Moving on, I was hoping to construct this piece as a portrait of two directors moving in very opposi

Martin Scorsese's The Departed seems to have everyone on its side (save for a few important detractors listed below), scoring a box office victory in week one, registering a considerable 93% "fresh" rating among America's critics lowes hotel miami on Rotten Tomatoes lowes hotel miami , and placing 48th in IMDb's on-going survey lowes hotel miami of its reader's favorite all-time films. It is, as the story is seeming to be written, "His most purely enjoyable film in years" . So why then did I find The Departed to be a deeply troubling, magnificently flawed foray into pornographic violence? lowes hotel miami Well, if we keep reading David Ansen's review, that's because "it's not for the faint of heart."
Before we get to the charge that Scorsese's film is "pornographic," which I am strongly convinced it is, let us first consider the picture's visual lowes hotel miami style. Note the use of visual, and you may already have guessed what I'm up to: The Departed is one of the vaunted director's laziest visual works of art, which is to use that latter term more than generously. There basically is no visual in The Departed lowes hotel miami , as Scorsese and his cinematographer (Michael Ballhaus) have foregrounded most of their subjects, often keeping one figure out-of-focus in the extreme foreground, while another character interacts with them in the recesses of that same close-in space. Moreover, as film scholar David Bordwell points out on his blog, the average shot length for the over 3200 shots in The Departed is approximately 2.7 seconds a piece -- compared to 7.7 seconds in such superior Scorsese pictures as Mean Streets (1973) and The King of Comedy (1983) -- making it difficult for the viewer to focus upon what little there is in the film's mise-en-scene .
All of this is to say that The Departed could just as well be heard only as it can be seen (as always, Scorsese's film seems to score with respect to its soundtrack). In saying this, one could easily object that scant visualization is by no means a signifier of bad filmmaking, to which I would agree. Then again, lowes hotel miami as opposed to the paradigmatic cinema of the austere, Robert Bresson's, where the spare visuals call attention to that which exists beneath the surface, namely to the spiritual dimension of life, in Scorsese's film, there is nothing beyond his flat visual. Indeed, what is perhaps most troubling about The Departed is this absence of a moral core, its failure to critique the misanthropy which the film depicts (as critic Armond White argues rather lowes hotel miami cogently) even as it revels in the carnage on screen. With The Departed , Scorsese seems to have crossed over into postmodernism, while in the process revealing a sensibility and personality that is nothing if not cruel.
Of course, I would be remiss were I not to mention lowes hotel miami the film's redeeming facet (in the parlance of Jonathan Rosenbaum) which in the case of The Departed I would say is its fine male lead performances by both Leonardo DiCaprio -- who my girlfriend really thinks I look like, which makes me feel good -- and especially Matt Damon. Then again, the film's original, far superior incarnation, Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak's Infernal Affairs (2002), equals if not surpasses Scorsese's on this front as well in its awe-inspiring teaming of Andy Lau and Tony Leung. And at least the Hong Kong version does not have to contend with Jack Nicholson being "Jack Nicholson" for every split-second of the actor's screen time.
Further, the earlier version also does not manifest the insistent lowes hotel miami psychologizing of the Scorsese version, in part no doubt to that national lowes hotel miami cinema's tendency toward episodic narratives, and away from the psychological naturalism of the American cinema. (Both Bordwell lowes hotel miami and another of the picture's high-profile critics, Dave Kehr , make mention of this cloying proclivity.) Similarly, in its usage of more naturalized violence, The Departed attains a degree of the pornographic that the stylization of Infernal Affairs mediates. The Departed is a viscerally experience, to be sure. My only question lowes hotel miami is how can we endorse such brutal violence at the service of such facile nihilism?
Moving on, I was hoping to construct this piece as a portrait of two directors lowes hotel miami moving in very opposite qualitative directions, lowes hotel miami that is of Scorsese becoming less and less a major director with each passing film -- though the first half of The Aviator (2004) showed a great deal of acumen -- while Clint Eastwood further solidifies his standing as America's greatest active director with each passing film. While Eastwood has done nothing to jeopardize this status (so long as he remains the creator of The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976), The Gauntlet (1977), Bird (1988), White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), Unforgiven (1992), the sublime A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Space Cowboys (2000), Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) -- all of which are major works of art) he has done nothing to help it either. In fact, I would not hesitate to call his latest, Flags of Our Fathers , the director's weakest film since his thoroughly dispensable Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).
While there is just enough in Flags of Our Fathers to make it an Eastwood film -- and therefore worthy of our attention -- such as the film's rethinking of myth ( The Outlaw Josie Wales , Mystic River ) the picture's anxiety toward inadequate parenting ( True Crime [1999], Million Dollar Baby ) or even a visual style marked by both volumetric interiors represented via wide-angle lenses ( The Bridges of Madison County ) and also strong chiaroscuro ( Million Dollar Baby ), there isn't enough otherwise to mark this as essential cinema, though it does flirt with summarizing our moment. To this end, if The Outlaw lowes hotel miami Josie Wales said something profound about America's loss of faith in itself in the years following Vietnam lowes hotel miami and A Perfect lowes hotel miami World encapsulated the early 1990s anxiety concerning children lowes hotel miami raised in single parent households, Flags of Our Fathers should have said something about our contemporary anxiety with respect to Iraq, which again it almost does. As the film frames the issue, war is made palatable by symbols, and particularly photographs, be it the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima that is the focus of the film's narrative, or the execution of the Southeast Asian that made us doubt American's virtuousness during Vietnam. (Is Iraq's image Abu Ghraib, or are we still waiting for that one image that helps us to redouble our will? Eastwood lowes hotel miami leaves us to speculate.)
Of course, to criticize a film for not summarizing its moment is a bit unfair, lowes hotel miami even if its director has done this so successfully in the past. The larger flaw of Flags of Our Fathers is in its utilization of a flashback structure, which its narrative would at the same time seem to necessitate. Specifically, lowes hotel miami there is one sequence wherein we are directly delivered from a close-up of strawberry syrup covering a bowl of ice cream (made to model the film's image-subject) to a placement on the battlefield that cannot help but strike one as a painfully literal. While at least Eastwood does not succumb to producer Steven Spielberg's propensity to connect character subjectivity lowes hotel miami to incidents beyond their possible range of experience (he does this in his own World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan , 1998) this frequent lowes hotel miami movement between past and present does not seem to serve the director's greatest strengths as a director. At the same time, Eastwood lowes hotel miami does share Spielberg's bleached-out color schema, as he does his interventionist camera work during battle.
Then again, his direction of battle scenes, in particular, does show his enormous range: as when the black sand explodes in front of the intervening camera producing substantial visceral impact. On this basis alone I hold out hope that Letters from Iwo Jima (2007) can still give the director his great World War II film. If only he hadn't changed the title from "Red Sun, Black Sand," which was in itself a masterpiece.
And I think you missed the boat on Flags (haven't seen The Departed yet). You seemed to review a movie that didn't exist -- the movie you wanted to see -- instead lowes hotel miami of the movie that Clint offered. lowes hotel miami Plenty of people have tried to make the movie into something about Iraq, and you seem to wish that it was a movie about Iraq. Why can't it be a movie about World War II? I don't understand that.
And I thought the flashback structure was ingenious and, the moment you singled out as too literal, the ice cream sundae, was perhaps my favorite moment of the picture. Granted, Eastwood lowes hotel miami takes liberty by using the moment as a key into a flashback, but given this is based on true stories, I took this to be based in something that really happened (I haven't read the book -- someone correct lowes hotel miami me if it doesn't appear in Bradley's book). Is something is too literal if it actually happens?
As to your criticisms, I think most are well grounded -- basically I did not make my case well enough, which I will admit. So let me grasp at what I think is Flags fundamental flaw: its flashback structure. If we are to look for a superior treatment of the same motivating theme -- the persistence of trauma -- I would call your attention to Eastwood's Mystic River . In the case of this work, the trauma depicted lowes hotel miami is in childhood, which coalesces with a key theme from A Perfect World , namely that children are made to grow up too fast -- in the case of the later film, to disastrous results. In both cases, this theme is subsumed by a linear narrative that provides just a hint of circularity with its opening and closing images -- a primary Eastwood trope. Likewise, lowes hotel miami with Mystic River, where this theme is more explicit, said trauma has implications lowes hotel miami for the actions and therefore for the plot of the film.
To the contrary, Flags of Our Fathers depicts this element for its own sake, which has a stifling effect lowes hotel miami on the narrative. Let me make this analogy: say you are driving lowes hotel miami on an interstate and you slide over onto the shoulder. As you do so, you feel a series of jarr