For some reason we didn't see The Departed when it was on the big screen. Smitty did, thank God, so we had a point of reference while watching the DVD with him.
A great film? Sure sure, but it's Scorsese and this wasn't "New York New York." But neither was it "GoodFellas" (a Top 5 pick around here, right next to "Brazil" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover").
Best picture? Best one featuring more than a dozen people killed by gunshot wounds to the head (we counted at least eight individual cranial shots, and there are two gun battles in which several characters meet their demise courtesy of bullets to the brain).
We can see why Matt Damon didn't win an Academy Award nomination -- he's no Leonardo DiCaprio or Jack Nicholson. We understand why Nicholson didn't get a nod -- he's Jack playing a mob boss. We don't know why DiCaprio wasn't nominated for his role.
Smitty alerted us to a couple of oddities:
•The scene where Nicholson romps with a couple of hookers has been edited further from the theatrical release; on the big screen, there's apparently more to the gathering than a handful of thrown cocaine.
•Ditto for a scene between DiCaprio and a dying member of the Costello gang -- the DVD version cuts some lines.
Scorses reportedly worked on "The Departed" until a week before it was released in theaters. Sounds like someone was still wielding a blade after the fact. We'd try to coax out more info from the DVD, but it's a bare-bones affair right now -- only the feature and the trailer. No deleted scenes, no bonus features. Guess that stuff will have to wait for the special Oscar-winning DVD release.
1 comment:
Killing off everyone the viewer cares about and then expecting him or her to care about your film for more than ten minutes takes a lot of hutzpah. Sure, Shakespeare could do it, but . . . well, you see what I mean.
Great movie, but not much staying power, in my opinion.
Was Wahlberg that good, or did he just have good lines? I suspect the latter, though he is growing on me.
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