Don't you think there's a different expectation of a biopic though? We're following this character for 24 years. There's not a huge amount of dramatic incident. I expect some more exploration of a character in the story of his/her life. It's not enough for me to just establish a character if the character IS the story.

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Mixes:
> Back To Deep [Deep Trippy House]
> Terra Nova [Modern Progressive Trance]
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I LOVE Shutter Island. Is it underrated? I think it's damn near perfect psychological thriller. Maybe it gets all wrapped up a little too nicely at the end there, but goddamn if it doesn't have the same chilling/unsettling effect every time I watch it. The setting, the lighting, the music. ..shit gives me the heebie jeebies, nevermind what's going on with DiCaprio.

Last edited by Silky Johnson on Oct-25-2018 at 11:03

Speaking of Scorsese, I watched Silence earlier this year. I'd say it's not for everyone, I certainly enjoyed it, but it's very slow and kind of boring.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J It's got "serious heavyweight film" written all over it. De Niro. Scorsese. Black and white. Biopic. Flawed character. I think people can be very guilty of reading too much into a film because it looks serious and important.

That's really it, but it was Deniro who really "saved" scorsese; he hadn't fulfilled his potential promise yet and by Scorsese's own words "robert saved my life" with Raging Bull. I think a lot of the film's success was the star power of Deniro at the time.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I get the hype around Scorsese. Taxi Driver and Goodfellas are stone cold classics, and he's still making good films these days (I really liked Shutter Island). It's significant that Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay for both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Scorsese made a lot of changes to the latter, and apparently Schrader thought he fucked it up. Taxi Driver is one of the finest character studies in cinematic history. Raging Bull just felt opaque by comparison.

Goodfellas is a strange one though. Scorsese following Raging bull was somewhat floundering as he flirted with Hollywood and even directed MJ's Bad. He basically hadn't produced a bona fide "hit" in 10 years when Goodfellas was released.

Pretty similar for deniro. In the 80's he only had a couple of notable films like the Mission but the rest were commercial vehicles some of which were panned by critics and died at the box office.

I think I've told this one before but Paul Sorvino who played Pauly in Goodfellas was having career and money issues and took goodfellas for quick cash. Scorsese although famous, was known to be in trouble somewhat career wise so that wasn't a selling point for Sorvino.

He read the script and said this is the worst spaghetti mob drama he's ever read but needed to money so badly he took the check and did the work. Even when filming it, he said it still felt like the cringeworthy mob schlock, to the point, when the film was released, he skipped the premier for fear of embarrassment.

It was only a few days later when people started started coming up to him, raving about the film that he went to see it and found it was great.

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Originally posted by DJ RANN Pretty similar for deniro. In the 80's he only had a couple of notable films like the Mission but the rest were commercial vehicles some of which were panned by critics and died at the box office.

It might not have been his best decade for box office, but he appeared in some amazing films in the '80s. Once Upon A Time In America? Angel Heart? The Untouchables? Brazil? Compared to the almost non-stop shite he's appeared in for the last 20 years and counting, the '80s were the golden era for De Niro.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J It might not have been his best decade for box office, but he appeared in some amazing films in the '80s. Once Upon A Time In America? Angel Heart? The Untouchables? Brazil? Compared to the almost non-stop shite he's appeared in for the last 20 years and counting, the '80s were the golden era for De Niro.

Absolutely, but he was quite criticized for "going commercial" (which is laughable given todays's regular conveyor belt of crap) and some of the comedies he starred in were abysmal.

Once Upon a time died at the box office - with time it became widely recognized as one of the greatest crime dramas ever made in hindsight but they lost something like $50m all said and done (after marketing expenses) which in the 80's money was a bomb of epic proportions. Brasil lost something like $20m+. Angel Heart lost $10m. He was getting critical acclaim for some of the films but they weren't performing at all at the box office.

In fact in the whole of the 80's he had only two films, Untouchables and Midnight run that made any money - literally all the rest were complete box office bombs. His 80's box office was something like $150m in the red. Sure he made some great films, the mission is a fucking masterpiece, but studios need to make money and he wasn't midas anymore and the industry knew it.

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Last edited by DJ RANN on Nov-01-2019 at 23:53

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Don't you think there's a different expectation of a biopic though? We're following this character for 24 years. There's not a huge amount of dramatic incident. I expect some more exploration of a character in the story of his/her life. It's not enough for me to just establish a character if the character IS the story.

Yeah, probably. I know it wasn't cliche by 1980, but I'm pretty wary of biopics that try to provide a back story for the person we've come to know as a public figure. It's easy for that full biographical arc to result in bloated biopic syndrome, cluttering it up and weighing it down in attempt to do too much. I actually like biopics that attempt to represent its subject by focusing on a specific cross section of that person's life, like the Sorkin Steve Jobs one, which was admittedly easier to do because the audience is already familiar with that personality.

But not every biopic has to choose between an opening scene with the subject-as-child running through a cornfield and ambitiously fantasizing about the future that awaits them, or just bypassing their backstory entirely. The Aviator, incidentally another Scorsese movie, tries to provide some explanation for Howard Hughes' obsessive-compulsive phobia by bookending the film with a tasteful, almost abstract flashback of the way he was raised:

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He traded sands for skins, skins for gold, gold for life. In the end, he traded life for sand. Afari, Tales

I think you're confusing back story or origin story with what I'm really asking for, which is insight or exploration of a character. I didn't feel the cinematic Jake La Motta had enough psychological complexity to warrant the attention of a two hour film. He's violent and jealous. That's established early on and just repeated endlessly. There are some vague hints about his competitive nature, but I didn't even see any exploration of his greed, for example. Halfway through the film he suddenly has a problem keeping his weight down. His later sloth suggests an avaricious character, but apart from his brother twice telling him to stop eating, nothing about it is explored. And I didn't see any trace of his wisecracking comedian trait until he suddenly was a wisecracking comedian. He attends some kind of comedy club earlier in the film but doesn't show a trace of interest or mirth towards the acts.

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Originally posted by wotyzoid Speaking of Scorsese, I watched Silence earlier this year. I'd say it's not for everyone, I certainly enjoyed it, but it's very slow and kind of boring.

yeah martins work generally gets a good amount of love from people, i was surprised this one sort of flew under the radar.

That he ultimately amounts to little more than a low-rent local comedian, yeah, that doesn't dwell comfortably with me either. I get the point that's involved: that he is the joke, and is just a washed up parody of himself, but none of this is bridged in any meaningful way or with any sense of precedence.

He's not an especially complex character (though that's not to say he's therefore simple), but I just never felt it was a character that was thinly stretched over the course of two hours. In many ways, it's all very familiar Scorcese territory: watching sharply drawn characters do as they do and live as they live as they go through a rise and fall narrative.

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He traded sands for skins, skins for gold, gold for life. In the end, he traded life for sand. Afari, Tales

Don't get me wrong, it's fine as a film. Well made, well acted, all of that. But this is a film frequently cited as one of the very best ever made. With that kind of hyperbole, I expect something absolutely outstanding. Either groundbreaking for its age or highly original or just undeniably iconic.

Film buffs I know will quote Goodfellas or Taxi Driver all day long. Those films have scenes and images that are burned into our collective consciousness. The only iconic line of dialogue in Raging Bull is quoted from another, older film. There isn't a single scene that I recognised while watching it from being aped, referenced or replayed elsewhere. There isn't a single scene it that stood out as particularly memorable. And I think it's notable that I've never actually come across anyone in real life who's ever quoted or referenced Raging Bull or cited it as a personal favourite. It's a good film, of course. But I wouldn't put it within a mile of the best films ever mile. Nowhere near.

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> Terra Nova [Modern Progressive Trance]
> Rough & Ready [Modern Trance]
>A Different Energy [Good Modern Trance]
> The Edale Mix [Panoramic Beats]