Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 20, 2023 1:11:42 GMT -5
Killers of the Flower Moon I personally had never heard of the Osage murders until I heard that there was a book about the topic, and the only reason I learned of that was because it was announced a few years ago that the adaptation was to be Martin Scorsese's next film after The Irishman, one of my favorite films of that year. After reading the story I became fascinated not at the idea that there would be a movie but how someone would go about crafting it. There were admissions made by both Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio that there were extensive rewrites to shift the focus elsewhere so it wouldn't feel so procedural or impersonal. Compared to the book are definitely those focal shifts but from a cinematic or dramatic standpoint those shifts might be for the best. There's so much to absorb in the story, from the history of the Osage in Oklahoma to where all the main players eventually ended up in life, that it would be hard for someone even of Scorsese's talent to keep a focus on one or two main threads. The end result however is a passionate, angering and also interestingly personal movie for Martin Scorsese, a movie that once again demonstrates why he's still a filmmaker to keep an eye on even as an octogenarian. In case you didn't read the book, Ernest Burkhart (Leo) returns from WWI and starts working for his uncle William Hale (Bobby D) on the Osage reservation in Oklahoma. At this same time, Osage men and women are winding up shot, stabbed, poisoned or passing under various mysterious circumstances. Right out the gate it's shown that Hale and Burkhart are orchestrating these murders despite the fact that Burkhart marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone who gives a great and subtle performance), a member of an Osage family, a family who almost all fall victim to Hale's murderous rampage over the course of the film. There's no 'whodunit' aspect to the story, there's no mystery involved other than 'will they get caught?' Instead the focus is on Burkhart's relationship with Mollie and Hale's manipulation and command over the town. It's not about getting to a answers to a mystery, it's about getting resolution and justice for people who historically received very little of it. I don't really get myself pumped up for movies terribly often but it's hard not to do so for Scorsese movies. The guy is in his early eighties and is still making films that push his own boundaries as well as the boundaries of popular cinema. It's not a novel idea to say that Scorsese is frequently making films unlike any that he has made before and Killers of the Flower Moon can sit nicely on that list. It's also exciting to finally see the two primary actors of his career, DeNiro and DiCaprio, share the screen in one of his films. It was weird enough watching The Irishman knowing that this was the first re-teaming of Scorsese and DeNiro in over two decades, likewise it's a little surreal watching DiCaprio, the other actor most synonymous with Scorsese movies, in his first Scorsese film since Wolf of Wall Street ten years ago. Here we have a drama/murder story that's often an incredibly slow burn. It doesn't have the frenetic energy of Wolf of Wall Street nor does it have the enjoyable familiarity of The Irishman. Killers of the Flower Moon moves at a slow pace that almost forces you to absorb the characters, the environment and the human toll that's levied throughout the film. I can't think of any film Scorsese has made that even comes close to what he's trying to do here and like I said he does inject his own personal sympathies into the film (the very last scene will stand out for you). If I were to give the movie any criticism it would be that it did indeed feel overlong at points which should seem obvious given its runtime but the film's setup and delivery are done as masterfully as you might expect. Killers of the Flower Moon is another worthy entry into Scorsese's canon, one that's filled with a rich and diverse collection of stories and characters. Like I said, it doesn't have the energy or familiarity you might come to expect from a Scorsese movie but it's a movie that stands on its own and I think over time will become a movie that' receives increasing appreciation. A- so says Doomsday
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Oct 21, 2023 15:24:52 GMT -5
Killers of the Flower Moon(10/20/2023)Warning: Review contains some spoilers Early on in Martin Scorsese’s very first movie, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door, there’s a scene where the film’s protagonist played by a very young Harvey Keitel awkwardly talks to a girl he met at a subway station and quickly brings up the John Ford movie The Searchers. Eventually the girl nervously admits that she’s scene it and thought it was good but notes that she doen’t normally admit to liking westerns, to which the Keitel character says “everyone should like westerns, it would solve everyone’s problems if they liked westerns.” Now, this exchange is meant to highlight the protagonists immaturity more than it’s meant to impart some sort of real wisdom of the genre, but the character is also plainly a Scorsese self-insert for Scorsese and it maybe says something that the twenty five year old Scorsese knew a lot about the downsides of using John Wayne movies as flirtatious icebreakers. Indeed, if you watch any interview Scorsese gives about his early life he’s inevitably talk at great length about how his earliest exposure to film came from going to see westerns of the John Wayne variety at various matinee theaters in the 40s and 50s. You can also hear Scorsese talking at great analytical about John Ford’s evolution as a western filmmaker in his documentary “A Personal Journey Through American Cinema.” However, for all the reverence Scorsese has for westerns, pretty much his entire career he never came close to making one himself. Hell, by my count the only movies he’s made that are even set in the western half of the United States are Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Casino, parts of The Aviator, and I guess The Last Waltz if you want to count that. But that (sort of) finally changes this year with his new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which still isn’t exactly a traditional western but is at its heart about a very sad conflict between people who are nominally cowboys and people who get called “Indians.”
The film, based on a work of popular nonfiction by David Grann, looks at a series of murders that occurred on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma during the 1920s. This reservation is in a unique position as oil was found there and unlike in past instances where valuable resources were found on Indian land they were not formally driven off and managed to gain great wealth from this oil money. That would seem to be the makings of a happy story of progress but that’s far from what happened as the Osage were still immensely wounded from generations of trauma and were still having to deal with all sorts of exploitative practices and worst of all were seeing a wave of mysterious deaths that seem suspicious. We begin our look at this situation with the arrival of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young World War I veteran who’s come to Oklahoma because his wealthy rancher uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) is something of a local leader among the whites in the area and a professed friend of the Osage. Quickly Burkhart gets a job as a chauffeur and ends up driving an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and the two end up falling for each other. Hale encourages Burkhart to marry her and he eventually does, but it quickly becomes apparent that Hale’s motivations for encouraging this are rather sinister.
The release of a high profile Martin Scorsese comes with some pretty big expectations. The man’s last four movies were major works and/or awards contenders and this newest film showed all signs of being a major epic. And maybe those expectations worked against it because I must say at a certain point while watching it I started to think something wasn’t quite working about it and I must say that when all was said and done I was a bit disappointed with it. Disappointment doesn’t mean it’s bad. Martin Scorsese does not make bad movies and this is no exception, but on a first viewing this one didn’t really connect and while I do want to get into some of its stronger elements here I feel a bit more inclined to focus in on where it didn’t work for me where so much of it seems promising on paper so I hope this doesn’t feel too much like an autopsy of something that isn’t really dead.
Looking for another Scorsese movie to compare this to, the one I landed on was of all things his 2001 film Gangs of New York. That’s pretty widely considered to be a rather flawed effort, albeit one that’s hard not to respect for its ambition and to some extent that also kind of feels like where I’m kind of going to land on this one. That was a movie that felt like it started with an interest in its historical era and setting moreso than its characters and kind of worked itself out from there. That movie certainly managed to land on a great villain who the audience was going to love to hate, in that case the fictional composite Bill the Butcher played by Daniel Day-Lewis, a violent Know Nothing who seemingly represents everything wrong with America. We have something of an equivalent to that here with Robert De Niro’s William King Hale, who is obviously less of a street brawler than Bill the Butcher but who is no less ambitious in trying to set up a sort of exclusionary empire in the place he has power. One could almost imagine someone writing an essay comparing the two as representative of two forms of American racism: the thug who proudly spouts intolerant invective to rally other thugs versus the two-faced schemer who abuses institutions to oppress and take advantage of the marginalized. But I think where both movies kind of go wrong is that they can’t quite land on the optimal point of view through which to approach the historical settings they want to explore.
Reports indicate that earlier drafts of the screenplay were much different and centered on an FBI agent named Tom White played in the final film by Jesse Plemons and functioned essentially as a detective story in which this character uncovers what was afoot in Osage County through his investigation. This basic story is still there in the final film but only in the third act when the Tom White character shows up in the third act and starts investigating the events that we’ve been watching play out up to that point. I could imagine this version of the film having been more streamlined and exciting but I can also kind of see why that framing was discarded: in essence such a film would suffer from the Mississippi Burning problem of framing a civil rights struggle as something “fixed” by the (too late) arrival of good white people employed by J. Edgar Hoover, which isn’t something that really gets to the heart of the situation. Another angle I could have imagined them taking would be to focus solely on the other side of the law and made the Robert De Niro’s William King Hale the protagonist and turned the whole thing into a sort of “confessions of a sociopath” narrative in the vein of The Wolf of Wall Street or The Irishman where he explains how he orchestrated his whole murderous racket in a lot more detail. Or they could have gone to the other extreme on the sympathy spectrum and squared in on the Lily Gladstone and it could have been a sort of paranoid thriller along the lines of Hitchcock’s Suspicion in which a woman slowly starts to realize her husband isn’t really what he says and may be plotting against her.
Instead the protagonist they landed on was one who sits at something of a midpoint between all these forces: Ernest Burkhart as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, the husband of Mollie, the nephew of Hale, and also the key witness found by Tom White. I definitely see a certain logic in zeroing in on Burkhart because he’s in some ways the most morally gray out of all these people: someone who does help commit hate crimes against the Osage but also does legitimately see to have some love and affection for his wife even has the plots against her and who does ultimately do the right thing at the very last minute. One can imagine that being spun into a rather rich and complex character study, but the problem with that is that Ernest Burkhart’s crimes are a bit too vile to make him a morally ambiguous and he also comes off as being a bit too… stupid, to really be complex. Burkhart is depicted here as a rather passive character, one who in the context of William King Hale’s criminal enterprise is mostly just a henchman taking orders and who seems to be motivated not by greed or ambition or even overt hatred but mostly just because he’s an easily influenced simpleton who does whatever his uncle tells him to out of a loyalty that itself doesn’t seem to be fully explored. Despite following this guy through a very lengthy running time I still never quite felt like I understood him in any greater way besides seeing him as this infuriating dolt who doesn’t think ahead and who’s double life as both the protector and tormentor of his own family still feels rather inexplicable.
Part of the problem with all this is that I think Leonardo DiCaprio is rather miscast in the Burkhart role. Reports indicate that back in that earlier version of the film in which the FBI agent Tom White was the protagonist the plan was to have DiCaprio in that role instead of Burkhart but he was shifted into that part when the movie became centered on him instead of White. This may have been a mistake. What’s more the person they eventually got to play White, Jesse Plemons, would have kind of been ideal to play Burkhart. Plemons almost specializes in playing dim people who hid darkness behind a boyish good-ol-boy face. He played a similarly sociopathic simpleton guided by a criminal family member in the later seasons of “Breaking Bad,” another working class married schemer in the second season of “Fargo,” and another boyfriend who turns out to be malicious in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. What’s more Plemons would have been a lot more age appropriate for the role. DiCaprio is pushing fifty and just got done playing an over-the-hill actor who represents an older generation on the way out in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and does not seem to be a very logical choice to play someone who is a young man freshly back from war when the movie begins and who only ages eight years by the time the film ends
That DiCaprio is too old for this part is a particularly big problem here because youth seems to be a big part of a lot of this character’s behavior. For one it seems to be the main reason why he’s so easily manipulated by his uncle throughout and why he engages in some rather impulsive crimes early on and why he gets pushed around so easily by police and lawyers late in the film. Played by a guy in his late forties he comes off as someone who should know better. But where this issue really becomes a huge liability is early on in the film when he first starts courting his soon to be wife Mollie, a relationship that did not make much sense to me at all on screen and kind of only makes sense if these people are young naïve and infatuated rather than adults who know what they’re actually getting into with such a commitment. Burkhart is a dumb and impulsive person with minimal financial prospects and isn’t terribly romantic in his advances. Aside from looking like Leonardo DiCaprio it’s not that clear why Mollie goes for him, and I must say Lily Gladstone’s performance doesn’t really help here either; she’s closer to her character’s age than DiCaprio is but she has an air of stoic maturity throughout the film that kind of belies the naiveté required for her to marry and then trust this man with the safety of herself and her family.
On the positive side there are other aspects of Gladstone’s work here that works quite a bit better. Her rather visceral depiction of the illness the character goes through late in the movie is quite strong and some of the later scenes of her marriage to Burkhart work a lot better. Robert DeNiro is also incredible as the film’s villain, delivering what may well be his final great performance, and for as much shit as I’ve talked about DiCaprio’s suitability for this role I do get why he sought it out and there are some scenes here he does pull off pretty well. Scorsese also doesn’t skimp on the visuals in the movie and does a lot with what appears to be a pretty substantial budget. When the film becomes violent people are killed in ways that are shockingly matter of fact and brutal, and really hit you when you watch it and Scorsese also uses some neat tricks throughout like it’s use of silent film techniques at the beginning and also manages to find an amazing solution to the “true story movie ending with a parade of title cards” problem that I so often complain about. And while I’m not going to tell you that I never felt the movie’s three and a half hour running time I did still admire the choice that was made to really keep you stuck in the world of this movie for the long term and go through this story from the beginning until the bitter end.
I guess that brings us back to the question of what attracted Martin Scorsese to this material in the first place. At my screening Scorsese gave one of those “thanks for supporting theaters” videos in which he says this is a highly personal project for him that he’s been wanting to make for a long time. That seems unlikely as I have my doubts that Scorsese knew about this particular story prior to the publication of David Grann’s book, which was only six years ago. My best guess is that what he meant by that was simply that it’s been a long time personal goal for him to find a way to make a western of any kind and that it was through this more grounded and recent historical story that he finally found the right story to do it with. The one he found was one that was in many ways the opposite of the manifest destiny fantasies that those westerns from his youth tended to indulge in, one where the cowboys well and well and truly the bad guys but not in a corny ways that just seeks to be a genre subversion but in a ways that really tries to examine currents in American history. Perhaps he can be forgiven for biting off just a little more than he could chew when taking something like this on but… well, he was given an incredibly generous canvas to work with in terms of resources and runtime so I don’t think it’s unfair to hold him to a pretty high standard when analyzing the results and on this first viewing I’m not sure he really pulled it off. But even a flawed work by Martin Scorsese that has this kind of ambition is going to be more worth seeing than your average movie, even your average good movie. That’s true about the aforementioned Gangs of New York and it’s even more true about Killers of the Flower Moon. **** out of Five
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Oct 21, 2023 20:49:30 GMT -5
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Post by Neverending on Oct 21, 2023 21:35:12 GMT -5
I agree but also disagree with Dracula. I agree that the focus on Leo’s character was misguided. But I disagree that the movie needed to switch genres. The movie is perfectly fine the way it was made, but the story certainly needed to be told from Lily Gladstone’s point of view. At the end of the day, it’s her story. It’s her money they wanted. It’s her family they killed. It’s her who was betrayed by a spouse. Spending 3.5 hours on Leo’s doodlehead character was asking for too much. And with that, I’ll concede to SnoBorderZero. You are right, sir. Oppenheimer is better. Unless Ridley Scott pulls out a miracle with Napoleon, Chris Nolan is finally getting his Oscar. Poor Doomsday. He might catch a bad case of diabetuhs and not make it to Oscar night. |
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Post by Neverending on Oct 21, 2023 22:06:24 GMT -5
I just finished reading about these murders on Wikipedia. So the guy that De Niro played lived till the 1960’s and both his nephews lived till the 1980’s. That’s crazy. They all did their prison time, but it wasn’t a lot. The guy that DiCaprio played even got a pardon! Then they just lived their lives till the 1960’s and 80’s. The children, by the way, inherited all that oil money that a bunch of people got killed over. I guess the DiCaprio really was that stupid. If he hadn’t tried to poison his wife, he would have made it out like a bandit. He got pardoned cause he didn’t actually do anything. All he did was act as a messenger for his uncle. His only actual crime was, you know, trying to kill his wife. Which he did do time for. Moral of the story, don’t try to kill your wife.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Oct 21, 2023 22:26:34 GMT -5
I share a lot of the sentiment here. There's a lot of brilliant stuff throughout, from the actors to the imagery to the score. The pace is slow but in the right way, the film really grinds you down with a crushing weight. That ending is also fantastic. But the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts and I think that really comes down to a lack of perspective. It "not being Scorsese's story to tell" does feel like a problem, not because it's offensive, but because he doesn't have the same handle on the material that he does with his other epics, be they crime dramas or spiritual examinations. I keep coming back to Hale, in part because De Niro is phenomenal, and in part because he's the only character the movie seens to fully understand.
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Post by Neverending on Oct 21, 2023 23:02:26 GMT -5
It "not being Scorsese's story to tell" does feel like a problem. This isn’t like when Scorsese gave Schindler’s List to Steven Spielberg. No one else would have gotten this movie made. Scorsese directing is fine. The issue was the script. They needed someone young (with contemporary social conscious) to pen a final draft. |
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 22, 2023 8:55:55 GMT -5
Chris Nolan is finally getting his Oscar. Poor Doomsday . He might catch a bad case of diabetuhs and not make it to Oscar night.  |
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donny
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Post by donny on Oct 22, 2023 11:02:45 GMT -5
Still marinating on what on I saw, enjoyed it, but may be a case of admiring something more than loving it.
For the 3.5 hour runtime, it moves pretty seamless, but there are parts where it just seems to drag. The film felt very matter of fact about what it was portraying, and it’s all building to this sort of inevitable ending, but I just didn’t feel the vigor in telling said story. It’s certainly a somber one, and rightly so, but maybe it’s like some of said on here, the focus on Leo was maybe a bit of a miscalculation. He was solid, but I do feel Gladstone could have been given more.
Some real funny dialogue and well placed humor though. “Fuck a duck”
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 22, 2023 18:26:30 GMT -5
Very, very good movie, but yeah...just a bit short of full-on greatness. The runtime is undeniably a factor there. Whereas The Irishman seemed to feel like it flew by, this movie, for as strong as it was, definitely felt like 3 1/2 hours. But beyond that, I do agree with the observation that framing the story more through the character of Molly (Lily Gladstone) would have maybe given this story more of a raw power/emotional punch. As it stands, the movie still definitely communicates the weight of the atrocities presented, but making Leo the main character...really does kind of give the film a more matter-of-fact/almost, dare I say, detached quality in terms of the character-centric throughline of it all, whereas framing it through Molly's eyes could've given it its full emotional weight and power. Still, though, it's impeccably-directed by Scorsese and the film still draws you in and is very strong overall...just not quite reaching the heights Scorsese clearly wants it to.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 22, 2023 18:55:57 GMT -5
I’m sure it’ll be on my top 10 this year but I’m not quite sure where it’ll sit, I have to watch Exp4ndables first.
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Post by frankyt on Oct 22, 2023 20:23:44 GMT -5
Def over long. But I liked it overall just have no real desire to sit through it again.
Due to Taylor swift noise bleed into the theater there were some funny moments, Molly's mother's death had shake it off playing over it, then the final time bill smith spoke to Ernest that had antihero playing - some chaotic brilliance.
But agreed with the sentiment that I'm not sure the decision to base it off Ernest might have worked better for the book but it did feel a little off on film.
Still marinating on my thoughts though.
I'd prob give it a 6.5/10
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Post by Neverending on Oct 22, 2023 20:31:21 GMT -5
Due to Taylor swift noise bleed into the theater You too, eh. |
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Post by Dracula on Oct 22, 2023 20:49:58 GMT -5
Then the final time bill smith spoke to Ernest that had antihero playing - some chaotic brilliance. Ernest is the problem, it's him. |
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 22, 2023 22:54:51 GMT -5
Same thing happened in my theater, but I only got the booms of the base; no lyrics.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 22, 2023 22:58:04 GMT -5
I got the same too.
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 22, 2023 23:06:10 GMT -5
Also...here's a tip, AMC: if you're showing a movie that's 3 1/2 hours, maybe you don't need to show nine trailers on top of your damn Nicole Kidman ad AND a special message from Martin Scorsese.
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 22, 2023 23:32:47 GMT -5
Also...here's a tip, AMC: if you're showing a movie that's 3 1/2 hours, maybe you don't need to show nine trailers on top of your damn Nicole Kidman ad AND a special message from Martin Scorsese. Ahhh thank you for reminding me of my latest chapter of Moviegoing with Doomsday. Nothing too over the top, just a guy blaring a podcast through his phone throughout the previews (all 9 since I also went to an AMC). Now at least it was off by the time the movie started but good lord, people in the theater were yelling at him after every preview ended. Like what the hell is wrong with you? And yes, we also had the 9 trailers, Nicole Kidman ad and Marty message beforehand. Part of the reason I miss the Arclight chain is that they played 2 trailers maximum, often 1 or none, then bam you go right into the feature. 5 minutes of BS tops, not 25 minutes. I know we're all supposed to say 'the theatrical experience is the best' and it absolutely would be if I had my own theater but every single time I go there seems to be someone just killing it for everybody. Maybe it's the area I live, maybe I pick the wrong showtimes (I don't), but JFC it's becoming tough. And the 30 minutes of trailers and commercials are salt in the wound. |
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Post by frankyt on Oct 23, 2023 6:32:38 GMT -5
Sturgill showing up again was a surprise. I think I remember him being announced but it's still so jarring sometimes.
Not sure I enjoyed the Robbie Robertson guitar licks that were placed throughout. Really kinda was a little over the top when compared to the violence that was jarring but matter of fact - the music was anything but subtle.
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Post by Neverending on Oct 23, 2023 12:00:28 GMT -5
Also...here's a tip, AMC: if you're showing a movie that's 3 1/2 hours, maybe you don't need to show nine trailers on top of your damn Nicole Kidman ad AND a special message from Martin Scorsese. Ahhh thank you for reminding me of my latest chapter of Moviegoing with Doomsday. We got three trailers (Ferrari, Next Goal Wins, American Fiction) and the Marty message. |
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 23, 2023 12:28:39 GMT -5
Also...here's a tip, AMC: if you're showing a movie that's 3 1/2 hours, maybe you don't need to show nine trailers on top of your damn Nicole Kidman ad AND a special message from Martin Scorsese. Ahhh thank you for reminding me of my latest chapter of Moviegoing with Doomsday. We got three trailers (Ferrari, Next Goal Wins, American Fiction) and the Marty message.  |
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Post by SnoBorderZero on Oct 26, 2023 18:03:49 GMT -5
The career of Martin Scorsese is still far from finished, and yet I don't think it's crazy to say that it can be hailed as perhaps the most impressive in film history. Very few filmmakers can claim the consistency of quality films that Scorsese has (in fact he has hardly any misses with New York, New York being the outlier in his filmography) coupled with the quantity that he's put out. And no director can claim that they're adding to that impressive resume in their 80s like Marty now can with his latest work Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from the excellent book of the same name by David Grann. With a director as prestigious and universally praised as Scorsese, attempts to poke holes in his style and film catalogue feel feeble at best. But some criticisms that I do encounter at times is that people feel Scorsese glorifies the problematic characters he focuses on (namely in Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street) and that his films thrive on a sensationalized energy that doesn't click for them. I think both of those arguments are very flimsy, but if we were to take both of those critiques and apply them to his latest work then what we have here is quite the opposite with Scorsese at his most damning of his subjects and a climax that lacks the raw punching power that we're accustomed to. And yet when Scorsese at some point (hopefully not soon) calls it quits, this one will rank up there among his best.
A movie centered on the genocide of Native Americans at the hands of greedy white people after their oil money would seem obvious to have a more measured approach to the material and a full condemnation of the bad people involved in this atrocity, but I don't think Scorsese is getting enough credit here either. We've seen plenty of hackneyed biopics and dramatizations of real life tragedies that drub everything up to excruciatingly pandering levels, with actors overacting for awards and soaring musical scores designed to manufacture empathy and tears that just ring false. Scorsese's western epic however does none of these things, playing everything with cautious respect in retelling the facts of Grann's book and looking to dramatize none of it. This isn't to say that the film is safe or dull in any way, because it absolutely isn't. But it does feel like Scorsese is highly aware that he's telling the story of people he empathizes with but does not belong to, a far cry from the Italian-American crime dramas he rose to prominence with. It's a long movie but not a slow one. It's a dramatic film without playing for the big moments. It's focused on bad people doing bad things and not looking to justify their behavior in any way. It's got a payoff but does so without an explosive climax or stunning revelations to get us there. On the surface, Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese playing a much more tepid hand in his directing than we're used to and that may make it appear to be the work of a man in his 80s lacking the vigor of his best, most kinetic days. I think it's the opposite. If anything, Killers of the Flower Moon demonstrates that the master can still be learning, adapting, shaking things up and not relying on the same old tricks. Martin Scorsese continues to show why he's possibly the greatest American director of all time by notching another hit onto a filmography filled with them, doing so while breaking from the hallmarks of what put him on that pedestal in the first place. And in his 80s, no less.
9/10
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Oct 26, 2023 19:12:15 GMT -5
You wait for the Sixer-Bucks game to post this essay??  |
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Oct 27, 2023 2:14:01 GMT -5
Alright, Sno. Reading time. The career of Martin Scorsese is still far from finished Have you seen him lately? He’s certainly the LeBron James of filmmakers. Boxcar Bertha was a masterpiece. Hey now, Clint Eastwood was having threesomes in his 90’s. No one is putting this in their Top 10. Mean Streets Taxi Driver Raging Bull The King of Comedy After Hours Goodfellas Cape Fear Casino The Departed The Wolf of Wall Street Tell me what you’re taking out, sir. Is this better than Kundun?! All this praise and you still ranked Oppenheimer higher. |
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PG Cooper
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And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
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Post by PG Cooper on Oct 27, 2023 6:32:59 GMT -5
No one is putting this in their Top 10. I've seen people doing just that. I mean, I'm certainly not but this forum, Sno aside, seem cooler on this than most. The larger reaction from critics is overwhelming praise. |
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