Thats right. There should be no such things as "films catered for Oscar". Films should be made to be a.) quality and/or b.) make money. Oscar should reward the best of these.

Just because the film won't be sucking voters dicks to get votes like a Hollywood biopic doesn't mean it's not something that they'd embrace. It sounds very violent, but that's nothing new to the Academy. I really don't see what you think is so shocking/unmarketable about The Departed that would make it turn off voters.

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It doesnt automatically shut it out, it makes it a bit harder. Every year we get movies that alot of people would say are superior to what the Academy has in their top 5, but why arent they up for Best Picture? Because they arent films the Academy goes for, it's always been like this, does that trend break sometimes? Sure, when you got a really remarkable film.

Scorsece has been ultimatley a loser at the awards yes, but they've had no issue with nominating his films of this type. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, all got them. I don't see that much issue.

All of those films could've won too, it was just that there was something better out there. GoNY and The Aviator... I never thought either of those had a shot.

Jesus, the cars couldn't go fast enough on the way home. "The Departed" is a sharp jab to the sternum, an adrenaline rush that certainly has no equal in that regard this year, and I'd venture saying no film has delighted this much in ruthless artistic agression in decades. This is the jolt the greats of the 70s were riding high on. And it's just too easy to say this is Marty's best movie since "Goodfellas."


I've got to go - I don't know - sedate myself or something. I fell 10 feet tall and as if minutes are going by like seconds. I'll dish out a review tomorrow, after my brain goes through its inevitable withdrawal this evening and I begin to make sense of the night during tomorrow's already approaching artistic hangover.


What a film.

But I seriously doubt the screenplay even gets a nomination, let alone ends up in the hunt for the win. It's old Marty, therefore, non-Academy-friendly Marty.

Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas were all far superior to the movies that beat them. Thinking otherwise is madness.

One of the most artistically ruthless films to be produced in decades, “The Departed” is a spike of adrenaline straight to the heart of an audience desperately in need of such rambunctious filmmaking. A loose but paradoxically loyal remake of the Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs,” the film is doused with a cast of familiar faces, each performer offering portrayals unique to anything in their respective repertoires. The script, tuned down to deafening perfection by screenwriter William Monahan, is as frenetic as director Martin Scorsese’s visual vernacular. And the atmosphere, molded by Scorsese as if he were twenty years younger, is as saturating and penetrating as one could hope for out of a freewheeling, balls-to-the-wall entry in the cops and robbers genre. This is truly one of the best films of the year.

If there is one thing audiences will be talking about regarding “The Departed” for years to come, it will be Jack Nicholson’s flagrant bloodlust and vicious insanity as Frank Costello.

Costello is the vilest of human occurrences, a truly despicable creature whose sole purpose in the world is to rail against the status quo and push his own boundaries as far as he can to get the maximum stretch out of life. As the character admits early on, “I haven’t needed the money since I took Archie’s milk money in the third grade. I haven’t needed p***y either, but I like it.”

Indeed, Costello is one of the true villains of the modern cinema, as morally filthy as he is fascinating. And Nicholson wallows in the role like he was born to wear it, savoring every feral gaze and relishing every blood-splattered grin. It might be his best work since “The Shining” 26 years ago, and a performance Academy voters are likely to eat right up like Ben Kingsely’s Don Logan in 2001’s “Sexy Beast.”

After seeing The Departed twice in NY this weekend, I took a look at Infernal Affairs on DVD last night… and then returned to the scene of the intense, funny, glorious crime for a third look tonight.

And after 3 viewings, it just keeps getting better.

The big question emerging from the last comments on Saturday was how faithful this film was to the original.

The answer is, it is very loyal… and it is a completely different and in my opinion, completely superior work in almost every way.

The one area where a non-Asian English speaker like myself, who understands who Tony Leung and Andy Lau are, but can never really understand who they are in that culture, is comparing apples with oranges. The acting, obviously. The are icons in Asian cinema and the power of that would be silly for me to discount.

But what’s interesting about how this film goes is that while the cast is loaded with familiar, big name actors, Scorsese really doesn’t much play on their celebrity status. Even Nicholson, whose work here is not wholly unfamiliar, is not really trading on any of his previous Jack-ness. He simply gives a genius performance.

And I want to continue to emphasize the person who will be most quickly forgotten as people talk about this film… William Monahan. I’m sure there was some improv on this set, but damn, Monahan’s screenplay has got to be battling neck-and-neck with Little Children to win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Bill Condon will get his nomination for Dreamgirls and I know we should all fear the power of the script for Flags of Our Fathers, but I can’t imagine two screenplays this year that will come close to the work in these two. And The Departed has an even better shot because the adapting is so dramatically different than the original in so many ways.

Monahan has given the movie context that Infernal Affairs simply doesn’t have. Almost all the characters are there in both and many of the plot points, from start to finish, match. But as the Oscar winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting touched on in a more personal way, the screenplay for The Departed brings a major city (Boston) and the culture clashes in it to life in a way we haven’t seen since the New York movies of the 70s.

(Yes, I have to acknowledge that this is a dark, adult, bloody film and it could seccumb in the Oscar finals to a sweep... but it is more likely to win at WGA and with critics groups that are a little more adventurous.)

Watching some of the early cut of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, also last night, it is almost like a before and after with this film. That film is so full of cultural seed-planting. This film is the tree that bears rancid fruit. And frankly, I was intrigued to notice some of the techniques from the later, Harvey-influenced cut, in The Departed. Still, Scorsese’s tendency not to cross cut between action involving two different strands of the story remains strong here, except in two sequences.

Also, remember that Leo’s story in Gangs was in playing the role of a near-son to the evil crime boss until he could get close enough to kill the man who killed his father. Leo’s goal here is not to murder Nicholson’s Frank Costello. But the vagaries of parenting are addressed rather specifically, with both DiCaprio and Damon.

Another advantage to seeing the movie again is that you start to pick up on smaller things, like the very brief cameo by producer Graham King as Leo’s Uncle Jackie. And this time I wrote down the quote of the year, which opens the picture, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”

So here is what I am going to do for those of you who want to play. I am going to start a “Departed Spoiler” entry also. You can ask whatever specific questions you have in the comments section and I will answer them there.

But what tonight’s screening of the film – and the conversations I have about it every time someone asks about the film – made clear to me is that this is one of the very best films of the year and that after repeat viewings, it is looking like this film may come close to the very best of Scorsese all-time.

Great to see this kind of enthusiastic response. After the yawn-inducing best picture line-up of last year (save for Munich), it would be great to see a bombastic Scorsese crime flick highlighting this year's top 5.

At long last and after weeks of conflicting buzz-hype, Warner Bros. finally had a screening last night of Martin Scorsese's The Departed (10.6), and what great Scorsese stuff it has. And what a relief! The fabled director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is back on the contempo urban turf where he once belonged. Here, at long last, is a return to an old-school, brass-knuckles crime flick with piss and vinegar and style to burn. It may not be profound or symphonic, but it's cause for real cheering.

Every piston in this film is well-oiled and chugs like a champ. The result is a package that's violent as hell and smartly written (hats off to William Monahan's script, which is much more clearly written and easier to follow than Siu Fai Mak's 2002 Hong Kong thriller, which I got totally confused by when I saw it in Toronto four or five years ago), and is heavily pumped and beautifully scored (the sound- track is a well-chosen cavalcade of '60s and '70s tracks) and superbly acted by a live-wire, blue-chip cast.

And I mean especially by Leonardo DiCaprio, who hasn't been this good since What's Eating Gilbert Grape . (I was going to say Titanic, but his work in that James Cameron film is so divorced from what he's up to in The Departed that they shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath.) I don't want to get hung up on just DiCaprio here -- this is a film that works because all the elements groove together just so, and Leo is only one of several -- but it's great to report that after two middling efforts (Gangs of New York and The Aviator) that he and Scorsese have finally generated real electricity.

The Departed doesn't exactly throb with thematic weight. It's just a feisty, crackling crime film -- a double-switch, triple fake-out dazzler about lies and cover-ups and new lies to take the place of old lies, and about the psychic toll of being a two-faced informer and living in a whirlpool of anxiety and dread. And it's DiCaprio, more than costars Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin or Mark Wahlberg or anyone else, who exudes the vibe of a hunted, haunted animal -- a guy so furious and frazzled and inwardly clenched that he can barely breathe.

Don't even talk about Leo's Amsterdam Vallon in Gangs of New York or Howard Hughes in The Aviator or Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can . In fact, some- body ask those guys to please leave the room and wait for us in the car. We'll be out later.

I'm not sure that what DiCaprio does in this film amounts to much in terms of reflecting or expressing some great current in the human condition -- he's just part of a very tricky and feisty concoction here -- but in the annals of crime-movie performances he knocks it out of the park. And I hear he's knocks it hard and fierce in Ed Zwick's Blood Diamond also, so maybe he'll wind up in the derby.

There's no question -- none whatsoever -- about The Departed being Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas. Is it as good as Goodfellas? Well, no...but who cares? It's tight and trim and exciting at every turn. It may not "say" or mean a whole lot, but it's Scorsese back in the groove...hoo-ahh!

It's going to make a lot of money. The strongest demos, obviously, are going to be older and younger males, and there may be some who will feel that the ending is a little too bitter and apocalyptic (think Taxi Driver squared), but the word-of-mouth will trump this. I stil don't get why Warner Bros. publicity decided to hide this film from the Toronto crowd -- it would have been the toast of the festival and then some -- and or least let some of us see it along with the junketeers who caught it during the festival, but whatever.

The energy, punch and Boston street funk in The Departed is so "on" and plugged in that Scorsese's last sixteen years of creative striving falls into sharper relief after seeing it. Since the unqualified triumph of Goodfellas in 1990 the poor guy has been a good shepherd wandering in a desert -- grasping, floundering, trying like hell to make a great film about something other than wise guys jousting and finagling on streetcorners.

Obviously Scorsese has done moderately well with other types of films but contemporary urban crime is his home ground. I'm sorry to be blunt about this, but the difference in focus and pizazz between The Departed and Gangs of New York, The Aviator , the cufflinks movie with Daniel Day Lewis and Kundun is just too glaring not to remark upon.

In the final analysis The Departed is just a brutally tough popcorn movie, but even as such it's way more effective than Bringing Out The Dead, and it's a much more riveting entertainment that Cape Fear or The Color of Money, even. It's not a realstic film -- Monaghan's dialogue is stylized and snappy in a David Mamet-on-steroids way -- and everyone is acting with some kind of Boston accent, but it's all of a piece. And when something is this assured and well-fused, a lack of depth and thematic resonance doesn't feel like a big hassle.

The Departed may just be a portrait of Marty pulling out the stops and resorting to every trick in the book to make this crime story "play" in a way that will make guys like me respond -- it may have been made from a place of total cynicism and I don't care. All I know is that the sputtering engine is back in tune again, and that it's a joyous thing to be enveloped by a fast and flavorful Scorsese film that's loaded with Boston "English" and plotted tight as a drum.

I guess I have to recite a plot summary of some kind. The story is basically a story of two moles -- a "bad guy" (Damon) infiltrating the ranks of the Massachucetts State Police, and a "good guy" (DiCaprio) infiltrating Nicholson's South Boston crime gang. Two rats, two wolves in sheep's clothing...and sooner or later it'll all come out in the wash. The key man in the middle is the burly and boodthirsty Nicholson, who obviously knows about Damon but doesn't know about DiCaprio. Two guys with the "Staties" -- Wahlberg and Martin Sheen -- know about DiCaprio but are clueless about Damon. Vera Farmiga is a sketchily-drawn psychologist who has affairs with both Damon and DiCaprio.

How good is Nicholson? Great in terms of his usual presence and assurance, but it's basically Jack playing off his legend rather than inhabiting a sadistic monster created by Monaghan (and allegedly based on a real-life Boston crime figure.) He basically tries a lot of stuff, and some of it connects and some of it is funny but it's basically "okay, good old Jack, we love him...next."

Every actor kicks ass in this thing -- there are no "meh" peformances. Farmiga, Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Sheen, Ray Winstone and Kevin Corrigan are all great. I got a feeling from the print I saw last night that a lot of saucy stuff was left on the cutting-room floor so here's hoping for a heavily loaded DVD in early '07.

I've run out of things to say and I have to get to a luncheon, but what a great thrill it is to see a real Scorsese film again. He's a great jazzman and impresario who knows the urban goombah thing up and down. He's obviously been trying to duck this syncrhonicity for years, but he can't. Marty may feel a wee bit unhappy about this on some level, but his fan base won't be. Nobody will, really.