come anticipate 'The Departed' with me

Except, of course, for Matt Damon?

there's a lot of punching in the trailer.

i heard this as "pork", ie police!

"poor" makes no sense in the trailer.

yeah, it's kinda like, "do that and you might as well grind me up and feed me to the poor..." so not a big deal.

walhberg is quite good! first non-naïf performance from him i've really liked.

Scorsese has a long history of burdening films with unpleasant and even atrocious central performances, and Nicholson seems bent on twirling the mustache off Daniel Day-Lewis's heavy in Gangs of New York—a role that really belonged to producer Harvey Weinstein.

it has a lot of teh same strengths and weaknesses i thought... although the centrepiece scene in IA (the "sting" when the two bros realize each others' existence) is nowhere near as strong. and it also has less of the "WE ARE THE SAME TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN DO U SEE DO U SEE" stuff that IA kept hitting you over the head with.

there are a couple of deviations from IA's plot but a lot of stuff plays out quite faithfully. and yeah, they beefed up the nicholson character (who was really much more understated in the original... well i guess that's obvious) and made him a lot more... demonstrative. but i dunno, it's fun to watch! why critics hate big performances so much i'll never know. i guess it's a really easy criticism to level at an actor or a movie...

Why wd Scorsese be interested in doing a 'faithful' remake of any film? (Haven't seen Inf Affairs trilogy yet)

Cage ... wasn't exactly the worst thing about Bringing Out the Dead

Far from it, esp w/ Patricia Arquette doing her usual sleepwalk.

what to see 38 votes for The Nutty Professor and no one's seen Which Way To The Front? We already know you're all off tickling Seth Rogen's taint, it'll just be depressing to see Three On A Couch get a goose egg

― da croupier, Thursday, June 23, 2011 11:39 AM

you've got jerry's imdb open in another tab admit it

not this second no

also i have seen which way to the front? my best friend in college was a weirdo

but even at the time I kept wondering, what's with all the jokes? It's like Marty was encroaching on Coen Bros territory.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, June 23, 2011 10:46 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

marty's always been making great comedies, such as taxi driver and goodfellas

ts wahlberg's cop in departed vs his cop in 'the other guys'

same difference. well, wahlberg prob funnier in departed.

also apparently no-one in boston knows that a building can have more than one entrance.

I just saw The Departed for the first time, and thought it was interesting how the plot followed the plot of Infernal Affairs quite faithfully, except for a major change at the very end...

(WARNING! SPOILERS FOR BOTH MOVIES WILL FOLLOW!)

In the original, Lau (the mole in the police force) walks away scot-free after Chan (the mole in the triad) has been killed. But in the remake, Sullivan (the counterpart to Lau) is shot by Dignam, a character who has no equivalent in the original, and who seems to have been added to the plot for the sole purpose that he can kill Sullivan at the end. So, in the original it seems Lau basically escapes his karma, except that it's strongly implied that the he will bear a heavy burden of guilt for the rest of his life. Whereas in the remake karma catches up with Sullivan in the form of Dignam... Funnily enough, this makes the The Departed both bleaker (both protagonists die), and more moralistic (justice is served) than the original.

On the other hand, in Infernal Affairs the idea that Lau genuinely wants to become a "good cop" is more evident. Here's another crucial difference between the movies: in The Departed the mob boss is revealed to be an FBI informant, and the biggest reason Sullivan betrays him seems to be that he wants to save his own ass, whereas in Infernal Affairs there's no informant angle, and Lau betrays his boss mostly because he realizes he could actually become one of the good guys. Because of this difference, Lau's guilt over Chan's death in Infernal Affairs feels genuine, whereas if Sullivan had survived in The Departed, he probably would've just been happy to get through the whole affair unscathed and not felt much remorse for what he had done.

So, even though both movies are seemingly about the gray area between morality and immorality, The Departed still wants to keep the line between more clear (the bad cop mostly remains bad, and is punished with death), whereas Infernal Affairs muddles things more (the bad cop wants to become a good cop, manages to pull it off, but is punished with guilt). I know that The Departed wasn't written by Scorsese, but it's interesting that a director known for movies of high moral ambiguity (you could argue that the ending of Taxi Driver is rather similar to the ending of Infernal Affairs in this regard) chose a more black & white conclusion over the gray one in the original material.

Also, in IA the mob boss seemed to be a pretty reasonable guy for a mob boss, whereas in TD Nicholson makes him a caricature of pure evil.

nice post tuomas

I thought it was pretty interesting that even though TD is almost an hour longer than IA, IA still manages to get its points across better. Of course, IA does it more through archetypes and downright cliches, but IMO these cliches work in it, because they're used as shorthand to outline the central character relations and conflicts, which still remain interesting. TD is more idiosyncratic and tries to flesh out the characters better, but most of the things that are added to the remake only serve to confuse what it's all about.

In IA the father-son relationship between the mole cop and his commanding officer is quite evident, in TD this doesn't really come across, and hence the old cop's sacrifice for the young cop feels unearned. In IA mob loyalty is emphasized, and both protagonists breaking it in their own way is a major theme; in TD it feels as if Costello doesn't even care whether there is a mole or not in his gang, and in the end he's revealed to be an informant himself, a twist that makes little sense, except for providing Sullivan with a more selfish reason for killing him.

In IA one of the gangsters figures out Chan might be the mole, but doesn't rat him out because Chan is his friend, so he feels conflicted and isn't sure what to do. In TD, in the equivalent scene, there's no good explanation for the gangster not ratting Costigan out; he possibly might've been a mole himself, but this is left unclear, and there's no special relationship between him and Costigan. Lau's wife and Chan's psychiatrist/girlfriend are conflated into on character in TD, but this serves no narrative purpose at all... Neither protagonist finds out that they're both seeing the same woman, and the ending with her still plays out the same way as it did with the two women in IA.

So yeah, it almost seems like the makers of TD thought IA's central conflicts of morality vs. selfishness and loyalty vs. personal integrity were a bit too corny, so they decided to de-emphasize them and focus more on the move -> countermove chess game aspects of the story. But if that's the case, they didn't really get that even if those moral conflicts in IA were corny, they're the things that brought the whole story to life. To me at least, not caring about these themes meant the movie didn't care about its characters, so I didn't really care about them either. Just goes to proof that sometimes being a bit cliched and corny can be a good thing.

interesting posts tuomas, i always like analyses of the raw elements of theme and plot

i've never seen IA (shameful i know), but,fwiw, the element of Costello being an fbi informant was added because the man he was based on, Whitey Bulger, was such an informant for years. it adds another layer to the theme of constant duplicity and also stands as explanation why Costello could be so (increasingly!) violent and not be taken down -- in an american context, having a big, powerful criminal enterprise left to state-level police to handle is a little bit anomalous (i think); it's exactly the kind of thing you would expect federal-level authorities to be responsible for. the failed efforts of the feds on-screen (alec baldwin) fit with this i think.

and also, fwiw: "Dignam, a character who has no equivalent in the original, and who seems to have been added to the plot for the sole purpose that he can kill Sullivan at the end."

that's not his sole purpose! other purposes: to have mark wahlberg have a bad haircut and say hilarious shit every appearance and play the "bad older brother" to sheen's good father.

less flippantly, i think the concept of audience connection to (or "caring about") character is not necessarily tied to theme. there is a pleasure in having movie stars cut loose and chew scenery that has its own kind of driving logic. putting wahlberg, baldwin and nicholson (plus ray winstone, kevin corrigan) is just flagrant in this way; you know you are going to watch men bark and yell and say funny shit and that's part of what will keep you going

Well yeah, I like movies that do that too, but IMO they shouldn't try to be something else, then. Like, After Hours and Bringing Out the Dead are both good movies exactly because they're all about these small vignettes, and they don't pretend to have a bigger story or anything. But with TD, the big story was still there, it had pretty much all the basic character relations (like the aforementioned father-son stuff) and plot beats from IA, but the acting and directing was just weirdly detached from them. In the original, the moral conflicts of the two protagonists are felt much stronger, and it actually manages to pull a neat Hitchcockian trick of making the viewer root for both, not wanting either one to be caught. And because of this the movie's most impressive scene is the one where Chan (the fake gangster) is tailing Lau (the fake cop) after he's met the mob boss, and Lau notes him, and suddenly they both know who the other one is, and that the other knows this, but they can't see the other well enough to figure out his identity... That is a wonderfully constructed scene, and it works because you kinda root for both guys, so at the same you want and don't want either one to figure the other's identity. And in TD, they've copied that scene quite faithfully (except that the tension is already a bit ruined to begin with by Nicholson's goofy dildo waving), and technically it should work as well as in the original, but it doesn't, because you don't really care about these guys and their situation the same way you do in IA. So yeah, the scenery chewing and dialogue in TD was totally entertaining, but the suspense plot (which still was a pretty big part of the movie) feels almost like a separate thing from it, so you don't really invest in it the way you do in IA.

In TD, in the equivalent scene, there's no good explanation for the gangster not ratting Costigan out; he possibly might've been a mole himself, but this is left unclear, and there's no special relationship between him and Costigan.

i thought that his molehood was abundantly clear?

(other dude)

No, the only real proof for his molehood is that a news report quotes the police he was a mole, but Costello himself points out that the cops might've just lied about that to get the heat off the real mole. Since there's no other indication that he was a cop, this seems to be the more likely explanation. The same thing happens with the counterpart guy in IA, but IIRC in that movie it's more clear that police were just lying to protect their real mole, whereas TD plays it more ambiguously for reasons I don't really get, since the guy in TD is a pretty insignificant character.

Lol

great lol!

hahahaha i knew this revive would pay off

???

The Departed's virtues lie in the fun that the actors are having with it (well except for Leo I guess.) The plot's pretty over-the-top and unsubtle for the most part.

I always found "and i ask myself...could i do murder?" pretty funny for some weird reason

Cant believe scorsese wasnt able to translate IA properly tbh

That was not my point; my point was that if you just want to do a movie that's all about actors having fun with their characters, why choose a complex and thematically rich story that's hardly the best vehicle for such actor showcasing? The plot and the characters of IA don't quite jibe with what Scorsese & co are doing in TD, and yet pretty much everything from the original story was kept intact. A simpler and less serious script would've worked much better for the sort of actor-driven gangster story TD seemed to aim for.

'imo' is only three letters long

I mean we're all obv just fartblowing here but if your position is gonna be 'this awesome movie makes different choices from what i personally would have done and it's all wrong' then an imo frames it nicely imo

tuomas has made some good points and u r being a ding ding 'imo'

Nah that's fair i'm carrying over mad issues from the twin peaks thread sorry big t love yr work rly

What Twin Peaks thread? I don't remember posting anything about Twin Peaks for ages.

Lol i'm only getting round to it now i am beefing with tuomas from idk 2008

tbf I don't think tuomas' opinions have changed much since then

whose baby was she carrying? do we ever find out? maybe i missed something..

the implication is that it's dicap's

ah right, cheers.

watched again last night, still great. noticed a series of hints implying the homosexuality of damon's character, google confirms i'm not the only person to notice this but wondering if other ilxors picked up on that?

He couldn't get it up, yeah, and Frank makes that crack about Sullivan meeting him in the porn theater ("Never thought I'd see you in one of these places")

*he said, five years later*

Marty was upset they gave him an Oscar for this crap

as you pointed out in this thread already

Hoberman. Hee hee:
Scorsese has a long history of burdening films with unpleasant and even atrocious central performances, and Nicholson seems bent on twirling the mustache off Daniel Day-Lewis's heavy in Gangs of New York—a role that really belonged to producer Harvey Weinstein.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Wednesday, October 4, 2006 10:07 AM (twelve years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yikes!

i mean

damon and dicaprio trying to keep these sheets nailed down but every time they get a corner secured nicholson ratface or wahlberg speedfreak or a baldwin arhhh just bursts outtve another one

im not able to rule on ray winstones accent can someone rule on winstones accent

if Spike Lee wins an Oscar for this year's mediocrity, the Scorsese-Departed parallel will be complete

yes yes we know everything was better when only you remembered it

im not able to rule on ray winstones accent can someone rule on winstones accent

ty

wanna watch Scorsese direct this? up on Vimeo.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/05/departed-set-documentary-scorsese-at-work-1202231189/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j1T5xjwGJQ

Marty should release his original 3.5 hour cut, the pacing is very strange to this one with everything wrapping up in 15 minutes.

and he should get rid of that incessant guitar theme running throughout. It’s like water torture.

I'M NOT A CAWP

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Maybe fuck yourself

Watched again for the first time in a few years, and (as a whole) worked better than it ever has.