Bringing Out the Dead Is Another Spiritually-Conscious Winner From Martin Scorsese

Death haunts Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage). That's to be expected given that he works as an ambulance driver in New York City. But for Pierce, it goes deeper than that. During his graveyard shifts, he's constantly plagued by hallucinations of a young woman he couldn't save. Every sidewalk he glances at or stores he wanders into, there she is, reminding him of how he failed her. His entire job is dedicated to helping people & saving lives yet here's a reminder that he failed at that job. Over the course of Bringing Out the Dead, Pierce grapples with the state of his life while interacting with a host of characters who have their own relationship with the fine line between life & death.

The Age of Innocence See's Martin Scorsese Excelling at Period-Era Romance

One of my very favorite things about Martin Scorsese is that his love for all kinds of films is reflected in the variety of genres he's explored as a filmmaker. Yes, he's done a couple of crime films, but he's also done a mystery thriller, a musical, screwball comedy/noir mixture, hell, in 2011 Scorsese embarked on a $165 million budgeted 3D kids movie! Scorsese doesn't just love one type of filmmaking, he loves all films and that's led him to dip his toes into an excitingly wide range of genres over the years. His foray into period-era costume romance cinema, The Age of Innocence, is one of the very best encapsulations of Scorsese's versatility.

Scorsese And Gangster Cinema Collided For The First Time On Mean Streets

With The Irishman dropping on Netflix streaming this coming Wednesday, now seems like a fine time to look back at the very first time Martin Scorsese directed a gangster picture. Granted, his second feature film, Boxcar Bertha, had heavy crime movie elements to it too, but that was a romantic drama first and foremost. Mean Streets is 110% a gangster crime vehicle, the kind of movie Scorsese would go back to multiple times in his career. Despite being a recurring genre stop for him, Scorsese manages to make sure each of his crime films are different from one another, The Departed is not the exact same movie as Casino, for example.

The Irishman Is Like No Other Gangster Movie Scorsese Has Ever Made

Early on in The Irishman, the film's titular lead character, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), recounts a story about his time serving in World War II where he held two enemy soldiers at gunpoint while they dug their own graves. Sheeran, while telling this tale, puzzles over why the two soldiers were doing this task. "Did they think that, if they did a good enough job, they would be let go?" he ponders. Whatever drove them to dig those graves, it really didn't matter in the end, they ended up as corpses in the ground. Such a tale ends up being a parallel for the overarching story of Martin Scorsese's epic crime saga The Irishman, which is all about gangsters like Sheeran digging their own graves while ignoring the inevitable doom that awaits them.

The Last Temptation of Christ's Compelling Humanity Makes It One of the Best Scorsese Movies

   

Martin Scorsese is known for his gangster movies and for good reason, he's made one of the all-time great gangster movies with Goodfellas. But that's not all he's delivered as a filmmaker, in fact, looking over his filmography, one is impressed with the variety of genres and aesthetics he's explored. The dude's dabbled in musicals, screwball comedies, family movies, Scorsese's love for cinema has been translated into him trying his hand at so many different avenues of creative cinematic expression. Such exploration has also led him to make religious-minded affair like Silence or The Last Temptation of Christ that stand out to me, as a Christian, as actually thoughtful Christan-based cinema, a perfect counter to all of that dreadful PureFlix drivel.

Casino Is More Than Just Another Scorsese Gangster Movie

While I've already penned up some thoughts on Martin Scorsese's Casino over on TheSpool as part of the website's Martin Scorsese Month (hey, that's promotion!), there's so much to say about this motion picture that my response to it cannot be contained to just one article. Over here on Land of the Nerds, let's turn our gaze back to Casino, a movie that was widely declared at the time of its release to be merely the reheated leftover pizza to Goodfellas' fresh-out-of-the-wooden-oven pizza. True, Casino is no Goodfellas, but then, what is? Goodfellas is a massively high bar to clear, and even other Scorsese gangster movies shouldn't be held exclusively to measuring up to that one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

In Laman's Terms: It's OK if Somebody Doesn't Like What You Like

An image from Martin Scorsese's 2006 movie The Departed depicting Jack Nicholson's response to watching Thor: The Dark World.

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

This is one of those rare In Laman's Terms columns that I approach with genuine hesitance only because continuing the discourse around this topic feels utterly ridiculous. There's so many real-world horrors transpiring as we speak, it can't help but feel like a distraction to talk about how it's OK for people to not like Marvel movies. Doesn't seem like such an obvious statement? But if the internet's behavior recently has been any indication, such a seemingly non-controversial stance is, in fact, tantamount to heresy. So let's jump right into examining the discussion and backlash caused by Martin Scorsese and Jennifer Aniston recently saying critical things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

We Live In A Society And Joker Lives In An Only Occasionally Successful Movie

So many people come and go in our lives every day, it's easy to forget that other human beings have had entire lives up to the point we meet them (maybe that's just the Walgreen's cashier in me talking).  Everybody's got a story for how they got to their current point in their lives, even wanna be stand-up comics like Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). Residing in Gotham City with his mother and working as a clown-for-hire, Arthur struggles through life due to his mental illness that includes a handicap that sends him into sudden fits of uncontrollable laughter. Bad luck follows Fleck wherever he goes as he searches for purpose in his life and a reliable father-figure to serve as a substitute for the dad he never knew.

All Hail The Masterful Awkwardness of The King of Comedy

The King of Comedy is another great example of a movie made in a specific era of history that still resonates as relevant today. This 1983 Martin Scorsese directorial effort hinges on the idea of a comic being obsessed with garnering fame through the aid of a late-night talk show host he's obsessed with, and admittedly, it's hard to imagine modern-day people looking for their big break being this exclusively fixated on a broadcast television late-night host as their ticket to glory. But that obsessive drive to be famous at all costs, a creepy sense of entitlement to stardom, all of that is still relevant to today. Though the pursuit of fame may manifest in different ways in 2019, The King of Comedy is about a guy whose primary motivation is disturbingly timeless.

Writer/Director Lorene Scafaria and Jennifer Lopez Excel In The Wildly Imaginative Hustlers

Dorothy (Constance Wu) just wants the bare essentials. She just wants to take care of her grandmother (Wai Ching Ho) and not live out on the street. To get the money for these necessities, she works as a dancer at a strip club alongside Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), the most talented dancer in the place. The two of them hit it off as fast friends and begin making a lot of money, particularly from clients who are also wealthy Wall Street brokers. For a little while there, everything is perfect. But once the 2008 financial crisis hits, the club is hit with money woes while Dorothy also leaves the profession to take care of her newborn kid. After a few years, Dorothy's financial troubles return worse than ever. Where is she gonna get the cash she needs? Well, an impromptu reunion with Ramona delivers a possible solution as Ramona reveals she's got a new scam brewing involving drugging Wall Street tycoons and then taking thousands from their bank accounts.

The Documentary Spielberg Looks At An Iconic Career In An Engaging Manner

This morning, the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced and among the nine films nominated for Best Picture was The Post, Steven Spielberg's newest directorial effort. With The Post securing a Best Picture nod, this meant, as pointed out by Mark Harris on Twitter, that Spielberg has now had eleven of his movies nominated for Best Picture, the second highest amount of movies a single director has ever had nominated in Best Picture (William Wyler has the most with 13 of his features scoring Best Picture nominations). That's an astonishing accomplishment and it's far from the only place where Spielberg's career has been marked with great success as anyone who's been to a movie theater in the last four decades can attest.

Raging Bull Refuses To Box Its Character Into Conventional Sports Movie Narratives

My favorite part about Martin Scrosese's work is how much is bubbling underneath the surface of his works. Taxi Driver captures the post-Vietnam angst of an entire generation looking for a hero in an incredibly dangerous and psychotic way while The Wolf Of Wall Street provides an unflinching look at 21st century corruption. Something like Silence could fill multiple essays with its subtext and underlying ideas. For Raging Bull, there's admittedly not quite as much going on beneath the surface (it's very much a typical "Career victory leads to personal destruction" tale) but it's still quite the riveting tale, no doubt about that.

Martin Scorsese's Next Film Is Going To Netflix!

Yes, you read that headline right! Martin Scorsese, the filmmaker behind some of the most influential American films of the last 40 years, will have his next film, The Irishman (which stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino) debut straight to Netflix, as it appears Paramount Pictures, which is in the middle of an upheaval, has decided not to take the major risk of simply distributing the film domestically. Thus, Netflix is in the process of securing worldwide rights to the title, with this pairing offering a paradigm shift for Hollywood.

There's Something Strange Afoot On Shutter Island

The 2010's have shown a lovely amount of versatility on the part of master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. He's examined the levels of excess rich white dudes can get away with in America in The Wolf Of Wall Street, confronted experiencing a crisis of faith in Silence and he found time to make Hugo, a 3D family movie that also served as a homage to one of cinema's earliest pioneers, George Melies. Before all of those though, he kicked off the decade with a horror/thriller starring long-time collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio entitled Shutter Island, which became the directors second biggest movie of all-time at the domestic box office.

And No One Dared Disturb The Sound Of Silence

As a Christian, my biggest complaint with so-called faith-based Christian movies like God's Not Dead is...well, I don't just have one complaint with these atrocious movies, the worst of the bunch are pretty much top-to-bottom disasters. But in terms of complaints directly connected to my faith, these films claim to try to explore real-world struggles of Christianity but don't seem to exist in the real world. In an effort to be as squeaky-clean as possible, actual topics of hardship are rarely explored in these Christian films. More adult concepts are off-limits except for rare sequences like Kirk Cameron bashing in his porn-riddled computer in Fireproof and any of the tepid dramatic situations are easily resolved in a tidy little bow.

Goodfellas Is A 145 Minute Reminder Of Why Martin Scorsese Is A Cinematic Legend

There was this odd phenomenon when The Wolf Of Wall Street came out three years ago regarding many commentators feeling that the movie was explicitly endorsing the various nasty deeds its lead character commits. Art is subjective and all that, so if that's your takeaway from the film, that's fair. Personally though, I'd say The Wolf Of Wall Street very much makes it clear that Jordan Belfort is a very bad man, one that the movie wants you to gawk at while seeing how much this real-life guy was able to get away with in his time of swindling and debauchery. Scorsese's whole point with that 2013 effort is for the viewer to come away with how delusional Belfort was as a human being; despite all the Quaallades and obvious wrongdoings he was committing, he still saw himself as untouchable, above the common world.

Five Not-So-Great Trailers For Great Films

I love movie trailers. They can function as a way to get excited about a film you already know about, as a means to entice you into seeing something you previously had no knowledge about or even serve as singular works of art in their own right. But not every movie trailer can be a winner, even if they're promoting motion pictures of top caliber quality. Inspired by The AV Club's examination of what makes a good trailer, today I'll be examining five movie trailers that I find to be subpar, a sharp contrast to the excellent films they're supposed to be raising awareness for.

Taxi Driver Review (Classic Write-Up)

Drive Crazy

Crime litters the sidewalk, as rain comes slipping down from the heavens. Droplets of liquid plummet onto the street while an atmosphere of depravity hangs over the entire neighborhood. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) feels he doesn't belong here, the scumbags around here make him sick. But his psychopathic actions make him a perfect fit for this part of New York City, even if his delusional mind makes him think otherwise.

Liam Neeson Returns for More Taking In First Trailer For Taken 3

Liam Neeson has certainly been busy with a bunch of action flicks recently. While they're not the only films he acts in (he was one of the best best parts of The LEGO Movie, and he stars in the next Martin Scorsese Movie) he's been primarily known for doing films where he beats up bad guys while sayings things in that intimidating voice of his. These kinds of movies started due to the popularity of Taken, which is getting second sequel called (no joking here) Tak3n. The first trailer for it has just arrived and you can watch it below.