Director Martin Scorsese is giving movie goers a reason to put on those funny 3D glasses.

“Hugo,” Scorsese’s first attempt at three-dimensional movie-making, may just change the way we think about 3D films. If only the story being told wasn’t such a snooze. Film critics will forgive the “Raging Bull” director when he abandons his pre-teen leads and dwells on the dawn of motion pictures. Bread and butter movie goers will simply roll their eyes and wait for the next bit of 3D eye candy to leap off the screen.

“Hugo,” based on the children’s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick, feels like a movie that’s been buried under a pile of heavy pillows. The attempts at whimsy stumble, the sense of wonder squandered by its somber tone. Even Borat himself, the great Sacha Baron Cohen, can’t inject enough humor to make “Hugo” anything but a visually striking snooze factory.

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The current 3D wave has thrown just about everything our way, from three-dimensional boobs (“Piranha 3D”) to Medusa’s snaky mane (“Clash of the Titans”).

But we haven’t yet had a certifiable auteur take a crack at the format – until now.

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” opening wide tomorrow, finds the Oscar-winning director turning his attention to the third dimension. The early reviews are glowing – a gaggle of comments essentially saying it’s the best use of 3D technology yet. Will that be enough to convince audiences that paying a surcharge – and wearing those clumsy glasses – are worth the effort?

Scorsese has his work cut out for him, and he can blame an industry which abused 3D nearly every step of the way.

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On this week’s episode of the HomeVideodrome podcast, we discuss Ozzy and Dio in Black Sabbath, wonder why Julia Roberts ever became America’s sweetheart and dedicate “Hell Awaits” by Slayer to Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky.  So go listen, and enjoy!

“The Departed” may have won Martin Scorsese a long overdue Oscar, the film doesn’t quite stack up to the source material, “Infernal Affairs.”   Originating from Hong Kong and directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, “Infernal Affairs” has roughly the same basic plot as “The Departed,” in that it follows two moles on opposite ends of the law being driven to the edge of madness as the number of people they can trust dwindles as the body count rises.

“The Departed” is certainly more relatable to western audiences, given Scorsese’s flair for stylish, swear-laden dialogue, however “Infernal Affairs” is not only a tighter picture narratively, it also is a stronger piece of work thematically. Andy Lau and Tony Leung inhabit the roles later filled by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, respectively. Lau has a golden-boy sheen about him that can turn sinister and threatening, while Leung has a world-weary demeanor that trumps DiCaprio’s overcooked performance.

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Many people harbor dark secrets from their past, memories that eat at their souls and cause them to live in fear of ever being discovered. And in the terrific new film “The Son of No One,” a New York City cop named Jonathan White has an even darker one than most.

Jonathan grew up in a Queens housing project where he earned the nickname “Milk” for being the only white kid surrounded by minorities. He was stuck living there with his impoverished grandmother because his cop father was killed in the line of duty. Surrounded by broken lives and with a black child named Vinny as his only true friend, Jonathan dreamed of getting out fast – particularly because a crack addict named Hanky is constantly terrorizing the kids in the building.

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Milk and Vinny find a gun and never really intend to use it other than to scare Hanky away, but in a moment of panic Milk shoots and kills the junkie. When he and Vinny move the body to cover up the killing, another drug dealer finds out and, in an ensuing tussle, the dealer tumbles down a flight of stairs to his death.

Detective Charles Stanford (Al Pacino), the former partner of Milk’s father, figures out these were innocent accidents that took out the worst human trash in the projects so Milk is never charged. The deaths are left officially unsolved.

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Read part one of this series here.

In William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, the babies born 1925-1942 are classified as members of the “Silent Generation.” These were the kids who grew up during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, entered young adulthood at the postwar high of the 1950s, and hit middle age during the cultural chaos of the late 1960s and ’70s. This life sequence puts them in Howe and Strauss’ “Adaptive” archetype, a recessive generation less populous in numbers than the ones before (the GI Generation) and after (the Baby Boomers.)

When this generation started making movies they transformed Hollywood. Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood lays out the popular narrative. The tail of the Silent Generation and the beginning of the Boomers (filmmakers born 1939-1946) put out major dramatic work that challenged the more bland conventions of mid ‘60s Hollywood cinema. The 1970s were the R-rated decade. Francis Ford Coppola made “The Godfather.” Martin Scorsese released “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” New serious actors like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Jon Voight, and Robert De Niro delivered legendary performances. This was a film generation inspired by the French New Wave to treat movies as serious art.

Oscar Nominated-screenwriter, award-winning mystery novelist, and now Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon was a member of this clique. Born in 1943, Simon is like others born at the edges of generations, a blending of both appears in his re-titled memoir Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, recently released in paperback with new material. (more…)

A pretty good year with a few movies that I would classify as great. The most popular movies were “Home Alone” and “Ghost,” the first of which inspired three sequels and the latter of which inspired what I still contend is the funniest movie trailer of all time.  The Oscars were particularly competitive and geeks are still mad about the outcome.

The nominees:

Dances With Wolves: I love it, but then my Indian name is Struggles with White Guilt.

Ghost: I distinctly remember thinking, really? Ghost? Really?! I don’t dislike it, but it wasn’t exactly Oscar bait. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Awakenings: Mmmmmm, L Dopa. Yummy, delicious L Dopa.

Goodfellas: Scorsese’s career seemed to build to this and plateau with this. I love some early Scorsese, and I love some later Scorsese. But this is the centerpiece of his career, in my opinion.

The Godfather Part III: Okay. Really? Really?!!! There were about a hundred gangster movies released in 1990, so it was practically unavoidable that two of them would wind up Best Picture Nominees, but seriously?

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED

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1. Four time Oscar-nominee and WWII veteran (The Mighty) Mickey Rooney celebrates his 90th birthday today.

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2. Lame Celebrity Tweet of the Day: Seth MacFarlane:

I wonder if anyone called him “Andrew Breitfart” in high school.

MacFarlane, radio host actress Amy Holmes, and Breitbart will meet this Friday night at the roundtable on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

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3. Fugitive child rapist attracts A-list cast

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4. “International human rights and climate change advocate” Bianca Jagger wants Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to stop an execution. I’d listen to her. She is a international human rights and climate change advocate. (more…)

When director George Stevens decided to film Shane in the early fifties, it was a momentous decision on a number of levels.

Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.” (more…)

Hard Boiled is a film that serves as not just a great movie in its own right, but as a fitting capstone to a complete body of work. The highly-charged stories, emotional spectrum, visual magnificence, and moral subtext of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” canon owes everything to the circumstances of the man’s early years. His is a directorial mind forged in the crucible of a hard but spiritual life.

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.” (more…)

Why does talent get a pass? And to what extent does the “morality paradox” color our view of great artists? 

Roman Polanski’s best films, like all great films, are very moral—in particular Chinatown and The Pianist. They deal with socially repugnant behavior (incest, domestic abuse, prejudice, oppression, war) and the human spirit’s attempt to triumph over ethical transgression and evil-doing. But as a new allegation of sexual assault surfaced against the director last week, the famous filmmaker’s life has been anything but a model of morality. 

So why do some in the entertainment industry have such a hard time separating the two? Why is it so hard for them to judge the art with the yardstick of criticism and the life with the yardstick of justice? Whence the urge to intermingle the two and excuse the opprobrium of the one because of the merit of the other? 

Despite the fact that in 1977 Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor (legally equivalent to statutory rape), his apologists typically downplay—or outright forgive—the director’s crime on one of five grounds: (1) the rape occurred over 30 years ago; (2) he’s paid his debt to society; (3) he’s a nice man being persecuted because of his religion and/or celebrity; (4) the victim was somehow complicit; and (5) he’s an accomplished valuable artist.  (more…)

Although it’s ambiguous about much, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island makes two things extremely clear: Leonardo DiCaprio is a seriously big movie star, and delivering on genre expectations excuses a multitude of sins as far as audiences are concerned.

The Scorsese-directed suspense-horror film has been number one at the U.S box office for two consecutive weekends, despite its stunning  collection of genre cliches, long-out-of-fashion narrative ambiguity, agonizingly slow pace, and few real surprises, along with the director’s usual arresting visual style. Thus a good deal of the credit must go to DiCaprio’s star power.

Telling the tale of a U.S. Marshall, played by DiCaprio, who with his new partner investigates the escape of a violent prisoner/patient at a federal detention and treatment facility on an island several miles off the coast of Massachusetts, Shutter Island employs enough horror and suspense cliches to scare off any discerning moviegoer. 

There are, for example, the isolated island itself (so reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and many other suspense stories), a stormy scene in a graveyard, wanderings through a confusing maze of corridors in an insane asylum, the hardnosed detective investigating a case that becomes much more complex than he thought it would, a sinister ex-Nazi, a character’s disturbing memories of wartime, classical music backing a scene revealing atrocities, weird people making perplexing claims, a character taking a hypodermic away from a doctor and injecting the latter, an automobile explosion, and many, many more.  (more…)

Big movie twists are fine. I appreciate them when they work and sometimes even when they don’t. There’s all kinds of gimmickry in storytelling and The Twist has always been one of my favorites. Regardless, we all love a movie twist that knocks us out; a “Sixth Sense” kind of twist where (with the help of the filmmaker) you rerun the story in your mind and feel a great amount of satisfaction as the pieces all come together. Even less successful movie twists work on some level. The last reveal in “Unbreakable” might not have been a “Sixth Sense” wowser but is arguably successful within the context of its own world and without the specter of its predecessor might have received the respect it deserved.

In order for this kind of twist to work, however, a film must accomplish two things. First, the story shouldn’t require the twist in order for it to be successful. What precedes the twist should be stand-alone compelling – a good movie all on its own.  Second, the twist should make you want to see the film again, and as soon as possible, because now what came before takes on an entirely new dimension that requires another viewing to truly savor.

And this is where “Shutter Island” fails. *SPOILERS COMING*

The two hours or so to director Martin Scorsese’s Big Reveal is a long haul, especially after you lose all interest after the first thirty-minutes due to a narrative that never gels or grabs hold. The acting is fine and the look of the atmospheric production is top-notch in that foreboding kind of way (aided by Bernard Hermann-esque flourishes in the score). But the mystery of an escaped patient on a big spooky island simply isn’t all that compelling. Nothing makes much sense once the second act really gets going, and while the Big Twist does work in explaining what came before, the thought of reliving two muddled unfocused hours was the furthest thing from my mind. (more…)

Is it better to live as a monster or to die as a good man? It’s a central question revealingly asked only at the end of an emotional ride in Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese’s latest film, “Shutter Island.” Set in 1954, Leonardo DiCaprio leads a strong cast as Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels, who visits a mental hospital while investigating the disappearance of a brutal female inmate. Ashecliffe Hospital, located at a former Civil War fortress on Shutter Island off of Boston’s harbor, is a haunting facility that Daniels believes is a cover for government-funded mind control experimentation. The fact that Daniels saw the horrors of such scientific experimentation as a soldier during World War II, and that the man responsible the death of his wife (Michelle Williams) is a resident of the mysterious institution spur his investigation, lending personal drive to his federal orders. 

But as migraine-fueled hallucinations intensify and the administration become increasingly secretive and restrictive, Teddy’s investigation forces him to confront the truth that the island’s doctors depict. And it’s ultimately left to the audience to decide what truly happened on Shutter Island. 

Set against the backdrop of a hurricane, nightmares are more terrific, sunshine more comforting—and scarce. Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) arrive at Shutter Island to an oppressive symphonic score making the gray skies and dreary buildings exaggeratedly eerie. But for the rest of the film, music plays masterfully to emphasize mystery—or in the film’s most tragic moment, its absence and the cheerful chirping of birds accentuate the heavy emotions of the moment, allowing audiences to focus solely on the performances of DiCaprio and Williams. Supported by a strong cast, “Shutter Island” has had the best acting I’ve seen in a film so far this year, and I doubt it will soon be beat.  (more…)

You can find today’s Gregalogue, “People Died, WaPo Lied,” over at BigJournalism.com!

Tonight, we’ve got Chris Cotter, Imogen Lloyd Webber, Tom Shillue, and my mom! Also a very special Joshua McCarroll segment!

Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Marshal who’s having a really tough week. He’s incredibly seasick, yet has to ride a rickety boat across choppy waters to a place called Shutter Island. Worse, the foreboding location isn’t just a misbegotten piece of land; it’s actually the most unique prison on the planet – a place that houses the most criminally insane people imaginable, yet tries to do so with dignity rather than the physical and psychological abuse that was a hallmark of institutional attitudes of the time, 1954.

Daniels is heading over with his new partner Chuck Aule, to investigate the mysterious and seemingly impossible disappearance of a female murderer from her locked room in the dead of night at the island’s maximum-security Ashecliffe Hospital. Once there, the duo find that the hospital staff, led by the psychiatrists Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), seem to be throwing up one obstruction after another, and a vicious hurricane is on its way in the dead of night. (more…)

The payoff for sitting through a dozen craptacular releases is that one movie where you actually say, “Damn, that was worth the $11.50 and the kidney I spent to see it.”  As a modern moviegoer, you must be an eternal optimist.  You must hope against hope that the trailer you liked didn’t contain every single good scene and funny joke in the movie, and that the reviewer who raved isn’t covering up some pinko agenda that’ll make you choke out on your Goobers. 

You have to believe that out there somewhere is an action movie director who knows what a tripod is.  That there is a young lead actor who has never starred in a CW television series about beautiful but sensitive teenage male models with supernatural powers.  That there is a comedy screenwriter who can imagine a “funny” situation not involving a bodily fluid.  That Michael Cera will one day play a different character.

In that spirit, a spirit of Pollyannaish hope in the face of overwhelming evidence indicating that Hollywood’s product will almost certainly continue to demonstrate that evolution is a two-way street, I present ten movies that are coming within the next six months that might actually be good – or at least not make me throw things at the screen and slap around the ushers. (more…)

Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film.  The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic, since writing is truly the key – no director could make a masterpiece out of “The Ugly Truth.”  It is one of the great travesties of artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies – nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but everyone remembers Frank Capra.  Together, those three wrote It’s a Wonderful Life.  (Together, Goodrich and Hackett also worked on The Diary of Anne Frank, The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Father of the Bride.) 

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras.  (more…)

As we say goodbye to the first decade of the new century – and I don’t wanna hear any revisionist bellyaching about the decade not ending until December 2010 – we also say hello to the mainstream media movie critics’ lists of the best movies since 2000.  Like their “hard news” reporting brethren, the MSM’s critics’ consensus view of what’s good constitutes a conventional wisdom that emphasizes the “conventional” while going light on the “wisdom.”  And, like the rest of the MSM, they are almost always wrong.

This countdown of movies – all but one of which was nominated for at least a couple of Oscars – is not a list of the worst movies of the last decade.  Instead, it counts down ten notable cinematic critical darlings that simply do not hold up over time.  They are not necessarily awful films – though some are transcendentally terrible – and many have good performances, memorable scenes or even a classic character or two.  But overall, the effect of watching them again today is similar to what you might experience at your high school reunion when you see how that sexy cheerleader you once dated is now a bloated wildebeest with a tat on her meaty hock reading “Hope and Change.”  You just shake your head, asking yourself, “Man, what was I thinking?” (more…)

Harvey Weinstein

Members of the Hollywood community have signed a petition to have Roman Polanski released from jail. When is the Hollywood community also going to demand the release of 58 year old rapist Bruno Vece?

On January 31st 2009 the past finally came back to haunt Bruno Vece who has been jailed for 20 years for sexual crimes he committed decades ago. Bruno Vece, of Loram Way, Alphington, had been found guilty of raping an underage girl in the late 1970s.

What Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, David Lynch and other Hollywood elites need to know about Bruno Vece is that he has built a new life since he committed these crimes over 20 years ago; he’s a new man with a new family and now it has been destroyed. (more…)

And please do take a moment to give to the Hollywood Fund For Moral Illiteracy…

Source:

Woody Allen
Wes Anderson
Darren Aronofsky
Jonatham Demme
Stephen Frears
David Lynch
Martin Scorsese

Full list: (it might have been quicker to name who didn’t sign the petition) (more…)