{"id":1225,"date":"2013-03-12T23:18:30","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T03:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=1225"},"modified":"2013-03-13T04:38:23","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T08:38:23","slug":"the-guy-who-made-kundun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/the-guy-who-made-kundun\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guy Who Made ‘Kundun’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"scorsese\"
\n

\nAs you can probably tell by my posts here so far, I don’t like many movies.\u00a0 Movies suck.\u00a0 But even an old curmudgeon like me can’t help but love Martin Scorsese.
\n
\nWhat can be said about Scorsese that hasn’t already been said?\u00a0 Well, I bet nobody has said to him, ‘Hey dude what the fuck were you thinking when you made Kundun<\/a>?\u00a0 Stick to New York, asshole.’\u00a0 Kundun is so bad people don’t even talk about it.\u00a0 Which really shows just how beloved the guy is.\u00a0 When he makes an epic embarrassment, people just brush it under the rug (yet for some reason, nobody extends his bud De Palma that courtesy).<\/p>\n

Forgetting Kundun, when Scorsese makes a bad movie you get Raging Bull<\/a>.\u00a0 A film that, with age, is rivaling Citizen Kane<\/a> as the popular choice for best movie ever made.\u00a0 I like to pick on Raging Bull for that reason, because at its heart, Raging Bull is a vapid, boring, meandering, overlong mess about nothing.\u00a0 However, the thing is, if you’re a movie geek, there’s a ton to love about Raging Bull, and I certainly do<\/i> love it.\u00a0 Whereas almost all other \u2018art films\u2019 are exercises in masturbatory, inaccessible nothingness, Raging Bull is a cinephile\u2019s delight.\u00a0 It’s a visceral film class, expertly constructed by a team of artists that really do know how to make movies.\u00a0 Raging Bull may not have a point, but those brilliantly-realized fight scenes sure make you think<\/i> it does. (Really it’s just about a guy being angry, and we have no idea why, and it’s never really explored.)<\/p>\n

So what happens when Marty makes a good<\/i> movie?\u00a0 When Martin Scorsese makes a good movie you get Goodfellas<\/a>, one of the most fun, interesting, intoxicating, emotional, and amazing movies of all time.\u00a0 Frank Darabont said that when he was making The Shawshank Redemption<\/a>, he watched Goodfellas every Sunday. \u00a0You can tell.<\/p>\n

The genius of Goodfellas is what it doesn’t show.\u00a0 The Lufthansa heist is hyped up\u2014but then happens off screen.\u00a0 The scene in the shower where Henry hears about the heist on the news is much more powerful than any dramatization could be.\u00a0 The whole movie is really just a guy (and a girl) telling a story.\u00a0 And it’s not even a great story. It’s kind of just an interesting story.\u00a0 But the detailed web of behaviors, accents, dialogue, colors, clothing, performances, and, of course, moving compositions, hold it all together. One of my favorite things about the movie, visually, is that there are very few closeups or wide shots.\u00a0 It’s a world of mediums where we see someones face, the faces around them, and nothing outside that.\u00a0 The world around them is in the distance\u2014if we see it, the medium lens puts it far away, out of focus.<\/p>\n

What makes Scorsese genuinely better than 99% of other \u2018art\u2019 filmmakers is that his style is truly expressive.\u00a0 The obvious example being the Copacabana shot.\u00a0 This shot is complicated as fuck, but with purpose.\u00a0 That\u2019s a good director.\u00a0 Boogie Nights<\/a>,\u00a0Rope<\/a>, Irreversible<\/a>, and Russian Ark<\/a> all have very long, complicated takes in them too\u2014but why?<\/i> To what end?\u00a0 None of those shots express<\/i> anything. \u00a0The opening of Boogie Nights does it simply because<\/i> Scorsese did it\u2014and the other three are just gimmicky.\u00a0 In fact, the only other truly expressive long take I can think of is the opening of Touch of Evil<\/a> because it used the device of a ticking clock.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Goodfellas is everything you could ever ask for in a movie\u2014no bad scenes, endlessly quotable, a frenetic visual feast, and nuanced to the point that the minutia is often more entertaining than the main elements. \u00a0I mean it’s got ”half a fag”, ”what are you some kind of sick maniac”, and the entire helicopter sequence.\u00a0 Those are worth the price of admission alone.<\/p>\n

Martin Scorsese is a gateway drug. His work in general is quite visceral and tranquil\u2014like marijuana.\u00a0 His movies wrap around you and make you think you’re reaching a higher consciousness, when really, you’re just watching a fucking movie. (And I don’t say that to belittle his work. \u00a0Just stating the facts. Also, I’m not a spaced out hippie\u2014I\u2019ve literally only smoked weed one time and never done any other drug. \u00a0I’m just making a metaphor.)<\/p>\n

The casual Scorsese user can delight in the occasional trip into Scorsese world, and remain safe within the confines of a truly fun and transcendent movie going experience (as long as he or she avoids Kundun and Boxcar Bertha<\/a>).\u00a0 However, for the burgeoning cinephile, what lies beyond his work is a dark pit of god-awful \u2018art films\u2019 and \u2018classics\u2019 laced with boring scenes and incomprehensible stylistic choices.\u00a0 I’m talking of course about Scorsese’s contemporaries and influencers\u2014guys like Altman, Malick and Cassavetes.\u00a0 Watching them is like doing heroin\u2014it seems fun, but then you\u2019ve done it and your life is basically over.<\/p>\n

I’m currently reading Roger Ebert’s book on Scorsese, and I’m remembering my own \u2018Personal Journey Through American Movies\u2019 as a curious and hungry hyper-intellectual thirteen year old with a chip on his shoulder.\u00a0 My story is simple\u2014I saw Jurassic Park<\/a> when I was six and immediately became a Spielberg-head and would obsessively watch Indiana Jones<\/a>, Close Encounters<\/a>, Jaws<\/a>, and Poltergeist<\/a> (yes, directed by Tobe Hooper, but ya know).\u00a0 My parents and grandparents were also cinephiles and introduced me to many wonderful movies like Tremors<\/a>, The Incredible Shrinking Man<\/a>, Back to the Future<\/a>, Ghostbusters<\/a>, etc. \u00a0I am forever indebted to my Grandpa for showing me Plan 9 From Outer Space<\/a> at age eight and opening my mind up to irony<\/i>\u2014which I guess made me a ‘hipster’ all the way back then. I got irony before it was \u2018cool\u2019.<\/p>\n

However, a detour in my \u201ctweens\u201d led me to thinking I would be a goalie in the NHL, and my filmmaking limb was severed\u2014but not cauterized.\u00a0 By age thirteen, I was a put-upon nerdy kid who tried to fit in by being smarter than everybody else.\u00a0 And when you decide to begin a descent into cinephiledom, Scorsese is the most obvious place to start.\u00a0 His movies are just popular enough to be household names, but just \u2018art\u2019 enough for you to be considered smart for watching them.\u00a0 They’re both iconic and subversive, a part of the counter culture that basically just became culture<\/i>\u2014like the Ramones.<\/p>\n

But here’s the thing\u2014it’s difficult for a thirteen year old to watch Taxi Driver<\/a>, because it’s, for lack of a better word, boring.<\/i>\u00a0 But what happens at that age is you want to believe.\u00a0<\/em> You want to be connected to that world that understands a movie like Taxi Driver, so you appreciate dolly shots that pan away from characters to empty hallways, or long zooms into Alka-Seltzer.\u00a0 Ironically, these things are to be appreciated as a result of the fact that at their core they are simplistic visual symbols to be taken at face value, and nothing more.\u00a0 Their effectiveness lies in their blatancy.\u00a0 In fact, there’s nothing not<\/i> to understand about Taxi Driver (except maybe the inexplicable ending when a psycho killer is turned into a hero.) But overall it’s just kind of\u2026 boring.\u00a0 Yet the truth is, Taxi Driver is a great thing.\u00a0 It’s a great thing because there’s a ton of really great moments, and it not culminating into a fully-realized thing isn’t such a big deal because there’s just so much for a cinephile to delight in.<\/p>\n

Roger Ebert loves Scorsese though. It’s like, nuts<\/i>.\u00a0 Since his book is just a collection of reviews, it’s funny because you have to keep reading over and over the phrase \u201cthe best American filmmaker\u201d because he uses it in every goddamn review of a Scorsese thing.\u00a0 When he\u2019s reviewing a great movie of his, he reminds us of it flat out, and when he\u2019s reviewing a bad movie of his, he praises it by basically saying \u2018from a lesser filmmaker, this would be a work of genius, but from the greatest American filmmaker, it’s just kind of eh<\/i>.’<\/p>\n

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Ebert loves After Hours<\/a> as much as I do.\u00a0 (Great minds!) \u00a0It’s unequivocally Scorsese’s second best movie\u2014and probably his most under-seen.\u00a0 And it’s said that Scorsese himself doesn’t particularly like this one that much.\u00a0 Not to be weird, but I think that’s partially why it’s good<\/i>.\u00a0 Scorsese is usually so theme-obsessed that he forgets about story.\u00a0 This happens with many \u2018art’ directors\u2014they get too caught up in their themes that they forget that less is more, and that story is everything.\u00a0 Kundun is obviously the pit here, but movies like Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Mean Streets<\/a> are all examples, too.\u00a0 They end up being about nothing by wanting to be about too much. After Hours isn’t like that. \u00a0It’s not typical Scorsese (it isn\u2019t about Catholic guilt, for once) and I suspect that is both why it’s good and why he doesn’t like it as much.\u00a0 It’s simply about a dude trying to get home and weird shit keeps happening to him.\u00a0 It’s a tight, succinct, fun story.\u00a0 (An 80\u2019s movie, basically.) \u00a0It’s refreshing to know that Marty can work outside all of his comfort-zones\u2014De Niro, Italians, old Hollywood nonsense\u2014and still make a great thing.\u00a0 The only example I can think of, of other \u2018art\u2019 filmmakers doing this, is David Lynch’s The Straight Story<\/a> (one of his better efforts).<\/p>\n

I’m always impressed that filmmakers of that generation were and are able to make good movies at all, when what they grew up on is so bad.\u00a0 How The Searchers<\/a> becomes Star Wars<\/a> is beyond me.\u00a0 This is most striking when you watch A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies<\/a>, a very long documentary hosted by Scorsese, in which he ushers you through the movies that influenced him as a kid.\u00a0 It is impossible for me to put myself in the late 40\u2019s as a pre teen.\u00a0 I can\u2019t even fathom it.\u00a0 But if Super 8<\/a> is proof of anything, it’s that growing up on good movies doesn’t necessarily mean one will make<\/i> good movies.\u00a0 So maybe there is<\/i> something to be said for being raised on bad ones.\u00a0 They certainly inspire ingenuity.<\/p>\n

A camera doesn’t have<\/i> to move.\u00a0 The basic building blocks of cinematic grammar don’t require it.\u00a0 Moving the camera, for purposes outside of following an action, is automatically a form of expression.\u00a0 But whereas other stylists use jagged jump cuts and a hand-held camera to falsely heighten bland scenes, Scorsese uses his camera to bring out the emotion underneath.\u00a0 It is true that his contemporaries (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma) all did the same, and all made better movies.\u00a0 But none made them with the same delightful zest that made you excited about movies themselves.<\/i><\/p>\n

Mean Streets is not a good movie, but its use of contemporary pop songs is in fact more innovative than Lucas’s American Graffiti<\/a> (also an utterly forgettable movie).\u00a0 Whereas Lucas uses his songs as a score, a musical bed to inform emotion and evoke nostalgia, Scorsese finds the emotional pulse of the music and blends it with his visuals to create a wholly other emotion, a tone created by the totality of all the elements.\u00a0 For whatever reason, Scorsese’s mind intuits movement, cutting, and music in a way nobody has before or since, and the results are staggering.<\/p>\n

There is literally no better example of this in the history of cinema than the Layla montage in Goodfellas, perhaps one of the most emotional sequences in all of cinema.\u00a0 He even played the track live on set to get the right timing and rhythm of the truck doors opening for the long crane shot that reveals Corbone in the freezer.\u00a0 On the DVD featurette, you can see footage of Marty feverishly editing that very scene with Thelma Schoonmacher (hard to tell where her genius begins and Scorsese’s ends).\u00a0 His intensity in that moment is that of a Van Gogh-esque painter (incidentally, whom he once portrayed in Kurosawa’s Dreams<\/a>) as he discusses the perfect cutting formula for the scene.<\/p>\n

But really, the best and possibly most surprising thing about Scorsese’s work is that his ingenuity reeks of inevitability.\u00a0 What I mean is, for example, there are some melodies that are so simple and infectious that they were bound<\/em> to be written.\u00a0 They feel perfectly inevitable.\u00a0 For instance, say, The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cSatisfaction\u201d.\u00a0 The shot in Taxi Driver when Travis is on the phone being rejected by Betsy, and the camera dollies away from him to the empty hallway, is like this too.\u00a0 The symbolism is so obvious that it doesn’t even seem like an idea.\u00a0 You accept it readily because your brain makes sense of its intention immediately\u2014and it takes a second to realize that you’ve never seen anything like that in any movie before.\u00a0 That is invisible, expressive, truly advanced filmmaking at its best.<\/p>\n

When Ebert was sick and he had guest hosts on his show, Kevin Smith took over for a week or so.\u00a0 He reviewed The Departed<\/a> and loved it.\u00a0 He said there should be a genre for Scorsese himself.\u00a0 He’s right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"scorsese\"<\/p>\n

As you can probably tell by my posts here so far, I don’t like many movies.\u00a0 Movies suck.\u00a0 But even an old curmudgeon like me can’t help but love Martin Scorsese.\u00a0 And so here’s my testament to how great he actually is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17],"tags":[589,583,591,582,61,575,566,577,586,592,568,399,65,37,581,576,572,70,66,563,157,564,565,584,461,578,567,571,573,570,104,185,588,590,396,593,580,587,569,585,574,579],"class_list":["post-1225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays","tag-a-personal-journey-with-martin-scorsese-through-american-movies","tag-after-hours","tag-american-graffiti","tag-back-to-the-future","tag-boogie-nights","tag-boxcar-bertha","tag-citizen-kane","tag-close-encounters","tag-david-lynch","tag-dreams","tag-frank-darabont","tag-ghostbusters","tag-goodfellas","tag-greg-deliso","tag-incredible-shrinking-man","tag-indiana-jones","tag-irreversible","tag-jaws","tag-jurassic-park","tag-kundun","tag-kurosawas-dreams","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-martin-scorsese-essay","tag-mean-streets","tag-plan-9-from-outer-space","tag-poltergeist","tag-raging-bull","tag-rope","tag-russian-ark","tag-shawshank-redemption","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-star-wars","tag-super-8","tag-taxi-driver","tag-the-departed","tag-the-incredible-shrinking-man","tag-the-searchers","tag-the-shawshank-redemption","tag-the-straight-story","tag-touch-of-evil","tag-tremors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1225"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1242,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions\/1242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}