Movie Update 18

Does this even need an introduction?

Brazil


Terry Gilliam has a long history of misfortune trying to get his movies made, but if nothing else I think he can look back on this as one film that he got to do completely on his terms. Unless he actually didn't, but it sure seems that way. Brazil is a combination of satire, violence, slapstick, and oppression that I don't think I've ever seen in a story before. Maybe something Kurt Vonnegut would write, I guess. It's set in an odd dystopian future where a gigantic bureaucracy seems to control everything. Johnathan Pryce is part of the system, but he gets caught up in something bigger involving a terrorist played by Robert De Niro and a beautiful girl he's been seeing in his dreams. It's both very funny and extremely dark at points, featuring some really great imagery and a killer ending. Unique and worth checking out.

Halloween


Despite really marking the beginning of the slasher movie craze, Halloween has a remarkably low death count and lack of a focus on gore. It's almost like a Hitchcock movie in its focus on suspense over shocking the audience. Like all older horror movies, it doesn't register quite as terrifyingly as it probably did in the past, but it's still a pretty effective little film. I definitely think I like John Carpenter's work in the horror genre a little more than action. Some teenagers do things Michael Myers doesn't like, he stalks them and kills them brutally, and he repeatedly fails to die. A lot of tropes, but it's a tight, tense movie.

Ponyo


As far as Hayao Miyazaki movies go, the plot in Ponyo is pretty slight. His films have always balanced family-friendly whimsy with deeper ideas, but I think this is easily his most child-focused movie, even more than My Neighbor Totoro. That doesn't make it bad though, of course. I still liked it a lot, from the undersea mythology it quickly builds to the gorgeous animation and painterly backgrounds. The environmental themes and dialogue (at least in the American dub) are a bit too obvious and expository, but they just flavor a fun little fairy tale. Not the best Miyazaki movie, but still a really good one.

Wings of Desire


This is a weird movie. I actually saw the American remake (and hated it) around when it came out in the 90s, without realizing it was based on this German film. The original is a lot better, but still really weird. It's based on the creepy idea that angels are always walking around outside our vision, watching over us and sometimes longing to be one of us. Bruno Ganz, also known as Hitler from Downfall and those funny youtube videos, plays an angel who falls in love with a human, and considers becoming a human to be with her. There's a lot of extended scenes with the angels just listening to the thoughts of humans, which can get repetitive, but they are really artfully shot, and the use of black and white and color is another effective touch. There's also a very strange subplot where Peter Falk plays Peter Falk. Yeah, it's a weird movie.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown


What do you call a dark comedy that you really like, but isn't really that funny or that dark? I'm not sure, but that sort of describes Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Carmen Maura stars as an actress whose affair with a costar has recently ended, and now finds herself caught trying to figure out what happened. At the same time, her friend recently slept with someone who turned out to be a terrorist, and she's considering subletting her apartment to an awkward, nerdy looking Antonio Banderas, who happens to be the son of her lover. Also, his wife is crazy and wants to kill her, or really anyone. It's a twisty, entertaining little movie, though it never reaches the crazy sort of climax or fevered pitch that the best movies of its ilk tend to. Still, a fun, well made movie.

Movie Update 9

A couple William Wyler classics and a couple by favorite directors.

Ben-Hur


This was pretty damn good for what is essentially Bible fan fiction, and I liked it more than I expected. Ben-Hur is pretty much the definition of an epic, lasting well over three hours even without its extended overture and intermission, and telling the story of a man whose life has parallels to and intersects with that of Jesus. He butts heads with Rome, he spends years rowing on a galley, and he becomes a successful chariot racer. I'm not sure how I felt about the religious stuff, but it's generally secondary to the film itself, which moves along well despite the length and has a few really good scenes. The chariot race in particular is outstanding. There are obvious moments where the motion is sped up, but it's still a thrilling sequence over fifty years later.

The Best Years of Our Lives


Another Best Picture winner directed by William Wyler. The Best Years of Our Lives is sort of the quintessential inspirational movie. It was made very shortly after World War II, and shows the return of three soldiers to a town in central America; one missing his hands and worried how his family and high school sweetheart will take his new hook prostheses, one concerned that he won't be able to support his wife with no job to come back to, and one older with two kids who has concerns about his bank is treating GIs. They all go through some foibles before it all works out in the end. The important part is the journey, and there are a lot of good scenes in there, with everything from humor to betrayal and budding romance. It seems pretty honest for the time period, and it's a well-acted film in general.

Mean Streets

Martin Scorsese's first collaboration with Robert De Niro was originally conceived as a sequel to Who's That Knocking at My Door? and there are definite similarities. Harvey Keitel plays a similarly self-conscious street tough who balances hanging out with his criminal friends with a troubled romantic relationship, and there's a familiar sort of aimlessness to it. The film is as much about the experience of being in Little Italy as it is about the simple, flimsy plot, and while that may have worked for some, I found it a bit dull a lot of the time. Scorsese just wasn't quite the virtuoso he'd go on to be yet. Still, there's good bits here and there, particularly De Niro's unhinged performance which helped make his career and the ending, which is trademark Scorsese violence in full effect.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights


You know a director has lost his touch when one of his parodies makes Spaceballs look inspired. I don't want to be too harsh on Men in Tights, but the fact is it's not particularly funny, and on top of that it's fairly unoriginal. Pretty much every joke is either something being referenced that didn't actually exist in the film's time period, or just kind of silly. The musical numbers seem awkwardly stitched in, and the entire romantic subplot is basically exactly the same as the one in Spaceballs. The cast is solid, and about the only thing that keeps the movie decently enjoyable instead of completely boring. Cary Elwes basically plays Westley again as Robin Hood, Dave Chappelle is one of his wacky sidekicks, Richard Lewis plays the mildly villainous Prince John, and Patrick Stewart has a solid cameo. Dom Deluise also does a pretty good Brando in The Godfather impression for no real reason. I don't know, I chucked a fair number of times, but I still recognized the movie has highly lacking compared to most of Brooks' earlier work. I wish he had made more movies back when he still had ideas.

Casino

Casino seems to be generally viewed as a rehash of Goodfellas, with director Martin Scorsese revisiting similar ideas with a similar cast, and not doing much to set it apart from his most recent gritty classic. Casino is basically just the same movie with more of everything - more violence, more swearing, a longer running time. So is it wrong that I actually like Casino more than Goodfellas? Yes, it's a somewhat excessive movie in some places, but isn't that the point? It's a movie about excess. It's based on the true story of America's most notorious criminal network during their most overtly violent and influential period operating in one of the world's biggest stages for pure capitalism. Las Vegas is bringing in obscene amounts of money, a ton of it is being stolen right off the top, and people got murdered left and right to keep them quiet. It would be disappointing if the movie wasn't over the top. And I enjoyed the hell out of it for most of its nearly three hours of running time.

The story stars and is heavily narrated by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci playing mob guys from Chicago. De Niro is Ace, a Jewish money guy who gets tapped by the family to run one of their casinos, and Pesci is Nicky, an enforcer who's there to back him up. Both the actors and the characters have a lot of history together, and the movie returns to the unstable relationship they had in Raging Bull, though this time it's Pesci who's the crazy one. The Chicago accent prevents him from seeming like a total rip-off of his own character in Goodfellas, and if anything he's even more out there with his short temper and tendency towards extreme violence. Lots of people end up getting stuck in holes in the desert, and he's responsible for a lot of them. As time marches on and the feds keep building their case against them, they struggle to avoid killing each other as they continually blame each other for all the problems they have. Compounding the issue is Sharon Stone as Ace's wife, an out-of-control hustler/junkie who is even more manic that Pesci, those less prone to stabbing you for messing with her. She has a sleazy ex-boyfriend played by James Woods who does a lot to sell his scumbag nature without much screen time, and he instigates a lot of their marital troubles. Mob movie regular Frank Vincent is also around as one of Nicky's guys, and he does a solid job.

The three central figures are interesting, and while I eventually got kind of sick of Stone's overwrought performance, the combination of business and personal problems that pile on top of them over the course of the story add up to a hectic, exciting, wild ride. And it might be a pretty good movie with just that, but this is Martin Scorsese we're talking about, and this is probably the single greatest display of style and invention I've seen from him. There are long tracking shots that mix with extremely quick cuts that are narrated over by two different characters and all sorts of little touches and interesting moves that you don't really see anywhere else, and they all add up to a film that is almost too fun to watch. The soundtrack is filled with tons of period music that both tells you where you are in history and fits perfectly with the action, and it's hard to go five minutes at any time without seeing something new. It might be style over substance, but it also might be one of the best examples of that ever put on film. I like mob stories because they make you feel things you shouldn't for very bad people, and Casino does that almost as well as any movie you can name. I wasn't blown away by Goodfellas, and while I can see why people would be and why they would prefer it to Casino, I just can't agree with sentiment. The Godfather is the best crime movie ever made, and Casino is one of the most entertaining. The violence is hard to watch like violence should be. The family drama is painful like family drama should be. It's just a visceral, thrilling experience the whole way.

Machete

Machete is a pretty good companion to The Expendables, another bloody ensemble action film that came out in the late summer of last year. It's a little more low budget and skews a bit differently with its cast, featuring more well-known women than men and a bunch of character actors. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I hesitate to declare one or the other the truly superior film, but they're both mostly enjoyable, hilariously violent movies.

The movie stars the instantly-recognizable Danny Trejo as Machete, a Mexican federal who gets betrayed, crosses the border, and gets betrayed again, when he decides to finally fight back against all those who have wronged him. It's a pretty extensive list, including Jeff Fahey as a slimy businessman and Steven Seagal as a slimy ex-federal. Robert De Niro plays a slimy politician with a fake Texan accent, in one of the more obvious jabs in a movie full of easy commentary on the whole immigration issue. I didn't bother trying to really understand what the movie was trying to say, because it was clear from the beginning that the real purpose of Machete was to be a silly Mexploitation film, and the politics are just there so a bunch of Mexican people can make speeches and then fight a bunch of white people. Basically, our economy needs cheap illegal labor to run, and if you try to totally get rid of it, bad things will happen. In real life, people would lose money; in the movie, they might get shot or blown up.

But anyway Machete joins an underground criminal network in an attempt to get back at the many villains the film quickly introduces. To sum it up simply, much like Once Upon a Time In Mexico, the plot is kind of an overstuffed mess. There are too many characters who don't have enough to do and the movie doesn't take enough time to make them all worth the effort. Luckily, unlike Mexico, Machete mostly makes up for it by generally acknowledging its own silliness and letting the fun come from a bunch of silly one-liners and especially absurdly gory and occasionally honestly clever action scenes. There's also some pointless nudity and winking celebrity cameos, this movie did come out of the whole Grindhouse project after all. Rodriguez has proven himself pretty consistent at making entertaining low-brow movies on the cheap, and he did the same thing again here. Things kind of peter out once you realize there's no way he's going to resolve everything in a unique and satisfactory way, but if you just let it be a stupid action movie with a lot of mediocre-to-good ideas, it's not bad.

Once Upon a Time in America

Once Upon a Time is Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone's final film, and one of his only works that isn't a western. It is beautiful, violent, poignant, and disturbing all at once, and it would be an easy contender for best crime epic of all time if it weren't for those pesky Godfather movies. It tells the story of a Jewish gang of bootleggers in Prohibition-era New York, focusing on Robert De Niro's character of Noodles, and James Woods' Max to a lesser extent. It starts in the middle of Noodles' life, with his friends getting killed and him barely escaping himself. It then jumps to him as a much older man, revisiting his old haunts after something has called him back, which serves as a way to frame the events that came before. It cuts back to the gang as a group of kids, including a very young Jennifer Connelly as the kid version of a dancer he falls in love with, and then shows the events that eventually lead to the film's beginning.

I make specific mention of the interesting structure of the story's timeline because of how thoroughly it was butchered in the original American release of the movie. The film in its intended form is almost excessively long at about three hours and forty minutes, but it uses all of that time for a reason. I can understand why a studio would want to cut down a movie's length for commercial considerations, and a few minutes here or there is usually acceptable. But they basically cut this movie in half, including a lot of the childhood scenes which are vital to setting up the character relationships that would carry the entire emotional weight of the story, and on top of that reedited the whole thing into chronological order, removing something that was important to the way the whole thing was told. At that point you're not even watching the same film anymore. I haven't actually seen this cut so I can't really comment on it, but all accounts are it takes a good piece of work and destroys it, and Leone was so hurt by what they did that he never made another movie before he died. It's really a shame, because America is probably his masterpiece and the original release prevented it from ever really taking off, preventing it from being put in the annals along with The Godfather and Goodfellas and turning it into something film buffs whisper about.

But I guess I should get back to talking about the actual movie. Leone learned while making his Spaghetti Westerns how to combine a stately, visually-focused film style with violent subject matter to elevate it above simple crass entertainment, and that translates very well over to mob movies. There's some absolutely wonderful imagery here, and the way it is combined with some really conceptually ugly scenes lends the whole thing a certain dark beauty. People get killed quickly and for little reason, and sexuality is depicted with a shocking frankness, and the main characters are most certainly not good people, as they make sure to show you repeatedly. But you still manage to find some measure of sympathy for them, in part because the time jumping shows how a youth of recklessness and crime can end with a broken old man filled with guilt and regret. It's the kind of thing you lose when, say, you reedit the entire film into chronological order.

Performance-wise, the movie is quite good. De Niro was sort of out of his period as a true genius of the craft, but he's still solid in both time periods. Woods is pretty excellent, managing the balance of a character who the protagonist both loves and is persistently troubled by, and he mostly manages to sell an ending that I otherwise thought was out of step with what I had come to expect from the story. William Forsythe is another of the game, and his gap-toothed grin and droopy eyelids add a little something to every scene he's in. Both women who play Deborah have the ability to make you believe a guy who could have almost any girl he wants would want her instead. Joe Pesci has a very small role, probably as a favor to De Niro, and he's as restrained as I've ever seen him. He and Burt Young are both good in a pivotal part of the plot that doesn't take up much time, but is still pretty essential to bridging the gaps in the story. There isn't quite the expansive cast of colorful characters you might see in another take on the same idea, but all of the ones who are important are very well drawn. It's not a perfect movie, and it really is just a bit too long in some areas. But it's the kind of work that really should be seen by more people, the way it was intended.

The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter is possibly the most restrained epic I've ever seen. It tells a story about war and how it can destroy lives, and about love, and is a sweeping three hours long. But there are fewer than ten characters of any real significance, and for the most part the story is contained to a small blue collar town in Pennsylvania. None of this makes it bad, it's just interesting how they decided to allot the running time to the different aspects of the story. Vietnam is the crux of the plot and all of the things that affect the main characters, but the movie probably spends less than an hour total there.

So five friends work at a steel mill, and three of them are leaving for the war soon. One of them is getting married before they ship off, and except for the groom they're all going to go deer hunting one last time after the ceremony. A bearded Robert De Niro is the one who most loves the thrill of the hunt, obsessed with bringing down the deer with one shot, and he's also in love with Meryl Streep, who happens to be in a relationship with his best friend played by Christopher Walken. And that's really everything from the first part of the story, which takes up the first hour. It then cuts quickly to Vietnam, and it's an abrupt transition from people having a good time at a wedding and on a hunting trip to people getting shot and burned alive in a war-torn village. They're captured by the enemy, and then the film introduces its infamous element of Russian Roulette. It might not be a historically accurate depiction of what happened in the war, but that hardly matters when it provides so much great material for the story. The game is an apt metaphor for the pointless, random violence of war, and is a nice way to show that without throwing too much money into huge battles. It also provides from some thrillingly intense scenes of drama.

None of the friends are killed in the war, but they are all deeply affected by their experience, and they don't all make it back to Pennsylvania. The third act is about the post-war life, and focuses mostly on De Niro. All of the central performances are great, including John Cazale's final role as one of the friends who stayed behind, and Walken's, which won him an Oscar. De Niro really holds the end of the movie together though, and without him supporting it it might not have worked. It's a complicated story where nothing is easy or black and white, and as a depiction of what trauma can do to people and how it can wreck plans and affect people who didn't even go, it's a powerful piece of filmmaking. I didn't like everything about its choices in pacing and a few other things, but still definitely deserving of its status as a great film.

Raging Bull

I could sort of understand how Goodfellas didn't win for Best Picture. It was a very good movie, but for some reason I don't find it as transcendent as many others do. Raging Bull on the other hand... what more could Scorsese do? The black and white cinematography is probably the best I've ever seen. The way every single shot is framed seems to have a purpose and work exactly towards the movie's goals. The plot is pure, and the kind of thing the voters like - the true story of a brilliant boxer who is his own worst enemy thanks to some crippling insecurities and poorly made decisions. The cast is outstanding, particularly Robert De Niro in the role of a lifetime. He worked out into real fighting shape for the scenes as middleweight champion Jake LaMotta, and then gained sixty pounds to portray him in his later years. Add that physical sacrifice to the actual work he does in front of the camera, transforming himself into another person and dominating the screen while doing so - it's incredible. He rightly won the Oscar, but the performance would have meant little without the properly told story around it, and Scorsese went home empty handed for his efforts.

The actual boxing scenes don't take up a large amount of the film's time, but they're impeccably crafted by someone who was never really big into sports. The fight choreography is interesting and believable, and the myriad stylistic touches like the ring shrinking or growing based on LaMotta's psychology or the way everything goes wonky when he allows himself to get pummeled by Sugar Ray Robinson add a lot to it. Outside the ring the film is just as good, refusing to sugarcoat LaMotta's horrible treatment of his family and ignorance of correct social behavior but somehow making him sympathetic by doing so. He seems like a real person as much as anyone in a movie ever has, and along with everything else the movie is never an engrossing watch. You feel his frustration when he has to play along with the mob to get a title shot and his pure anger when he's imprisoned for something he didn't even think was a crime. Just as good as character studies get. Possibly my favorite Scorsese film I've yet seen.

The Godfather: Part II

The Godfather might be the best made film I've ever seen, and the sequel does plenty to live up to that standard of cinematography, editing, and acting. I don't think it's an insult to say it doesn't quite live up the the original's standard of storytelling, because it's still an outstanding film and that's a hell of a thing to live up to. I had no issue with any individual element of the movie, I just don't think the overall character arc is quite as fascinating as in the first. In Part I, Michael Corleone is a war hero who slowly gets sucked into his family's criminal business due to loyalty to his father and a decade of desensitization to the wrongs he's committing. He eventually finds himself as don of the whole family. It's a transformation that's fascinating to watch. in Part II, Michael's the godfather. And he's the godfather for the whole movie. Lots of interesting stuff happens to his character, including some pretty brutal personal things in the second half. But while he descends deeper into the role of ruthless crime lord, the arc is just less distinct. It felt more like watching a few episodes of a brilliant crime show than a self contained, fulfilling story.

Again, I don't want to undersell how good this film is. It's one of the best of the decade. It just didn't quite match the first, to me. There's a lot going on, and it's definitely a movie that gets better the closer attention you pay to it. Bit characters from the first film show up to play important parts, there's a dense web of deception and backstabbing that's quite a bit of work to keep up with, and it's as interesting a straight gangster tale as I've ever seen. The flashback segments featuring Robert De Niro as a young Vito Corleone, depicting his rise to power in 1920s New York, are pretty brilliant, and I might have gotten more out of the film as a whole if they got a bigger share of the 200 minutes rather than feeling like a distinct B story to the main one of Michael's struggles. The mostly returning cast is brilliant, Al Pacino further proved himself to me as a master of the craft in his younger days, Robert Duvall continues to make Hagen one of the most sympathetic characters despite his somewhat thankless role, and Diane Keaton has a lot more to do this time, showing she deserved to be in several of the 70's best films. I don't really know many other actors here by name, but no one would have made it into the movie if they didn't know what they were doing. There's not much else to say about it without going into the specifics of the story, which I feel would be a disservice. I don't have to tell anyone this, but the Godfather movies deserve to be seen by anyone who likes the medium for more than just a few laughs and explosions.

Taxi Driver

It's sort of hard to articulate my thoughts on Taxi Driver. It's a character study of a man who at first appears relatively normal except for perhaps too strong of a negative opinion regarding the other people in his environment, yet as it goes on he quickly becomes more and more psychotic. He talks about how the streets should be cleaned up, eventually deciding he should be the one to do it. I'm a little unclear on the amount of time the film covers. It doesn't feel too long, but the character undergoes a lot of change and some telling details are sort of skipped over. A lot of the film is just him watching the world around him, though it never gets boring and it's punctuated by moments of grave intensity, including the totally alarming climax which is only hampered slightly by the dated special effects. It's really a movie propelled by Robert De Niro's performance, at different times charming, pathetic, and harrowing, and without which I'm not sure the film succeeds.

His is not the only good performance, with Harvey Keitel making the despicable pimp of an underage girl somehow a bit likable, and Jodie Foster holding her own in an early role as said prostitute. There's some early stuff at a campaign center with Albert Brooks and Cybill Shepherd that doesn't really seem to fit with the rest of the movie but provides a bit of relief from De Niro's ever-deepening dementia, and also provides a glimpse at where his mind is truly headed. It's a good collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader, just one of many, as they somehow make the unusual story work. I'm not sure I agree with every decision Scorsese makes, but most of it succeeds and it seems pretty groundbreaking for 1976. The ending is definitely odd and can work with a couple different interpretations. At first it seemed to come out of nowhere and mesh poorly with what I had seen just before, but in hindsight I think it works better than something closer to what I was expecting. I still feel like there's something just a bit off with the whole thing, but it's certainly a staple of the decade and has me wanting to watch more by both the director and the lead.

Ronin

Yet another film I've seen a lot of before. For what it attempts to do, Ronin is pretty much a perfect action movie. Screw the gigantic CGI-fests of this decade, I'd rather watch this or a Bourne movie any day of the week. The plot is intelligent, the cast is strong, tension rises effectively before violent things start to go down, and the action itself is as exciting as anything. The shootouts aren't terribly elaborate, and despite Robert De Niro's endless talents as an actor he can't help but close his eyes with every shot he fires. But those gun fights are just a warm up for the real thrill of the movie - its car chases.

There are only two real chases in the film, but they're both excellent. Director John Frankenheimer had done them in the past, but I would bet this is the culmination of his talents in that area, if not any others. It's hard to say what makes a chase a success. There's some combination of speed, quick turns, danger, and the right editing that can make all the difference between a truly exciting scene and something that falls flat. Whatever the formula for a good chase, I could watch scenes that make the grade until the end of time. Not continually, though. I mean, a guy's gotta do stuff besides watch movies.

The rest of the movie besides just the chases is good, too. Everyone from the Irish gangsters behind the job to Sean Bean as the bumbling criminal who gets kicked out before he has a chance to really do anything manages to bring something to the table. De Niro and Jean Reno are the key protagonists through the whole thing, and they have a nice international friendship as they battle through betrayals from every direction and fight to get the case that everyone wants. Everything from the planning phase in the beginning through to the relatively downplayed but still interesting finale just works well. Good movie.

Jackie Brown

Jackie Brown is a bit of an oddity. It's Quentin Tarantino's third and probably least remembered film. One of the only stories he's done that wasn't his own, he took the plot from an Elmore Leonard novel (Who wrote many things that were adapted to screen, like 3:10 to Yuma) and reworked it into a tribute to 70's blaxploitation films, even starring a veteran of the genre, Pam Grier. Another big character is played by Robert Forster, who was also a long-time actor without a ton of success, and whom I only recognize from recent episodes of the increasingly-shitty Heroes. I guess Tarantino likes reviving people's careers. Some really big names (at least for the time) like Robert De Niro and Michael Keaton play smaller parts, but the movie focuses on Grier, Forster, and the always cool Samuel L. Jackson, who by the way turns 60 next month, can you believe that?

Anyway, Jackie Brown is a pretty solid crime movie, if not up to the standards of Tarantino's other work. It does a lot of things well that you expect from him, like clever dialogue that's just fun to listen to and some interesting decisions made with the filming. For some reason, I always seem to like the way he handles important scenes, especially violent ones. You can just sort of tell when something bad will happen, but it's still surprising to see how it actually comes about. Jackson is about as entertaining here as he was in Pulp Fiction, and the cast in general does a good job with the script.

On the other hand, the movie has some of the problems he's known for, too. If there's one thing he needs to learn as a filmmaker, it's how to let a scene go. Maybe he just needs a more assertive editor. Jackie Brown is indisputably too long. This isn't an epic crime drama, it just wants to be. It has all the makings of a tightly woven, thrilling movie, it just has an extra half-hour stapled on. Too many scenes don't really serve the plot, just add character where it isn't needed or go on for too long. Showing the same important moment from three different perspectives is a somewhat interesting creative choice, but there's no reason it couldn't have worked with all three cut together and a lot of time saved. It just sort of feels like an unnecessary flourish. And I know he likes to follow characters around with really long tracking shots, but I'm not sure anyone else does. Tarantino took a long break from directing after this movie, and I've never really heard why, and Kill Bill's running length suggests it wasn't to rethink his style. Whatever the reason, it wasn't because he made a decent if unexceptional genre film.

Goodfellas

As far as "true stories" go, Goodfellas' is a pretty entertaining one. A little too much of it is narrated, although I'm sure that was less of a complete cliché at the time. It's a winding tale of growing up as part of the mafia, and how instantly things can change or go wrong. Henry Hill grew up envying and eventually joining a family, although he was always on the outside because of his non-Italian blood. The biggest obstacle to his success is Tommy, a guy he came up with who's friendly with him but a little too insanely violent for his own good. Tommy's played expertly by Joe Pesci, who won an Oscar for his efforts. I've seen better acting, but his embodiment of the roll is complete and there are tons of legendary scenes showcasing the real-life personality. Ray Liotta and Bob De Niro are also very good with their parts, more level-headed counterparts to Pesci and apparently very true to the people they mimicked.

I recognized several actors from the little I've seen of The Sopranos, including the therapist, played by Lorraine Bracco, who is also very good as Hill's wife, innocent at first but drawn into the world of crime. The movie as as much about Hill's home life as his work, and the development of their relationship along with his advancement in the ranks make an interesting story. This is one of the multiple occasions where many believe Martin Scorsese was robbed of the Best Director Oscar, which he eventually won with my 2006 movie of the year The Departed, and I can definitely see their argument. The construction of each scene is excellent, with some really great extended shots fleshing out the realistic vibe. There's also artistic handling of key moments, like the subtle perspective shift in an important diner scene late in the film I might not have noticed were it not point out to me, and the whole cast does great work for him. I really should have seen it sooner, but it's never too late to watch a good film.