Martin Scorsese's SILENCE, adapted from Shûsaku Endô's novel of monks in 17th-century Japan, starring Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, Ken Watanabe, and Adam Driver

lol @ kundun! i liked it!

I've read a couple of Endo books, feels like a very weird fit for Scorsese

It's a very violent story, if that helps.

thats a relief i was afraid it'd be some boring shit about feelings or smth

from one of his recent interviews it sounds like movies about faith are the only things he really wants to make right now

This is the only Endo book I've read, and I disliked it enough to not read any of this guy's other stuff. Maybe a bad translation? It is some heavy-handed shit tho. Lots of novels set in Edo-period Japan that I'd love to see turned into Hollywood movies but this is not one of them :(

― flamboyant goon tie included, Saturday, February 1, 2014 4:30 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i liked this book as a slight-but-intense story about faith and doubt but i am pretty fearful that its gonna be a sledgehammer on screen.

you ppl don't know shit from shinoda;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_%281971_film%29

FADE IN: Rural village, Mount Fuji in the background. Sunrise.

FADE IN SOUND: "Gimme Shelter"

lol

hahaha

VOICE-OVER:

The thing Fr. Rodgrigues loved was stealing. I mean, he actually enjoyed it!

lol eazy

yeah, like that sledgehammer Age of Innocence

(he was gonna do Silence a few years ago w/ DDL and Benicio del Toro... has wanted to make it for 20 years a la Last Temptation)

Ward F, that Shinoda film doesn't exist unless it's "available"

that shinoda film is "available"

there's a legit region 2 release from the masters of cinema label

just askin', i'd like to see it

It's on the Criterion hulu.

yeah, i don't do that

For those that DO, it's there.

After nearly 20 years of false starts, Deadline reports that a Martin Scorsese passion project has finally secured its funding. Silence, based on the Shusaku Endo novel about Jesuit missionaries facing persecution in 17th-century Japan, will begin production in Taiwan on January 30. Fábrica de Cine and SharpSword Films have now committed to financing the movie, which is being targeted for a 2016 release by Paramount Pictures. In a statement, Scorsese said, “I’ve wanted to make Silence for almost two decades, and it is finally a reality.”

The last time it took this long for Scorsese to get a project together was Gangs Of New York, which the director tried to make with The Clash in the late ’70s and finally made it to the screen in 2002 with Daniel Day-Lewis and Scorsese’s then-newfound muse Leonardo DiCaprio. Amazingly, DiCaprio won’t appear in Silence, and will be presumably sitting on a jet ski in Ibiza with a model while filming is under way. After going through a Gangs Of New York-style set of permutations over the years, the cast of Silence now includes Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Ichi The Killer and Thor actor Tadanobu Asano, replacing Ken Watanabe as, we hope, a guy who keeps shushing everyone.

ho damn, Tadanobu Asano

wait Joe Strummer was originally going to be in Gangs of NY

Silence was originally meant to star Savage Garden

Thor actor Tadanobu Asano

i grant that "thor" might be the highest-grossing movie asano has been in but that just sounds so weird. dude is an axiom of asian cinema going on 15 years.

i wish i could be excited by a new scorsese movie these days, but damn his track record over the past 15 years is bad (i though WOWS and SHUTTER ISLAND were passable, the rest not so much)

Shutter Island is so enjoyably terrible, just a clusterfuck from start to finish. Didn't think he had anything as funny and dynamic as WOWS in him, was pleasantly surprised. Nonetheless, the days of me being excited about a new Scorsese movie are long gone.

Am currently finishing the novel and like it. Am going to watch the Shinoda film next and am looking forward to Marty cribbing some Mizoguchi camera moves and Ozu camera placements in his ( you know he's gonna go there!).

can we get mods to replace Ken Watanabe w/ Tadanobu Asano in thread titlr?

Weehee! I'm glad Tsukamoto is in this.

in limited release Dec 23

http://variety.com/2016/film/news/silence-martin-scorsese-1201870272/

http://www.avclub.com/article/things-get-loud-first-trailer-martin-scorseses-sil-246384

garfield and driver look so, so bad

original film is incredible, its a real shame scorsese feels he needs to remake already incredible asian films rather than come up with new ideas. saying that, i'm not sure i want another wolf of wall street. dignified retirement with just maybe documentaries from now on please?

this seems up scorsese's alley but who knows how it'll turn out? garfield reminds me of someone in the trailer but i can't place it.

scorsese's batting 1.000 so far w/his religious pics for me tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq7EDnC629s

I don't think this is a remake per se

It looks very different from the other film.

not comfortable w considering adaptations of same src txt as remakes

also p sure this is a batman begins prequel

not comfortable w considering adaptations of same src txt as remakes

it's one of my pet hates tbh

yeah, just cuz there was an adap of the novel 45 years ago it seems BS to say there can be no others

i read an article by Fr. James Martin (jesuit writer and priest who did heavy consultation on this film) and it made me pretty excited for it.

garfield givin me the steve zahn vibes

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/magazine/the-passion-of-martin-scorsese.html

Endo is Catholic iirc so this seems like an obv fit for Scorsese, whose Catholicism informs so much of his work imo

Seems weird now that Adam Driver is playing second fiddle to Andrew Garfield. I guess it was cast like 3 years ago or whatever.

dang this movie

i think the trailers for this tried to make it look a bit more mel gibson-ish in its religious persecution aspect but it's a very subdued and internal film in a lot of respects, it's quite something. hardly stylized in the usual scorsese sense whatsoever, it's a very "still" film. it moves at an extremely leisurely pace that i found pretty hypnotic but...it's not for everyone, that's for sure.

Driver lost 50 lbs for this, it seems, so playing Joey Ramone is not out of the question i guess.

Scorsese, Japan, interior, still, I'm all over this tbh

Nomar how did u get to see this ?

garfield reminds me of someone in the trailer but i can't place it.

Just saw a trailer for this at the movies and he looks like that guy from Horrible Histories, Mathew Baynton, so much so that I wasn't sure it wasn't him for a while. No doubt not the person he reminds you of though.

got all the feels now

Scorsese responds to a review in the TLS with a defense of cinema aesthetics:

“In a book”, writes Mr Mars-Jones, “reader and writer collaborate to produce images, while a film director hands them down.” I disagree. The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer. They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but, I think, to engage with them on as intimate a level as possible. The viewer also “collaborates” with the filmmaker, or the painter. No two viewings of Raphael’s “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints” will be the same: every new viewing will be different. The same is true of readings of The Divine Comedy or Middlemarch, or viewings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or 2001: A Space Odyssey. We return at different moments in our lives and we see things differently.

I also disagree with Mr Mars-Jones’s contention that any adaptation of a novel into a film can only amount to a “distortion” or an “exaggeration overall”. Of course, in one very important sense, he is correct. Alfred Hitchcock once told François Truffaut that despite his admiration for Crime and Punishment, he would never have dreamed of making a film out of it because in order to do so he would have needed to film every single page (in a sense, this is what Erich von Stroheim tried to do when he adapted Frank Norris’s McTeague as Greed). But sometimes, the idea is to take elements of a novel and craft a separate work from it (as Hitchcock did with Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train). Or, to take the cinematic elements of a novel and create a film from them (I suppose that this was the case with certain adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s novels). And some filmmakers really do attempt to translate a novel into sounds and images, to create an equivalent artistic experience. In general, I would say that most of us respond to what we’ve read and in the process try to create something that has its own life apart from the source novel.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/

can't believe Adam Mars-Jones has spouted some moronic bullshit

he's new to me

he's a middling lit crit over here who is easy enough to ignore except when he writes think-pieces about his incomprehension of how cinema works, apparently

Really loved this, altho the more i turn over the particular issues of faith and freedom that it wrestles with in my mind, the more they seem unique to the often ridiculous and unique vagaries of catholicism, which are not really present in a lot of other religions (the glorification of suffering, the idolatry/emphasis on outward displays of faith, confession, proselitizing, etc). Still a beautiful and p fascinating film when u accept it on its own terms.

Unique i say

I never wrote about this at length, and while I have reservations I was ravished by it too, its concentration and severity most of all.

i probably sound like a catholic or christian apologist (im not a christian) but i think the movie becomes immeasurably richer if you take stock of what a revolutionary idea christianity was and is in certain contexts--what an incredibly disrupting force it was (for good and ill) and its radical revaluation of human life. seen in that context an image of a japanese peasant refusing to trample (refusing to renounce the meaning and value of his/her own life) and facing actual fucking crucifixion in the ocean, being burned alive ("on fire with faith"), or drowned at sea becomes incredibly powerful--to me anyway.

― ryan, Sunday, January 8, 2017 3:34 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gd post

i wish that idea came thru more somehow but idk how itd be done

the '71 film is showing at NYC MoMA today and Sunday (albeit in 16mm, which means that's all they could get)

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/4282?locale=en

Checked it out of the library to rewatch on this fine holiday weekend.

rewatched the original recently and have to say Scorsese did an incredible job, and maybe improved upon it. begs the question, when he can make films like this, why does he have to make things like Wolf Of Wall Street?

so he can follow it up w/ a billion-dollar deNiro-Pacino film

The Shinoda film looks beautiful but is destroyed by one of the worst performances I have ever sat through. Amazingly the guy seems not to have had a role since.

, why does he have to make things like Wolf Of Wall Street?

the grosses of WOWS and Shutter Island paid for the flop of Silence. I don't see the big deal -- dat's Hollywood, Jack.

Oh and Endō co-wrote the screenplay but did not sanction the ending Shinoda chose

I wish the novel were longer.

I was fine with the movie not being longer.

the movie was great though

Yep.

i like that the novel is compact tbh, a virtue that more writers should embrace

I've not seen this, but every time I see the thread title it reminds me of the Paul Mooney review of The Last Samauri.

i’ve been thinking about this movie lately

maybe need to see it again

My boring opinion is it's my favourite he done

It's one of his best

final shot is all-time

I'd totally given up on him after hugo and the wolf of shite street, then he directs two career-best movies in a row.

the Masahira Shinoda version is up there with Marty's too

I tried watching this but bailed out halfway through. Somewhat tedious.

Give it another chance.

I just read the entire thread, it was ten times more enlightening than watching the film.
Scorsese's interest in religious topics is painfully sincere and obvious but I don't think his skill set matches his aims, none of the three religious films he's made work. The final shot in this is warmed-over Tarkovsky.
Stylistically, Scorsese tries to restrain his expressionist tendencies, but what results looks like a particularly slow "serious" European co-production directed by someone like Roland Joffé.

How does the painful sincerity and obviousness show itself in Silence?

I’m sure I said this earlier in the thread, but Silence moved me.

top 5 Scorsese

How does the painful sincerity and obviousness show itself in Silence?

Just that it's obvious that he's working over deeply considered beliefs and trying to communicate them, the film wasn't made just to win a bunch of awards or to kill time.