The Departed (2006)

5/5

I just came back from seeing The Departed with Jed, Sameer, and Amar. This movie is phenomenal. It is a return to the genre the great master reinvented. I had ridiculously high expectations for this movie, and they were surpassed. It has the flash and fun of GoodFellas and Casino mixed in with the intensity and subtlety of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. This is the zenith of entertainment in art. This is why you watch movies.

First off, the characters are the most unique, off-the-wall screen presences I can remember. The acting is so absolutely amazing that they are actually able to pull this off. The colors, style, and subtlety pervaded every shot and scene that to list off each memorable part of the movie would be to describe every second of it. The script is consistently funny, the violence sudden and shocking, and the subtext omnipresent. Watch it if you want to enjoy a good time, or if you want to analyze it as cinematic art. Just watch it.

The introductory scenes were so bizarre; it looked like an abundance of b footage spliced together randomly. I feel like Scorsese didn't really have a vision for how he wanted the beginning to look. I might be wrong though. And after the first ten minutes, I was so absorbed in the movie that I couldn't generate any more fictitious reasons like the one above to not love the movie. In fact, why am I writing this review and not seeing it again?

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0407887/

Gandhi (1982)

4/5

This three-hour epic is everything an epic should be: monumental, expansive, and stirring. The pacing is excellent for the most part (even though I thought the last third dragged on quite a bit). This is helped by the stellar script, which expounded on an incredible philosophy extremely well. I found it eye-opening and informative and recommend it to anyone interested in the man or the country. The acting by Ben Kingsley was consistently brilliant.

There were some things I didn't like in this otherwise great film. I always feel a little bit cheated when a biopic only shows one side of its subject: in this case, Gandhi's sacrifice for his country. It makes him less three-dimensional and takes away from the overall film. (I hated Cinderella Man for that same reason--Russell Crowe's character was pure good with no flaws.) I also hated the use of news reels to tell the story for them; I consider it sloppy filmmaking. Also, although infrequent, some scenes seemed unnecessarily or excessively violent.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0083987/