geoffcowgill wrote:I'll say this: Martin Scorsese is the best filmmaker there has ever been. Numerous directors have had more impact, influence, and importance for landmark works, but no one, absolutely no one, has more consistently proven with such awesome force that they know how to make a movie better than this man. Is he a visionary? Maybe not so much, relative to a Fellini, Welles, Godard, Hitchcock, even Altman. But he is the cinema craftsman par excellance. How and why should The Departed, a cop/mob cat-and-mouse movie with a couple of pretty nifty contrivances central to its plot, be one of the best, if not the best, movies of the year? 'Cause Scorsese can hardly make a bad movie. And he's a master of all of it. Kubrick and Hitchcock were visual stylists of amazing instinct, but they let countless crappy performances slip into their films. William Wyler and Howard Hawks knew how to tell a story and coax charismatic and empathetic performances from actors, but had little elan with the visual dynamics of cinema. There are precious few bad shots or bad performances in a Scorsese movie. We can argue about what his best period was, and what his best film was, but who EVER has amassed a record of as many great films? And he didn't even have the rapidity of the studio system to pump up his numbers, and his meticulous editing process ensures that he can't crank 'em out even by the diminished standards of prolificacy today. I fully expect a deserved standing ovation come Oscar night.
This is all well and good if you like his films. I dont. Hitchcock has made great films and a few poor ones. I dont think I have seen a bad performance in a Hitchcock film to rival Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, and that including Tippi Headren in Marnie. But Hey Ho
So Long Kid, Take A Bow.