David Vining's Blog, page 162

Martin Scorsese: The Definitive Ranking

Martin Scorsese during the filming of Taxi Driver — Image by © Steve Schapiro/Corbis

25 movies spanning the 60s to the 10s, and the man’s not done yet. Martin Scorsese is one of the premiere filmmakers alive, one of the great talents who understands every aspect of the craft and how to exploit it. His three main influences were Howard Hawks, Federico Fellini, and Michael Powell, but he created a style all his own that combined elements from all of them and more.

His work will forever b...

Silence

How do you follow up a movie about debauchery on Wall Street through the 90s? If you’re Martin Scorsese, you make a deeply religious movie adaptation of a Japanese novel about Jesuit priests in feudal Japan, that’s how. This was one of three major passion projects that Scorsese held onto for a number of years before finding the funding to make (the other two were The Last Temptation of Christ and Gangs of New York). Originally written with Jay Cocks (and the first Scorsese writing credit on ...

The Wolf of Wall Street

When people think of a “Martin Scorsese movie”, they usually think of movies like Goodfellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street is like Goodfellas. It’s his first movie since Casino like Goodfellas. It’s the story of crime and excess told purely from the perspective of the excessive criminal, making his life appear so appealing to the audience, but also dramatizing his downfall. Like Goodfellas, it’s meant to demonstrate the appeal of that lifestyle to an audience unfamiliar with it, taking you in...

Hugo

Both completely of Scorsese’s filmography and apart from it, Hugo is a masterful adaptation of the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick from one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers, using all of the modern tool set to create a visually lush and dense feast for the eyes matched by a wonderful emotional journey that intelligently synthesizes several different story elements into one cohesive experience. Free of guile and irony, this is Scorsese’s most earnestly heartfelt film that f...

X-Men

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The very beginning of the modern comic book boom in movies was an awkward time. There was this great wealth of material begging to be tapped, but after the ludicrous direction the Batman films had taken under Joel Schumaker, studios were unsure of how to actually handle the material. The source material was bright and colorful, but had the bright colors of Batman & Robin been the reason for its failure? It’s campy tone? As William Goldman had said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything, so t...

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

#2 in my ranking of the DCEU franchise.

Well, that’s an improvement. The original release of Justice League in 2017 was a conflict of visions, mostly made by Zack Snyder but completed with heavy reshoots by Joss Whedon. It was also cut down from what would have been, best case scenario, almost three hours at the time to a svelte two hours flat. Considering the amount of storytelling that needed to happen in that shortened timeframe, it was no surprise to me that it felt rushed and incompl...

Shutter Island

This movie’s ending is a case study in how to read movies. If you consider what was said before, what was done before, and the basics of the character’s journey, there is literally only one way to read the movie’s final moments. Everything up to that moment builds to the finale is designed to feed a specific end point, and it helps the movie as a whole that everything up to that point is incredibly well done. Scorsese had one early foray into big budget filmmaking with New York, New York, wh...

The Departed

This is kind of the ideal remake. It takes a concept with great potential that the original didn’t fully realize, deepens it, does more with it, and transplants it to a completely different setting. This isn’t just Infernal Affairs in America, this is Infernal Affairs in Boston. The script by William Monahan, a Boston native, ends up so intimately tied to the reality of the city, its different cultures, locations, and even history that it gives the movie such a wonderfully distinctive flavor...

Infernal Affairs

This movie is just too shallow. It very much has its fans, but I think this is a good example of many audience’s preference for plot over any other element of narrative. For me, plot is the least important element used in building a story, behind character, theme, and style. For many others, plot is all that really matters, moving people from one story beat to another until the resolution. I find that kind of storytelling thinly enjoyable at best, hoping for anything with any real meat on it...

The Aviator

Man, does Martin Scorsese love the movies. He takes the life of one of the most enigmatic individuals of the twentieth century and provides such an incredible focus on the movie side of things, even when he fully demonstrates that Howard Hughes saw himself as an aviator first and foremost. The only successful biopic of Howard Hughes made since his death, The Aviator is a glorious look at a man who made the most of the money he inherited, following his passions wherever the led him, told by a...