephistopheles, gradually claiming more and more of Bud’s soul, as Bud acquiesces to performing more dangerous and fevered favors for Gekko in the pursuit of treasure. I’m sure TWO AND A HALF MEN was not part of the equation…

No matter how big of a dog you think you are – there’s always a bigger dog. The dog bigger than Gekko is Terence Stamp as Sir Larry Wildman. He’s richer, scarier and Britisher. Gekko puts Bud on Wildman’s tail for inside info, exploiting Bud’s hunger and rewarding him with riches.

WALL STREET is the same parable espoused in TRADING PLACES (1983): engage in insider trading, lose your shirt. That is, being drunk on power makes you as likely to screw up and go to jail as being drunk on alcohol. Bud’s downfall looms as he moves into a swank penthouse apartment (decorating it in 80’s Gaudy), scores a sophisticated blonde, Darien (Daryl Hannah), and develops a penchant for preparing sushi for dinner. His hubris would lead him to try brokering a deal to chop up the small airline company where his father is a union boss.

Of course, the downfall of the padawan presages the downfall of the Master…

By the late 80s, it was established that the richest 1% in America “owns half the country.” Gordon Gekko would make a speech that would become infamous for the catch-phrase “Greed is good,” making it seem as 80s-dated as Adam Ant, but the speech is relevant in 2011 for various reasons. The opening phrase, “You do it right – or you get eliminated” is still the model for everyone in business – except for the corporate dishonest who do it wrong and still get rewarded (the “Too Big to Fail” asshats).

It is ominous that even back then, director Stone and corporate raiders were acknowledging that the USA was run by corporations; what they couldn’t predict was that greed would not save the corporate model but set it up for takeover by other countries with a better grasp on capitalism.

…The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be Survival of the Unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right – or you get eliminated… I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies and cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward search of mankind, and greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
— Gordon Gekko, WALL STREET.

Will that “malfunctioning corporation” ever learn its lesson when there’s a steal-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich bailout around every corner?

In the end, both Gekko and Bud have met their downfall, Gekko ending up in jail and Bud ending up in TWO AND A HALF MEN.

END

Shit Happens.

Two blond white American upper-class people fall in love. Through all the adversity of being blond and white and American. Who coulda seen that coming?

Florist Eloise (Jennifer Aniston, in continuance from ROCK STAR) and self-help guru Burke (Aaron Eckhart, in continuance from THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) Meet Cute while Burke is touring Seattle giving self-help seminars. And “love” happens. Shit.

His backstory is compelling – wife died in accident, his father-in-law (Martin Sheen) unforgiving of Burke because the self-help book he penned made him famous on the exploitation of her death. While Aniston’s backstory is typical numb date night fare. But Love Happens anyway.

Excellent supporting performances by Dan Fogler (in a straight role of a humorous character, Burke’s manager, “Lane Goddamned Marshall”) and John Carroll Lynch, as a victim of grief over a dead son. Judy Greer is Aniston’s silly plucky pal. And Sheen’s few onscreen minutes are dynamite.

Don’t know why they bothered inserting the love story sideways into an otherwise interesting film. The tiresome exchanges between Burke and Eloise derail the movie’s real poignant heart – that of a healer who hasn’t healed himself, who seems to be a snake oil salesman at first, but maybe faking sincerity enough for his “I’m A-Okay” shtick to have a positive effect on his followers.

Eckhart sells the nuanced, troubled guru with the right amount of arrogance and pathos. And Jennifer Aniston is, as always, adorable; the type you don’t just bang and run, but put on a pedestal as your loving, caring girlfriend. But the outlandish circumstances of their watery courtship are mind-numbingly egregious.

If this movie wasn’t laden with enough syrupy stupidity, all backed by manipulative tinkling piano, it even has a slow clap, to conclusively take itself out of the running for any kind of credibility.

Aren’t you sick of the beige love story named for a play on words, like WHEN IN ROME, or THE UGLY TRUTH, or (God help us!) DEAR JOHN? I give myself no brownie points for the title of this review – it was way too easy – echoing the two-word review of Spinal Tap’s album “Shark Sandwich.”

END

A Romantic State of Union.

“Romantic comedies” have long been relegated to the demeaning stable of Chick Flicks because their sophomoric bent allows them no breadth of intelligence or forays into behavior with balls – pussies browbeat men into behaving like pussies, whilst pulp novella situations play out in a world inhabited by pussified male models and Jennifer Lopez.

Director Rob Reiner‘s THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is exactly the opposite; not only is the male protagonist anything but a pussy, or unlikely to be pushed into being one, the movie is intelligent and charming, yet masculine enough for men to appreciate, with astute writing and full-bodied characters, and takes into account the fact that some viewers can apprehend more than just boomboxes outside bedroom windows or fart jokes.

Michael Douglas is The American President, Andrew Shepherd, a widower with his second term election looming. Annette Bening is lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade, whom he falls for. The obstacle between the smitten lovers is nothing short of the aura of the Presidency itself, and writer Aaron Sorkin (A FEW GOOD MEN) brings a depth of humanity and humor to this situation that is sorely lacking in American love stories.

…in the land of the Kree
And the home of the braves.

Douglas effortlessly inhabits the President’s mantle and it is a constant joy to see him imbue this office with a power that we know the real President does not have, a poignancy we know the real President does not possess and a humanity we know the real President has long since lost. (As in most American movies portraying the Presidential post, the refrain must unfortunately read, “We can dream, can’t we?”)

When President Shepherd orders an attack on a foreign country, his concern is for the civilians with families who will be working the foreign embassy when it gets bombed; it is a heart-wrenching decision for him – as opposed to the real life President G.W. Bush’s flippancy when asked whether he suffered any pangs of conscience after greenlighting the Iraq war, “I made the decision. I sleep well at night.” To the real life President, “only one thing matters – winning.”

Sociological disparities like this litter the film: we realize that opposing party leader, Bob Rumson’s (Richard Dreyfuss) smearing of the President’s love life and his half-baked jabs at Shepherd’s “flag-burning, hippie girlfriend” were reined in by the film-makers, after being aware of the real-life President stooping to outright lies to blacken his opposition (Bush versus Kerry, 2004).

And though it is obvious much White House protocol was passed over with a wave of the Hollywood wand, the movie is so well-made these deficiencies seem like trivialities.

Supporting players are suitably brilliant: Martin Sheen (as Shepherd’s Chief of Staff and confidante), Michael J. Fox (reprising his role as some kind of Alex Keaton within the President’s cabinet), David Paymer (the role of pollster couldn’t be more suited to a character actor so jumpy and uncomfortable), and John Mahoney (the character actor with his picture next to “father figure” in the dictionary).

The intelligent dialogue snaps and crackles like an electrified fence with a small animal thrown against it:

In a debate in the Oval Office, Sheen chastises Fox for questioning the president’s decisions, “The president doesn’t answer to you–”
“Oh yes, he does! Because I’m a citizen. And this is my president!… ‘Cause in this country, it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it is our responsibility!”

When Fox, in turn, melodramatically spins the president’s duty to uphold the truth, “People are so thirsty for truth, they’ll crawl through the desert until they find it. And if they find it’s a mirage, they’ll drink the sand,” the president counters with what we know to be the unfortunate truth, “They don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”

Brings a tear to the eye that people could be this cognizant and lucid. Pity none of them are in government.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT never loses its focus on the love story, the element which actually holds our attention – rather than make us wince – due to being played out by intelligent adults, instead of 16-to-20 year-olds making all their decisions under the influence of hormones and beer, or pussified male models and Jennifer Lopez. Witnessing the chemistry between Shepherd and Wade, we can’t help but speculate that if the real-life Presidency could experience one-tenth of this heady hallucinogen with a woman one-hundredth as vivacious and witty as Annette Bening, there would be a million times less political turmoil in the world.

As it is phrased outside Presidential circles: “Dude, you need to get laid more often.”

END

The indignity of being bitchslapped by a bitch…

Martin Scorsese’s Badfellas.

Cops who are robbers. Robbers who are cops. And a hip hop star synonymous with exposed underpants who steals the show.

A welcome return to form for the premier gangster movie-maker, Martin Scorsese, who bats one outa the park with THE DEPARTED. Ferociously funny, doggedly compelling, a tour de force of gritty production, tightly-wound storyline, sneeringly salty language and flame-throwing acting chops. And there’s Leo and Matt and Sheen and Winstone and Baldwin and Marky Mark. And Jack. All so deliciously at the top of their game that the word Oscar is bandied about this movie as profligately as it is around Sesame Street’s resident Grouch. Deservedly so.

Poffy deep undercover

Jack Nicholson is Irish mafia kingpin, Frank Costello, who opens the movie cultivating the trust of a young street kid, who grows to be Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a Massachusetts Police Officer whose loyalties lie not with law enforcement, but with his mentor, Costello. Concurrently, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former street thug who passes his academy training with flying colors, and who also applies to the Massachusetts P.D., is rejected on the grounds that you can take the thug out of the street, but not vice versa, and is “invited” instead to go deep undercover within Costello’s mafia. Confronting Police Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen), being forced to relive his checkered past, though DiCaprio mines incredible emotive shadings, that scene is definitively stolen by Mark Wahlberg, as the Cynicism juggernaut, Detective Dignam. With this film, Wahlberg comes into his own as an Actor; though his scenes are short, they are as cuttingly sweet as limes and salt rubbed into paper-cut wounds.

THE DEPARTED quickly establishes its triangle of the gangster (Costello), his mole in the police (Sullivan), and the police mole in his outfit (Costigan) – and then sits back and lets the plot twist, as each faction tries to untwist its knickers and weed out their respective moles.Right hand man to Costello is Mr. French (Ray Winstone, almost unrecognizable under heavy beard and faux-Boston accent – given away by his customary élan, i.e. as tender and subtle as a crucifix nail). Under Captain Queenan is Ellerby (Alec Baldwin, in another of this movie’s smallish roles that is eaten alive by its actor – Baldwin gives Wahlberg a run for his money as comic relief scene-stealer). Amongst the battle-scarred veterans, Scorsese chose wisely to insert a “new” beautiful face as female lead – Vera Farmiga, as police psychoanalyst, Madolyn, who moves in with Sullivan and then begins an affair with Costigan (nice!), setting up a tangential triangle which might have obscured the larger criminal drama in a lesser director’s hands, but otherwise only served to verify that old saw, “chicks dig bad guys.”

Sullivan is a policeman, sure, but as a mole for Costello he is inherently a Bad Guy – whether Madolyn knows this or not, she is drawn to his duplicity and callousness. Costigan, though also a cop, is so deep undercover that the street is rubbing off on him in ways that make Madolyn’s pants-suit pants moist – once again, no medals for figuring why she prescribes him “private therapy.”

The indecency of being rapped by a rapper…

THE DEPARTED is unmistakably Scorsese, with all the classic Scorsese stamps; his characteristic camera moves, angles and smash-cutting; foreboding or calming source music juxtaposed over contrary visuals, and pulling a depth of performance from his actors that took them places in their heads they never want to visit again without an attorney.

Selling Leo as a hard case in Scorsese’s GANGS OF NEW YORK was only possible because Daniel Day-Lewis sold the movie; here, in their third collaboration, DiCaprio is steaming with mental muscle, street smarts and a spring-wound temper that turbo-charges his screen presence like no other role he has ever attacked. Not only might it be one of his best performances on film, the same can be said of Nicholson, whose conniving and ruthless Costello seems always to be on the verge of either welcoming you as a brother or snapping your spine and appending a pun.

Re-made from a recent Hong Kong movie MOU GAAN DOU, 2002 (INFERNAL AFFAIRS, written by Felix Chong and Siu Fai Mak and directed by Mak and Wai Keung Lau), it is a slight annoyance that Scorsese would insult his audience by performing that patronizing surgical act of re-rendering foreign art for the Great American Unwashed; on the other hand, THE DEPARTED (screenplayed by William Monahan) stands extremely tall on its own merit, not exuding that alarmist stanque of “remake” (OLIVER TWIST, 2005) or worse, “bad remake” (FUN WITH DICK AND JANE 2005), or worse still, “pointless remake” (PSYCHO, 1998).

Whereas Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS showed us the world through the eyes of only bad fellas, THE DEPARTED slews its camera over the wrong AND the right side of the law, graying the line between honor and justice and law and order with its complex layers of hypocrisy. Among thieves, among cops alike, we see honor and duplicity and lawlessness and order.

The worlds are exactly the same. But the chicks dig the bad guys.

END