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

i like that ranking but might move gony to last after a recent re-watch. it is a strangely sloppy movie

Departed is just a great cop thriller, though i often think it was a mistake trying to elevate it slightly by including allusions to Whitey Bulger and I wish Nicholson's performance was a bit icier for the whole movie, like it is in the early '70s scenes. but overall it's great. I think it's a shade below WOWS because the latter is just so unrepentantly bonkers and has zero corniness. it's more up Scorsese's alley.

Gangs of NY is really stunning to look at and DDL is amazing (these days his performance is overshadowed by There Will Be Blood a few years later i think) and it's completely entertaining for most of its running time but it is pretty ridiculous and Cameron Diaz is just not very good here. i read somewhere Scorsese initially wanted Sarah Polley for her role but was overpowered by Weinstein's wishes?

a rewatch might make me switch up GONY and shutter island too. i don't remember anything really weak about the latter, it just hasn't stuck with me. but it's also the only scorsese from that list i watched on the small screen and i think that one would have been elevated by a big screen viewing.

AMC airs The Departed all the time. I don't mind it except when Nicholson's on screen. That performance grated on me then and it's worse now.

his performance is fun enough but i think the movie would hit a lot harder if he wasn't in Joker mode. or if another actor with a more low key menacing style was in the role. like if you took Ian McShane's performance in Sexy Beast and put it in The Departed, something like that.

GONY is way too Weinsteined. The story has been so script-doctored as to make the historical background almost incomprehensible. Which, for a film based on a non-fiction book, is pretty stupid. I'd doubt it could ever have been great, though, the sets are way too expensive for the bleak, loosely structured story it begs to be.

I need to watch The Aviator. Love the colors in the trailer.

The Departed spends way too long trying to be weighty, then loses it all in it's pulpy twists. It's one of those where the catholic guilt thing drives the whole thing off course.

aviator is p beautiful imo
the star stunt-casting is a bit distracting but leo + blanchett are great

All I remember about the one time I watch GONY is that I was bored and exhausted and wondering, when will this end?

DDL was the only great think I can recall in it, and he was on a different level from everyone else.

Maybe I'd enjoy it more now. At the time - right after it came out on DVD - historical dramas weren't my thing, I was really watching because it was a Scorsese flick and for so other reason.

Ugh, grammatical mistakes.

plz kids, stfu about all the burnable Scorsese films of the last 19 years, there are multiple threads for that

(and not one word about the docs)

fascist

sorry, easily distracted :)

Ok, so that was pretty amazing. It's definitely imbalanced towards the west, though, especially compared to the Shinoda version, but that's okay. It's great that the versions are different.

yeah, I don't expect a movie to aspire to balance so I wouldn't criticize it on those terms either. as a space to inhabit for 2 and a half hours it succeeds pretty well imo.

It just definitely tilts the novel in one direction, is what I meant.

sorry, I wasn't disagreeing with your premise, I haven't read the novel.

btw you better hurry to see this in the US, it's tanking; grossed a bit over a million on 1580 screens last weekend, and a sole Oscar nomination for cinematography is going to hasten its exit.

:(

the courtyard jail looked really comfy!

Watched twice in theatres and got a hold of a very nice screener rip yesterday. Can't wait to watch it again. I think it's one of Marty's best. Like top 10 even.

@NickPinkerton
Final word on Silence's popular "failure": America is a very Christian nation, except for when that Christianity asks you to do hard stuff.

Basically we just want to go to church in sweatpants.

@NickPinkerton
King of Comedy earned $2.5M on a $20M budget and just think of how forgotten and reviled that movie is today.

It's probably top five for me. But I'm no big Scorsese fan.

same here, his best since the 80s. shameful that this would be so ignored in comparison to Wolf Of Wall Street, which for me reflects all his worst qualities and i've no need to ever see again - and yet was nominated up its arse

Wolf of Wall Street probably top five for me as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the Osc^rs are a nearly pure negative barometer, as is the above poster

his next w/ DeNiro as a 74-yo hitman they will be comfy with

now i know this has basically bombed but as i read pieces like this one https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/02/steve-bannon-donald-trump-war-south-china-sea-no-doubt

In one radio show, used to promote an article incorrectly claiming that a mosque had been built at the North Pole, Bannon focused heavily on China’s oppression of Christian groups.

“The one thing the Chinese fear more than America … they fear Christianity more than anything,” he said.

i do find it interesting how it finally got bankrolled and made in the current climate.

p sure filming silence started long before (2015 maybe?) before trumps rise

but fwiw it was funded by fabrica de cine, a mexican production company. theyve done other xtian themed movies

as a majority in hollywood are democrats, left-leaning, or liberal, what wont surprise me is getting 1984 on the big screen

there was a whole labyrinthian scandal w/ producers when it fell apart last time, ppl went to jail as MS has said in interviews

thats nuts

link?

Eventually I was able to feel I understood enough of the novel to be able to make another attempt at writing it with Jay Cocks. That was in 2006. By that point, the legal matters, chain of title, and ownership issues were very complicated. Some of the people involved in Italy had been incarcerated.... I think the whole thing was finally made for $46.5 million. Actually it was made for 22. The rest of that money went to lawyers and lawsuits.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/martin-scorsese-silence-interview/

my cinema is doing a season of all the marty & bobby films, considering going to all of it

pass on Cape Fear

haha oh yeah

dunno what i think of this, i didn't particularly enjoy it. some of its key drama -- doubt chipping away at rodrigues eventually swallowing him -- wasn't staged v well. no idea if this is intentional but i was struck how inarticulate he was; his japanese inquisitors had pretty good arguments!

the last act of his life in japan was a surprise, i'll give it that.

one of the previews was for the next of those 'god it not dead' movies. this thing didn't find its audience, did it...

sure it did! exactly the size audience an adult examination of faith and spirituality gets in America.

(the trailer was for that Sam Worthington-Octavia Spencer jawdropper, right? what church/greeting-card empire paid for that?)

didn't really see rodrigues struggling with "doubt" per se, but more like a conflict between an idealized or heroic version of his faith vs it's actual implementation. in some respects it's a bildungsroman.

hence the "pretty good" (and sort of unarguable on their own merits) arguments of his inquisitors. (like, i.e., something out of dostoevsky)

i appreciated how cynical they were, "it's just a formality" etc

(the trailer was for that Sam Worthington-Octavia Spencer jawdropper, right? what church/greeting-card empire paid for that?)

no, but that was there too! looks super terrible

my viewing companion was pretty unhappy with it, thought it was near unconscionable that we have a pro-missionary movie in the year of our lord 2017, that the japanese were either faithful bumpkins or autocratic torturers. i didn't really argue but i didn't think it was *that* bad, or not bad in that way.

last preview was for the nolan dunkirk, which, heaven help me, i'm kind of looking out for

yeah and it's remarkable how much of the high drama of the movie (if you are moved by it like i was) revolves around mere "formalities"--the kind of paradoxical difference/continuity between worldly professions of faith and the inner silent (ahem) presence of it. so it's totally cynical and yet indubitably true to say it's just a formality, who really cares? in a lot of ways this made me think of the climactic moments of 1984, in that an authoritarian regime of the kind in this movie is content with the formalities but a radically (perhaps fantastically) totalitarian regime
in Orwell needs to penetrate all the way down into the soul, so to speak, so that any possibility of resistance is not just quashed but impossible. so in some ways Silence dramatizes the emergence of a notion that there is something beyond the formalities, beyond the reach of power, as i quoted from Gauchet above.

also suffice it to say (as i think
i said above) that i think the movie/novel is highly ambiguous about missionary work--in effect the one "heroic" deed he performs is to renounce his mission.

not sure if Scorsese has discussed Black Narcissus in relation to this -- not sure that Silence is truly more "pro-missionary" than that film.

the final narration leaves rodrigues' final disposition a mystery but the final shot doesn't. what's the book like?

The final shot is an invention of Scorsese. In the book, he is begged to perform rites in secret, but he declares that it would be sacrilege to do so as a fallen priest - which is a nice paradox, kinda. Which the book screws up, and it's one part where it feels as if Scorsese doesn't really understand the argument that is put forth by the book.

i saw this and liked it. it's very hypnotic. how many times do we see the ritual of apostasy? and each time there's a slightly different consequence, a different dilemma.

there were several very modern-feeling grimaces or reactions from garfield and i laughed each time, WITH him though, i thought they were great touches.

interesting to have a movie whose hero is almost entirely impotent throughout. (i suppose there is a christian resonance to this)

i didn't notice any cgi, fwiw