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In Reply to: Re: And yet another straw dog: is there a posted by jamesgarvin on May 31, 2005 at 15:42:26:
change the topic when cornered or is it purposeful?
The Mafia books you mention (I'll throw in Mario Puzo, as well) do not ascend to art, and to be fair, they don't attempt to. Scorscese DOES in Mean Streets with his emotional portrayal of the underlying friendship between the Keitel and the DeNiro characters...and then fails in subsequent films about the mob to so humanize them. We are left with a squalid, brutish vision of the world. There is no redeeming value in any character. None.
By focusing his lens so closely, Scorscese fails to place his subjects into context. An example: one can make a film about Nazi concentration camps w/out just showing the torture and killing. Films such as Schindler's List do so and rise to art.
Scorscese fascination with ugliness and thugishness lowers him into the sewer. He is so bereft of feeling he won't even look upward.
Follow Ups:
There was no redeeming value in Amon Goeth in real life or the film and in fact Spielberg and Ralph Fiennes did a fantastic job of giving Amon a multi-dimensional persona that is fitting to the pre-emininant historical novels by Christopher R Browning (Ordinary Men...) and Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners).Goodfellas (which should have won best picture and director as most pro critcs acknowledge) lead character had redeeming qualities relative to many of the others. People in this world you may be surprised to know value greed and the easy life above all else and love to have power. Nowehere is that more clear than in Goodfellas and indeed Schindler's List. Gang mentality doesn't go away, desire for power is capitalism and if you can;t play within the system you create your own or your the sheep like most of us forum posters who do our job for X amount of money and lead vanilla lives.
Scorcese grew up in anything but a vanilla world and his world is our world -- just the part we like to hide under the covers. His characters in the films I believe work best Taxi Driver and Goodfellas have redeeming characters or at least pitiable characters even tragic. I have not seen Mean Streets - I bought the Scorcese Box Set(first one) and will look through the films to see where I stand when I see a larger sampling of his earlier work.
I'm not convinced that he is necessarily any better a director than Steven Spielberg --- Frankly from what i can tell Scorcese is successful in a narrow subject matter and far less successful when he he strays from the seedy. Spielberg can do it all whether it's the big stupid cheesey popcorn movie that is just one bag of fun or when he does something like Schindler's List which transcends the movies and is by quite a wide margin the best film I have ever seen. The anti-Spielberg crowd can kiss my hairy butt on this one.
Spielberg also has made some of the biggest dung heaps I've ever seen -- so at least when he misses he misses BIG. I'd have it no other way.
I am not changing the subject. I referenced the mafia generally, and the books on the mafia specifically, only to demonstrate that what Scorscece depicts in his films are real people, as did Coppola in the Godfather films. My use of those books was only to buttress my argument that what Scorscece is doing is different than what Tarantino is doing, and to compare them is to compare apples and oranges. Once again, for the learning impaired, Scorscece is attempting to give you a window into a world that you are probably not familiar with. Tarantino is not. Scorscece is attempting to portray real type people in a real environment. Tarantino is not. Scorscece is trying to educate you, in addition to entertaining you. Tarantino is not. If you have a problem with viewing a film which attempts to depict violence that takes place in parts of our country as it is perpetrated by amoral people, who have not a humanistic bone in their body, and would rather have a film maker tell you that violence is bad, and provide you some style, panache, and, at the end, that all the bad guys in black hats get their commupetance, then the limitation is with you, not Scorscece. Ironically, you enjoyed Tombstone, with it's "humanistic" portrayal of Doc Holliday, a ruthless killer. So, maybe your preference is that the film maker rewrite history to make images tidy. To each his own.I am merely asking you to carry your analysis to the logical extreme, and you refuse to do so, for reasons which are obvious. When you compare Scorscece to Tarantino, I write that you are comparing apples to oranges. I provide you specific reasons why. I provide you specific examples for Scorscece's window on his world. Yet you refuse to address any of those arguments. Why? Would you compare Tarantino to Hitchcock, and then conclude that Tarantino is somehow lacking? Oh darn, there I go changing the subject again.
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