Martin Scorsese - the man and movies

[kid-glove]

Interesting news,
De niro and Scorsese could rejoin, apparently discussed about a film on old guys (Goodfellas) looking back on events retrospectively.

Thread to discuss exclusively on his works.

[kid-glove]

DiCaprio says latest film role was 'most challenging'

BERLIN (AFP) – Leonardo DiCaprio called the traumatised World War II veteran he plays in the latest Martin Scorsese film the most demanding role he has done for the director, ahead of its world premiere Saturday.

Oscar-winner Scorsese and his favourite actor teamed up again for the psychological thriller "Shutter Island" -- the pair's fourth collaboration, which is appearing out of competition at the 60th Berlin Film Festival.

Asked at a press conference ahead of the gala launch of the film what was the most challenging role he had played for Scorsese, DiCaprio said "probably this one".

"It is a fascinating character study of how a human being deals with extreme trauma," he said.

DiCaprio said he had come into his own as an actor through his work over the last decade with the Hollywood legend behind "Raging Bull" and "Taxi Driver", calling him "the definitive director of our time".

"Any actor would be a fool not to jump at the opportunity to work with Mr Martin Scorsese," said DiCaprio, 35, who first acted for the director in "Gangs of New York". He said he would "only have his fingers crossed" to act for him again.

"He's got this infectious love of cinema and it rubs off on everyone on the set. We share the same tastes -- we have the same kind of commitment to make the best possible film we can."

Scorsese, 67, had not released a feature film since 2006's "The Departed", also starring DiCaprio, which won him the best directing Oscar -- the first of his four-decade-long career.

"Shutter Island" is based on a 2003 mystery novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, whose work has also been adapted by Clint Eastwood ("Mystic River") and Ben Affleck ("Gone, Baby, Gone").

The film, which drew lengthy applause at a press preview, follows two US marshals in 1950s Massachusetts pursuing a missing psychiatric patient on Boston Harbor's Shutter Island.

One of the lawmen, played by DiCaprio, has returned from World War II where he participated in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau -- an experience that left deep psychological scars.

When a hurricane hits the area, the marshals are stranded on the island, home to a hospital for the criminally insane.

Scorsese said he had taken inspiration from watching DiCaprio grow as an actor since his breakout role in 1993's "What's Eating Gilbert Grape".

"As he's maturing as a person, that life is being channelled into the actual work," he said. Scorsese said the "trust factor" with the actor had allowed him "to be able to focus that and perfect that and be part of that" process.

The premiere was scheduled one day after fellow veteran director Roman Polanski returned to the big screen with "The Ghost Writer", which also drew praise from critics.

"Shutter Island" also stars Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow and Michelle Williams.

The film had been kept under close wraps until its premiere but sneak previews granted to a handful of critics have garnered rich praise.

"It?s a true oddity, an outlier, as isolated and enigmatic as the gloomy, rain-whipped island on which the action takes place," the New York Times wrote this month.

"The hero, a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels, is a tormented soul, the type of man to whom Mr. Scorsese has never been a stranger."

The Berlin Film Festival runs until February 21

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Agree with Leo on Marty.

And much looking forward to Marty's take on Lehane.

[kid-glove]

http://www.obsessedwithfilm.com/mart...he-shining.php

That's just too much hype. Can't wait.

[kid-glove]

Original Mccarthy review, Vareity.

Shutter Island

A Paramount release of a Phoenix Pictures production in association with Sikelia Prods. and Appian Way. Produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Bradley J. Fischer, Martin Scorsese. Executive producers, Chris Brigham, Laeta Kalogridis, Dennis Lehane, Gianni Nunnari, Louis Phillips. Co-producers, Joseph Reidy, Emma Tillinger, Amy Herman. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay, Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane.

Teddy Daniels - Leonardo DiCaprio
Chuck Aule - Mark Ruffalo
Dr. Cawley - Ben Kingsley
Dr. Naehring - Max von Sydow
Dolores - Michelle Williams
Rachel 1 - Emily Mortimer
Rachel 2 - Patricia Clarkson
George Noyce - Jackie Earle Haley
Warden - Ted Levine
Deputy Warden McPherson - John Carroll
Lynch Laeddis - Elias Koteas

Expert, screw-turning narrative filmmaking put at the service of old-dark-madhouse claptrap, "Shutter Island" arguably occupies a similar place in Martin Scorsese's filmography as "The Shining" does in Stanley Kubrick's. In his first dramatic feature since "The Departed," Scorsese applies his protean skill and unsurpassed knowledge of Hollywood genres to create a dark, intense thriller involving insanity, ghastly memories, mind-alteration and violence, all wrapped in a story about the search for a missing patient at an island asylum. A topnotch cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio looks to lead this Paramount release, postponed from its original opening date last fall to Feb. 19, to muscular returns in all markets.

As Kubrick did with Stephen King's novel, Scorsese uncustomarily ventures here into bestseller territory that obliges him to deliver certain expected ingredients for the mass audience and adhere to formula more than has been his nature over the years. Although "The Departed" and "Cape Fear" come close, "Shutter Island" is the film that most forces the director to walk the straight and narrow in terms of carefully and clearly telling a story; if testing himself within that discipline was his intention, this most devoted of cinema students among major American directors gets an "A."

He also chose his material well. Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel is quite a few notches above the norm for mass-market popular fiction; ingeniously structured and populated with a rogue's gallery of intriguing, deceptive characters, the book is a real page-turner, spiked with game-changing twists, which draws upon perfectly legitimate medical, legal, historical and political issues.

It even offers an ending sufficiently ambiguous enough to inspire genuine debate. At its heart, however, it's still a potboiler, smartly fashioned to yank the reader this way and that while providing a veneer of moral inquiry for respectability's sake.

The script by Laeta Kalogridis (an exec producer on "Avatar" said to have worked closely with James Cameron on developing the project) faithfully hews to the letter and spirit of Lehane's tome, leaving Scorsese and his top-drawer collaborators with the largely technical task of crafting a drum-tight suspenser that won't take on too much water via the many memory flashbacks and surprise developments.

Working in a format that recalls the moody, low-budget horror mysteries of the 1940s produced at RKO by Val Lewton -- most pointedly "Isle of the Dead" and "The Seventh Victim," but in a far more visually vivid and explicit style -- Scorsese employs an exquisite modern equivalent of old-fashioned process work to show U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) chugging the 11 miles on a ferry between Boston and the eponymous island that's home to Ashecliffe Hospital

Warned by welcoming deputy warden (the excellent John Carroll Lynch) that the place houses only "the most dangerous, damaged patients," the two men get an eyeful of weird, zombie-like inmates doing menial work around an institution that resembles an impenetrable fortress -- because it was built as one, for use during the Civil War.

It's a heavy, deeply ominous place, outfitted by production designer Dante Ferretti to instill not only menace but also unease and anxiety; it's deliberately made difficult for Teddy and Chuck, as well as for the viewer, to understand the proximity of one place to another, to know where one stands literally and figuratively, to decide where it's safe and where it's not. Cloaking the mood is the pervasive disquiet of the Cold War tension of 1954.

This makes it harder to get a handle on the task at hand, which is finding Rachel Solando, the murderer of her three children, who somehow escaped from her tiny room, got past guards and presumably made her way out onto the island. The man in charge, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), is elegant, erudite and helpful, albeit only up to a point, and after interviewing staff and patients, Teddy and Chuck begin to feel they're on a fool's errand.

But there are forces that keep the men on the rocky, densely forested island.

Teddy, a grizzled World War II vet tormented by the fiery death of his wife (Michelle Williams in flashbacks) two years before -- as well as by visions of the corpses he found at Dachau upon helping liberate the concentration camp -- finds a cryptic note left by Rachel in her room that drives him forward. He may have hidden reasons of his own for sticking around. Then there's a gathering storm, which cuts off telephone and ferry service even before reaching full hurricane-level intensity.

One can rest assured that Teddy is not alone in concealing secret motives and agendas. In fact, everyone has them and, beginning an hour in, they are parcelled out in astutely measured doses to keep you hanging on to the very end.

Along the way, there are encounters with a brilliant doctor with a suspicious German accent (Max von Sydow); a perilous descent into the bowels of the notorious Ward C, home to the worst of the worst; rising suspicions about what really goes on in this place and accompanying doubt as to whether anyone who arrives on Shutter Island ever is allowed to leave.

This is high-end popcorn fare adorned with a glittering pedigree by a powerhouse cast and crew. DiCaprio appears deeply into his role; a lot is asked of him, physically and emotionally, and his battle-and-tragedy-scarred veteran embodies a tangible anguish. Ruffalo is ideally cast as the older but junior agent who takes a lighter approach to serious matters. If this story had been made in the heyday of noir, Kirk Douglas could have played Teddy and Robert Mitchum would have been a perfect Chuck.

Kingsley and von Sydow bring their smooth confidence to bear on their roles as institution big shots, while Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson score in their individual big scenes.

But the greatest interest lies in the craftsmanship, which is provided in spades by Ferretti, cinematographer Robert Richardson, visual effects and second-unit overseer Rob Legato, costume designer Sandy Powell, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and dozens of others. Even when it's clear Scorsese has decided to employ fakery and allow it to be obvious, it's done with elegance and beauty.

Of at least equal interest is the soundtrack, supervised by Robbie Robertson, which employs mostly modern serious and classical music in the same manner of intelligent sampling that Scorsese normally uses rock and borrowed movie compositions. The sudden infusions of discordant, atonal and otherwise unsettling passages by Ligeti, Penderecki, Cage, Adams and, more traditionally, Mahler, among numerous others, further amplifies the sought-after climate of malignant ambiguity.

[kid-glove]

That really is one of the immensely fanboy reviews I've ever read. To be read with a pinch of salt,

[Appu s]

K_G is it releasing on 19th or not?

[kid-glove]

I guess.

[Aalavanthan]

IMDB says.. Drama is set in 1954 ..

sounds interesting .. I still couldnt come out of the screenplay excellence of Departed and this man has come up with another movie again with the same lead..

13th March is the release date in UK and it is blocked on my calendars now

[ajithfederer]

As of now,
Favorite Films in that Order: (Subject to change forever)

The Departed
Raging Bull
Taxi Driver
Good Fellas and Casino
The King of Comedy

I haven't seen Mean Streets. I didn't like Cape fear Much either.

[Aalavanthan]

The Departed
Goodfellas .. Joe Pesci Need a re-visit
Casino
Raging Bull/Taxi driver


Need to see the other movies that you have mentioned AF.. I guess The Departed would be the best mafia movie made ever