Scorsese's Operatic Impulse

No Martin Scorsese film is without interest, but I doubt that his latest, Shutter Island, will ever be ranked with his best work: among other things, it's overloaded with way too much expository dialogue and way too many plot points, most of them red herrings. Still, its clammy atmospherics do get under your skin, and its core concern—guilt and the defenses we construct to deny it—is fairly compelling, as Scorsesean a theme, certainly, as in anything he's done.* I was never (well, rarely) bored by it, for it contains more than enough of the director's signature pyrotechnics to sustain interest. Here his formidable command of the medium encompasses a hurricane, hallucinatory flashbacks, and a climactic quest through a cavernous, chamber-of-horrors asylum.

On the other hand, those very pyrotechnics and Scorsese's propensity for grand spectacle—his operatic impulse, I'd call it—make me a bit wistful for those past occasions when he worked on a smaller scale, within tighter budget constraints and without so much razzle-dazzle. I'm thinking here of films like The King of Comedy (1982) and, reaching back further, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). Within the last twenty years, however, it seems that every feature Scorsese has done (excluding his documentary work) has had to be outsized, larger than life. Whether the spectacle is violent, as in Gangs of New York and The Departed, or genteel, as in The Age of Innocence, Scorsese seems doggedly determined to blow us away—through flashy cutting, swooping camera movements, sudden shifts to slow motion, portentous camera angles, what have you. For just a film or two, I'd like to see him deliberately restrain himself and demonstrate once more that he can be entertaining and thought-provoking without always having to overwhelm us.

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* That theme, of course, comes by way of Dennis Lehane's novel, which Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogrisis adapted quite faithfully. Kindred spirits all, I suspect.

Legacy of a Series Long Gone?

The Little Indie That Could—Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker—richly deserved  all the honors it won during the recent awards season, up to and including its six Oscars. It's Bigelow's best work to date, no question. And one of the things that really struck me about it on first viewing was how much of a stylistic departure it seemed for the director. Her flair for visceral action sequences has long been noted, but the near-constant nervous intensity of this film—the hair-trigger editing, the swish pans and quick zooms, the unexpected shifts in perspective, the whole handheld, quasi-documentary look of the movie—wasn't quite like anything she'd ever done before. Or was it? I then recalled that she directed a few episodes of the NBC cop series Homicide: Life on the Street late in its run about a dozen years ago. The house style of that series was, much like that of The Hurt Locker, deliberately jittery, rough, and immediate; any director hired for the show had to conform to it. I lamented the demise of Homicide—it was so much better than anything its creator, Paul Attanasio, and executive producer, Barry Levinson, ever achieved with their big-screen collaborations. Though it lasted seven seasons, the series was never very popular, and now it's pretty much forgotten. Thus it cheered me a bit to think that it might have a legacy of sorts in  Bigelow's much-praised Iraq war drama.

P.S. The Hurt Locker has been much on my mind of late, and I hope to have more to say about it in the near future.

Welcome to the Kinetograph

On this site, I'll be sharing random reflections on the art form I love the most: the cinema. My posts will be wide-ranging and, I hope, mostly intelligent. They may concern an old favorite, a current film or DVD I've just seen, or just some thoughts  about movies in general. I've named this blog after one of the Edison lab's early movie cameras: kinetograph means, loosely, "motion recorder" or "motion writer." Since I'll be writing about motion pictures, it seemed appropriate.