October 1: Iron Man 2Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
I didn't think it was bad, necessarily, but in this movie much more than the first you could really see all the pieces being moved into place for the 2011-2 Marvel Universe Cinema Explosion. I'm sure for some superhero fans that really gets them pumped, but now I'm feeling a bit wary of Thor and Captain America. If the path to The Avengers doesn't unwind organically, I'm afraid that the whole enterprise is going to collapse under its own weight.
October 2: A Home at the End of the World
Screened: At home, DVR from HBO
October 4: Date Night
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
October 6: Who's That Knocking on My Door
Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch
So, sometime around the end of September/beginning of October, forces conspired to prompt me to dive headfirst into Martin Scorsese's filmography. I've seen quite a few of his movies, having taken an undergraduate course that studied his work alongside that of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, but there are still quite a few I haven't yet seen, and several I haven't watched since that class. The press around the beginning of Boardwalk Empire frequently invoked different ideas of how Scorsese's artistic vision framed the show, and the kinds of continuing criticism one reads when one frequents the websites of television critics paint an interesting portrait of what people view as markers of the Scorsese-esque. After letting it rattle around in my head for a few days, I decided to give in to my self-imposed movie marathon impulses and institute Scorsesefest 2010, watching the features in chronological order.
Introductory movie, and a first-time viewing for me. There's something sort of charming about the fact that even the early work of acclaimed directors can feel so student-y - as an American Studies person with a few film studies courses under my belt, I couldn't help but be amused by the conversations he has his characters engage in regarding The Searchers. It was interesting to watch this film in relatively close proximity to Mean Streets - you can see where a lot of the ideas about male camaraderie, Catholic imagery, and the relationships between young men and women got more refined as Scorsese got more experience as a filmmaker.
October 6: Daughters of the Dust
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
October 8: Boxcar Bertha
Screened: At home, DVR from TCM
Another one that was new to me. I'm left mostly fascinated by how unbelievably fake the blood looks in movies from the sixties and seventies. It looks like paint, the kind of bright primary red that kids use. How alarming would it be if something the color of a stop sign came out of your body?
October 9: Mean Streets
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
I love, love, love the first twenty minutes of this movie. The opening credits, the character introductions, the soundtrack choices. (Listening to "Tell Me" about five times in a row was a crucial step on the way to instituting the one-woman film festival.) Perfection. While the film then starts to drag a bit for me, I think on this viewing I was better able to appreciate the way that it captures a sort of age of liminality when you're trying to be an adult even though you don't really know how to do so.
October 9: The Social Network
Screened: In the theater
The movie managed to address the ongoing discussion around Facebook and how it has or hasn't altered the meaning of friendship to its relevant generation without directly engaging those debates that always seem to involve a lot of hand-wringing over the fate of the Millenials. Take away the millions upon millions of dollars, and you've still got a painfully honest picture of the way people in their late teens and early twenties come together, fall apart and learn (or avoid learning) how to become adults. Great performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield; Eduardo Saverin should send Garfield a fruit basket or a bucket full of cash or something - Garfield's wounded-Bambi eyes generate more sympathy than favorable press or positive legal outcomes ever could.
October 15: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch
Of all the Scorsese works I didn't see for class, I think this was the one that I was most interested to see for the first time. When you're watching Scorsese alongside Woody Allen and Spike Lee, it quickly becomes evident that you're dealing with a lesser-evil situation as far as depictions of women go - when I get to The Departed, I can talk about how excited I was when I first saw it that Vera Farmiga's character had a real job - so the female protagonist is really intriguing. (Boxcar Bertha doesn't really have much of a personality, unfortunately.) While I liked Ellen Burstyn's performance a lot, it's a very seventies movie, in a dated way rather than an iconic one. Not that I didn't like it, just that I don't know that I'll ever feel a burning desire to watch it again.
October 15: Taxi Driver
Screened: At home, from personal collection
The Scorsese filmography is one where, generally speaking, men recur and women do not. Which is to say, from Harvey Keitel through Leonardo Dicaprio, you've got a number of actors who show up in more than one Scorsese film, and few actresses for whom the same is true. Watching Taxi Driver this time around, I couldn't help but wonder what it might've been like if Scorsese had worked with Jodie Foster as an adult. She has such a dynamic presence, in that sardonic-seventies-tween sort of way that doesn't seem to exist among child actors nowadays, that it's intriguing to speculate on how she might work as a Scorsesian adult.
October 16: New York, New York
Screened: At home, from personal collection
- I'm trying to think of what a contemporary analogue would be to Scorsese taking De Niro and making New York, New York as the film following Taxi Driver, but I'm fairly stumped. Young directors on their way up the ladder of industry success generally don't do things like this these days. It's especially jarring to watch the films in order, as both feature pans from De Niro's feet up to his head - Taxi Driver towards its end, when Travis is first revealed in shaved-head, ready-for-crazy-action mode, and New York, New York at its beginning, showing Jimmy for the first time. It's a bit of a downer, and it'll never have the same reputation as the films of the great book musicals, but I love New York, New York, flaws and all.
- I love the many layers of meta-commentary in the "Happy Endings" sequence. It is so very perfectly fifties, and utilizes Liza Minnelli and all her attendant history (baggage?) so well.
- "The World Goes 'Round" seems like it could be a perfect song for Glee. It has just the right tone for a bittersweet, episode-ending montage.
October 17: The Last Waltz
Screened: At home, from personal collection
I'd been fighting it since the "Tell Me" scene in Mean Streets, but this was officially the point in this endeavor when I realized that the impulse to accumulate soundtracks was going to become a problem.
October 21: Raging Bull
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
In terms of Scorsese's period pieces and the way he incorporates aesthetic elements of contemporaneous films, it was really interesting to watch Raging Bull so closely after New York, New York. He doesn't broadcast his influences as explicitly as, say, Tarantino or Todd Haynes, but you can feel a love of those unique things that mark each era as distinct from one another. This was the movie where I most appreciated the opportunity to watch it outside of the class setting and just take time to absorb the beauty of the film.
October 22: Please Give
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
October 30: Winter's Bone
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix
