
fredrikgunerius
Joined Nov 2003
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Martin Scorsese is a filmmaker who always strives to get under the skin of the milieus and characters he portrays, often set in New York City. What's been so remarkable about Scorsese's NYC portrayals is how his combined disillusionment with and passion for the city always shine through. There is never a sentimental ending in a Scorsese film, and when it comes to the city and its characters, he has an unwavering desire to understand them - on a fundamental level.
His latest film, Bringing Out the Dead, embodies these very qualities. This is an unvarnished portrait of a rarely depicted milieu, and it certainly is psychologically complex at times. Still, Scorsese doesn't quite achieve enough over the course of these two hours. As with Taxi Driver, he attempts to creep under the skin of his protagonist. The theme is once again how the brutality of the big city eats him up from within, and how he must find his own, private ways of coping with it. Surreal sequences and subtle hints of film noir are used to create atmosphere and reinforce the film's themes. But our empathy for Frank Pierce remains limited - partly because we struggle to understand him (something Scorsese seems to have difficulty with, too), but perhaps most of all because the film focuses more on the depiction of the milieu and, ultimately, the mystery of the story. As a result, the lead character, played by Nicolas Cage, loses some of its dramatic weight, and the film's conclusion in this area doesn't quite align with how central it is to the overall narrative.
No one expects Scorsese to make conventional films, and that's a good thing. But although he always has interesting stylistic, technical, and formal aspects on offer, he doesn't always manage to tie it all together. Bringing Out the Dead is one such film: It contains a lot, but its narrative structure isn't cohesive enough to merge its many ideas into a compelling whole.
Review originally written in 2000.
His latest film, Bringing Out the Dead, embodies these very qualities. This is an unvarnished portrait of a rarely depicted milieu, and it certainly is psychologically complex at times. Still, Scorsese doesn't quite achieve enough over the course of these two hours. As with Taxi Driver, he attempts to creep under the skin of his protagonist. The theme is once again how the brutality of the big city eats him up from within, and how he must find his own, private ways of coping with it. Surreal sequences and subtle hints of film noir are used to create atmosphere and reinforce the film's themes. But our empathy for Frank Pierce remains limited - partly because we struggle to understand him (something Scorsese seems to have difficulty with, too), but perhaps most of all because the film focuses more on the depiction of the milieu and, ultimately, the mystery of the story. As a result, the lead character, played by Nicolas Cage, loses some of its dramatic weight, and the film's conclusion in this area doesn't quite align with how central it is to the overall narrative.
No one expects Scorsese to make conventional films, and that's a good thing. But although he always has interesting stylistic, technical, and formal aspects on offer, he doesn't always manage to tie it all together. Bringing Out the Dead is one such film: It contains a lot, but its narrative structure isn't cohesive enough to merge its many ideas into a compelling whole.
Review originally written in 2000.
Rand Ravich's The Astronaut's Wife is a film with a vast gap between its strongest and weakest aspects. It's a visually striking, occasionally intelligent thriller, brimming with mystery - that is, until the denouement. Johnny Depp plays the astronaut who returns to Earth after a mysterious near-miss in space. Charlize Theron is the wife who must uncover the consequences of it all. Depp is charismatically enigmatic at first, but ultimately struggles to make sense of his woefully underwritten character. Theron does the devoted wife well, but is left defenseless against a script that squanders both its own potential and the efforts by the cast. Much of the blame lies with the relatively inexperienced director, Rand Ravich, who, despite his smooth storytelling and eye for composition, fails to make his film transcend the story's banal and unremarkable mystery.
Danish cinema experienced a new wave of success in the 1990s, with Kim Bodnia emerging as one of the most prominent figures of this wave. It began with Ole Bornedal's inventive Nattevagten in 1994 and continued with the dark violence fests Pusher (1996) and Bleeder (1998). In Lasse Spang Olsen's action-filled dramedy I Kina spiser de hunde, we find Bodnia in a fun caricature of these roles as the stand-offish and seemingly invincible hobby gangster Harald. A somewhat subdued Dejan Cukic plays Harald's mildly neurotic brother, who finds himself in a series of bizarre situations that require the help of Harald and his disciples to get him out of. Anders Thomas Jensen's witty screenplay is clearly inspired by Tarantino and works well under Olsen's free-flowing direction and gritty cinematography. Bodnia is rock-solid without bringing too much extravaganza, and along with his companions, he dances his way through increasingly absurd criminal situations. The characters' naive self-confidence is both amusing and well-defined. This is a film that plays more with character types and particular milieus than it does with any weighty social critique. Olsen delivers the narrative well, crafting simple entertainment wrapped in a well-executed and creative style. A fine example of how relatively straightforward techniques can still become solid cinema - with a sense of artistic integrity retained.