A Boy And His Dreams of the Cinema: Scorsese, Hugo and Me

When watching Martin Scorsese’s new film Hugo, it’s as if my love for Scorsese has come full circle. I first fell in love with him – in obsession with him, really – when I was eleven years old, when I watched VHS copies of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) and Taxi Driver (1976) almost back-to-back. On a visceral and emotional level, I had never seen anything like these pictures. These first encounters with Scorsese occurred only a few months after the death of my father, and in a way, the events are forever linked in my mind. My eyes were opened to a different kind of world – a place where pain, obsession and guilt were always present, and the only way to express this pain was through cinema.

And it is in this way that I looked to Scorsese, really, as a sort of father figure – as a filmmaker who spoke to the fears and obsessions I harbored at a very young age, but also as a filmmaker who understood the excitement and thrilling rush of living. His films are experiential in a way that other movies are not, and I think I recognized early on that no other filmmaker was capable of communicating “an intensity onscreen that matches what [one] perceives/suffers in real life,” as eloquently stated by Chris Hodenfield in his article “You’ve Got to Love Something Enough to Kill It: The Art of Noncompromise.”

On December 20th, 2002, I was a twelve year-old boy sitting bright-eyed, entranced, exhilarated and moved by Gangs of New York on its opening day at the AMC Barton Creek Cinema in Austin, Texas – my first Scorsese film in theaters and a life-changing – yes, an absolutely life-changing – experience. And so with Hugo has Scorsese finally made a film about a twelve year-old boy enveloped by the cinema. And not just a twelve year-old boy, mind you, but a boy with a recently deceased father who seeks emotional satisfaction through the imagination and power of cinema. If there was ever a Scorsese film made just for me, surely this is the one.

My anticipation for a new Scorsese picture is unmatched; I await a new Scorsese movie the same way some anticipate a sort of religious experience. I don’t know if it's truly possible to count the ways Scorsese has influenced every single part of my everyday life, down to the music I listen to daily (The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison) to my beliefs about people, down to the way I experience things, every blink, cut and interpretation of events – not to mention my choice to attend New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Scorsese’s alma mater. His work is such a fundamentally important part of my life that there are times when I don’t know how much I originally found similarities between my personal demons and Scorsese’s work, and how much Scorsese’s work ultimately influenced my behavior.

“Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive.” - Martin Scorsese

Although every one of Scorsese’s pictures is extremely personal – after all, that’s what’s so effective about his films – Hugo may be Scorsese’s most personal film of all. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), a young boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station in the 1930s, discovers that an automaton left for him by his recently deceased father (Jude Law) may unlock the mystery behind George Méliès (Ben Kingsley), an unhappy elderly man who owns a toy shop in the train station. What Hugo and his newfound friend Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), Méliès’ goddaughter, gradually discover is that Méliès is one of the original pioneers of cinema, the director of over five hundred pictures and a revolutionary filmmaker. However, most of his films are believed to have been destroyed and melted at the rise of World War I, and Méliès, a broken machine without a purpose, resigns from life and fades into obscurity – until Hugo, who understands the pain of having one’s hopes and dreams disintegrate into flames – sets out to restore Méliès’ work.

Ah, film preservation – Scorsese’s most passionate cause, and the real subject of Hugo. The film is all about time, cruel time that batters away at celluloid. As the clocks tick-tock away in Hugo, the memories of our lives are slowly dying, the celluloid burning into ash and the preservation of our past decaying. But how can we let time destroy the magic and power of the cinema, of our memories?

The film gets you caught up in the magic of moviemaking, to the point where the audience gasps in astonishment at the beautiful remaining print of Méliès’ film A Trip to the Moon (1902), screened by film scholar Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), who worships Méliès, but, like many, believes him to be dead – until Hugo and Isabelle prove otherwise. Watching Hugo with an audience, there were further gasps of awe when Méliès – in one of the most visually arresting and beautiful flashback sequences I have ever seen – splices together a cut in one of his early films. It had never occurred to me that so many people would not have known the process behind film editing, but there you go.

To say that Hugo is the finest use of 3D technology that I’ve ever seen doesn’t do justice to what Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson achieve with this picture. I don’t particularly like 3D, and yet the visual bravura of Hugo has convinced me that, when utilized by a master filmmaker and treated as an artistic device, it is a major cinematic innovation, on par with the innovations of Méliès and the Lumière Brothers.

This movie is so rich – not just visually, but emotionally – that even after two viewings I am still overwhelmed by it. The performances, from the brilliant and hilarious physical comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Station Inspector, to Kingsley’s nuanced, powerful portrayal of Méliès, are superb. The editing, by the wonderful and loyal Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, is as crisp and exciting as ever.

But in the end, if Scorsese is Hugo, the film preservationist – the boy who restores the magic in a broken machine – then Méliès can be seen as a stand-in for any one of Scorsese’s filmmaking influences whose work he has restored through his Film Foundation, including Michael Powell, Elia Kazan, Luchino Visconti and, of course, Méliès himself. But surely Scorsese knows that, by the end of Hugo, when Méliès takes the stage and tearfully acknowledges Hugo before a screening of his restored work, that it’s impossible for someone like me to look at Méliès, the great innovator of cinema, without thinking of Scorsese, the wise master of filmmaking who influenced me.

This is the work of a master at the height of his cinematic powers. People who truly love film have, picture after picture, said this exact same thing about Scorsese many times. We said it when The Aviator (2004) soared as the most ambitious, energetic and entertaining Hollywood biopic in years. We said it when The Departed (2006) was no less than the great American tragedy of the 2000s, a masterful return to the gangster picture that held us captivated in our seats. And we’re saying it again for Hugo, a movie that has been surrounded by so much negativity from the first announcement that Scorsese would direct a 3D picture – as if the world’s finest filmmaker, who has never made anything short of a great film, wouldn’t find a way to discover the art in 3D technology and take it to an entirely new level – and not only that, but do it with his most passionate cause as his subject material.

My loyalty to Scorsese is boundless, and I’ve suffered through the lows – throwing things at the television when he unfairly lost Best Director Academy Awards for Gangs of New York and The Aviator to inferior films, listening to pseudo-intellectual hipsters knock on the brilliance of Shutter Island (2010) – and I’ve been with him through the highs. And let me tell you, there is nothing that feels as wonderful as watching the artist you love and defend your entire life receive the praise and admiration he so richly deserves, squashing the cynicism of those who feel his time has past. This is his time. George Méliès, step aside for another master of cinema. Martin Scorsese, take a bow.

The Best Films of 2010

1. The Social Network (David Fincher)

"How does it feel to be

One of the beautiful people?"

David Fincher's The Social Network is the best film of the year. Although the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate who created the website Facebook and subsequently became the youngest billionaire in the world, doesn't sound like material worthy of comparison to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), the comparison is more than justified. Fincher's astounding direction, Aaron Sorkin's brilliant and dense screenplay and the performances - particularly from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg - are all first-rate. The film brilliantly illustrates both Zuckerberg's apathy toward the Harvard social elite and his desire to somehow be a part of their social network - and in the process, the movie, with its kinetic energy and obsessive characters (one of the film's many resemblances to Fincher's finest film, 2007's Zodiac), chronicles the rise of the smartest man in the room and his ascension to power.

In the end, however, The Social Network is astonishingly powerful not simply because it brilliantly illustrates the twenty-first century rise of brains over brawn, but because it gives us a portrait of a talented young man who, despite having taken the entire social experience of college and put it online, will always remain on the outside looking in, strangely alienated from both the real, physical world (the college parties, normal relationships with other human beings) and the virtual world of his own creation. And it is in this way that we understand and empathize with Mark Zuckerberg. Because, by the end of the film, he's still reaching out for that one thing more unattainable than money, social status or five-hundred million online friends - his own personal Rosebud.

2. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)

Blue Valentine is a film that tore my heart into pieces. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance worked for years to get this gritty, Cassavetes-inspired relationship drama made, and his passion for the project is evident in every frame.

Ryan Gosling, who gives the most fearless, heartbreaking performance of any actor this year, and Michelle Williams, who is equally incredible, play a young married couple whose once-thrilling relationship is now slowly disintegrating. And while certainly both characters have their virtues and faults, I must admit that I haven't connected so strongly or felt so deeply for a character in many years as I did with Gosling's Dean, a genuinely decent young man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Blue Valentine resonated strongly with me, and I have a feeling it's because I saw a lot of myself in Dean (there's one scene near the end, in particular, that frustrated me endlessly, as Dean visits his wife at work and is considered 'a threat' by her co-workers). Blue Valentine is the sort of film that feels ripped straight from personal experience - it's as raw and honest a portrait of young love as I've ever seen, and it's a tragedy that will resonate with anyone who has ever been where this film takes us.

3. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is a fascinating character drama, an exciting and almost experimental exploration of the human mind, a reinvention of the horror genre and a dynamic acting showcase for its star, the incredible and still very underrated Leonardo DiCaprio. Shutter Island is also an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated man haunted by his past. Add Teddy Daniels to the list of Scorsese’s tragic and multilayered antiheroes – Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Howard Hughes, Billy Costigan, Rupert Pupkin, Jesus Christ. The film also continues Scorsese's fascination with our understanding of violence (it should be noted that our perception of the lead character's violent actions changes dramatically when watching the film for a second time).

Shutter Island is eerie from the very beginning. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) steadily approach an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Hovering over every scene is a paranoid, post-war anxiety shared explicitly by our protagonist and thoroughly felt and realized by Scorsese. Tensions rise as Teddy recalls horrific memories from liberating a concentration camp during the war, and his suspicions of Nazism and conspiracy by the House of Un-American Activities on the island become our suspicions. The best Scorsese films force the audience to live inside the minds of moderately-to-severely delusional characters weighed down by an enormous and overwhelming guilt. Shutter Island does just that. DiCaprio’s performance is superlative and even more layered than one initially realizes. With this performance, I think it’s safe to say that DiCaprio is the best actor of his generation.

The film is a brilliant melding of film noir, detective mystery and psychological horror, at its very core an exploration of an emotionally disturbed human psyche, disguised as a Hitchcockian thriller that works as both a homage to Scorsese’s favorite psychological thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s while simultaneously elevating itself into something larger and more complicated. When you watch Shutter Island, you're not just watching Scorsese's film – you're watching thousands of classic movies at once, assembled together in a picture conceived by a filmmaker whose encyclopedic knowledge of film history pours into every detail of every frame, so much so that an already-genuinely suspenseful scene of DiCaprio racing up a flight of winding stairs simultaneously serves as a homage to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). The ranking of Shutter Island behind The Social Network and Blue Valentine is arbitrary - in a year of great films, these three are the best.

4. The Fighter (David O. Russell)

The Fighter is one of the rare films that gives me hope that the gritty, character-driven dramas of the 1970s are not completely dead. Four terrific actors – Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo – are given powerful material and, with David O. Russell behind the camera, they are allowed to dynamically explore some intense and raw relationships in a boxing drama that wisely aims for the realism of Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) rather than the hokiness of the Rocky films. Bale gives the male performance of the year, in a brilliant, Method-driven portrayal that ranks alongside the best work of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. In fact, The Fighter is the kind of project that would have attracted the talents of De Niro and Pacino years ago. Unsurprisingly, it took Wahlberg five years to get the movie made in the current Hollywood climate.

There’s a scene between Bale and Leo where, in the midst of a tense confrontation, Bale starts singing The Bee Gees' I Started A Joke, and, slowly, leads Leo into singing along with him. It's the sort of uncomfortably honest scene that you don't see in movies anymore. The Fighter undoubtedly features the best ensemble cast of the year.

5. Biutiful (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)

The films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu have regularly appeared near the top of my past ten-best lists. 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) were two of the decade's most powerful films, and in those films, Inarritu directed Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi in some of their finest performances to date. His latest film, Biutiful, stars Javier Bardem, whose performance is head and shoulders above every other male performance this year, with the exception of Ryan Gosling's work in Blue Valentine and Christian Bale's work in The Fighter. If every Academy member went out and saw this extraordinary film, Bardem would almost certainly win the Best Actor Oscar - he is astonishing. With Biutiful, both Bardem and Inarritu are doing the best work of their already impeccable careers.

6. True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Time just gets away from us.”

There's a moving and unexpectedly emotional resonance in True Grit that I didn't experience fully the first time I saw the film. Joel and Ethan Coen, the most consistently excellent of all American filmmakers, have made a western that stands in brilliant contrast to their nihilistic and grim masterpiece No Country for Old Men. If the latter film captured the disillusionment and brutality of the new West, then True Grit surely captures the heart and the sadness of the old West. Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon give three of the year's best performances, and the screenplay is as dryly hilarious and strangely poetic as the finest of the Coen's works. With the moving hymn Leaning On The Everlasting Arms by Iris DeMent closing the picture, Joel and Ethan Coen offer a softer but no less profound meditation on spirituality than their masterpiece from last year, A Serious Man.

7. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

I suspect the reason I love Darren Aronofsky so much is because, as Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly pointed out, his films remind me of the early work of Martin Scorsese. Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), the best film of that respective year, had a sort of gritty realism that recalled Mean Streets (1973). With Black Swan, Aronofsky once again calls upon an actor to go above and beyond the call of duty, and, just as Mickey Rourke bled for his artful performance in The Wrestler, so does Natalie Portman bleed and suffer here, in a role that should unquestionably win Portman the Best Actress Academy Award. The entire film is disturbingly visceral and haunting, and the supporting cast - particularly Barbara Hershey as a frighteningly possessive mother - is phenomenal. It's the best movie I've ever seen about performance anxiety. In a year of films dealing with psychological trauma, Black Swan may very well remain the finest.

8. Inception (Christopher Nolan)

This breathtakingly original and fascinating film is not a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie or the latest installment in a film franchise. Nolan, who brought gravitas to superhero films with 2005’s Batman Begins and especially 2008’s The Dark Knight, is one of very few commercial American filmmakers taking risks and exploring new territory with his films, and Inception may represent his finest accomplishment yet. The film is a complex and thrilling heist movie, a tragic romance, an exploration of the human psyche and Nolan’s own, seemingly personal commentary on what separates our dreams from our reality. As far as science-fiction thrillers are concerned, Inception is the best of its kind since Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).

Leonardo DiCaprio, further cementing his status as the best actor of his generation, is Cobb, a ‘dream thief’ who specializes in extracting ideas from people’s minds while they are asleep. What distinguishes Inception from nearly every other big-budgeted action picture in recent memory (particularly James Cameron’s Avatar, which seems less impressive with each passing day) is the film’s sheer originality in concept and execution, and, most importantly, Nolan’s use of a dynamic ensemble of actors, including Marion Cotillard’s deeply felt and powerful performance as Mal, Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s sly and ingeniously underplayed point man Arthur, and Cillian Murphy’s troubled tycoon Fischer, a character so compelling that he deserves his own film. When was the last time a science-fiction action picture broke your heart and engaged your brain simultaneously? With Inception, Nolan has set the bar extremely high for summer entertainment.

9. 127 Hours (Danny Boyle)

Danny Boyle's extraordinary 127 Hours is, quite simply, the most intense and gripping theatrical experience I've had in years. And yet the movie is also one of the most uplifting, life-affirming and joyous odes to the human spirit that I've seen since Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle and his star, current Tisch School of the Arts student James Franco, have taken fascinating true-life material and elevated it to great art. This is masterful filmmaking and features a lead performance from Franco that will be talked about for years to come.

10. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

The Ghost Writer is one of the year's great surprises - a thrilling, shocking mystery that represents Roman Polanski's finest work in years. This film opened on the same weekend in New York City as Shutter Island, and it was amazing to sit back and watch as two legendary filmmakers, Scorsese and Polanski, showed their younger peers how to direct deliberately-paced and shocking thrillers. As grim as Chinatown (1974) and every bit as entertaining, The Ghost Writer is the sort of movie that would have made Alfred Hitchcock very proud. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson give fantastic performances.

There were more than ten excellent films this year, however. Here are fifty-one movies that deserve some recognition. Following the list, I've posted some personal awards.

1. The Social Network

2. Blue Valentine

3. Shutter Island

4. The Fighter

5. Biutiful

6. True Grit

7. Black Swan

8. Inception

9. 127 Hours

10. The Ghost Writer

11. Another Year

12. Hereafter

13. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

14. Greenberg

15. Animal Kingdom

16. The Town

17. Life During Wartime

18. The Kids Are All Right

19. Somewhere

20. Fair Game

21. I Love You Philip Morris

22. Rabbit Hole

23. Barney's Version

24. Solitary Man

25. Let Me In

26. Get Low

27. Never Let Me Go

28. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

29. Toy Story 3

30. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

31. The American

32. Inside Job

33. A Letter to Elia

34. Please Give

35. Cyrus

36. The King's Speech

37. Enter the Void

38. Winter’s Bone

39. Casino Jack

40. City Island

41. Stone

42. Leaves of Grass

43. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

44. Mother and Child

45. Green Zone

46. Farewell

47. I Am Love

48. The Killer Inside Me

49. Exit Through the Gift Shop

50. The Other Guys

51. Love and Other Drugs

52. Ondine

53. Harry Brown

54. Machete

Best Picture: The Social Network

Runner-Up: Blue Valentine and Shutter Island

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island

Runner-Up: David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Actor: Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine and Javier Bardem, Biutiful

Runner-Up: Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island

Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Runner-Up: Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine and Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter

Runner-Up: Matt Damon, True Grit

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Runner-Up: Amy Adams, The Fighter and Lesley Manville, Another Year

Best Original Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Inception

Runner-Up: Blue Valentine and Black Swan

Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Runner-Up: Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit

Heading Out For The East Coast, Lord Knows I've Paid Some Dues Gettin' Through

After many months of remaining inactive on this blog, I feel obliged to start writing and updating this online journal once more. Today - September 3rd, 2010 - seems like a fairly appropriate day, as I am currently flying from Austin to New York City for my second year at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. I've had a terrific summer, but before I start reliving my summer activities, I need to revisit my spring semester at NYU. The spring semester, in short, was just as exciting and engaging as my first semester. I completed five courses - Digital Frame and Sequence, Writing the Essay: The World Through Art, Freshman Colloquium, The Language of Film and Introduction to Psychology - and I was extremely lucky to have absolutely terrific professors for these courses. For my Writing the Essay: The World Through Art course, I wrote two extensive essays - one on filmmaker Martin Scorsese and one on Ground Zero, both of which I posted on this blog.

For my Digital Frame and Sequence class - taught by professor Jennifer Rodewald - I wrote and directed several film projects, all of which were shot using still frames on a digital camera. Of the many short movies I made, my favorite of them all remains Homesick, an experimental film I photographed and edited featuring many of my friends. You can watch Homesick below - although I will warn you upfront that it contains some disturbing images.

Homesick - An Experimental Film by Jack Kyser from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

My other favorite film project from the spring semester was my final narrative movie, Vincent, a fifteen-minute drama starring my friends Bobb Barito, Alex Casper and Alexander Fofonoff, and the great composer and lyricist James Merillat (his original musical Radio Eyes premiered at Austin High School two years ago - I played the eccentric detective Inspector Riley). The film - which I wrote, directed and edited - follows a disturbed young man named Vincent (Barito) who is forced to commit violent crimes for his surrogate father (Merillat) in return for a kidney operation. You can watch Vincent below - although I should warn you that the film contains violent images and disturbing content.

Vincent: A Film by Jack Kyser from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

In April, my good friend Morgan Block and I volunteered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it was quite a rewarding experience. I worked my volunteer shifts at the Village East Theatre - just around the corner from my residence hall, Third Avenue North - and I enjoyed the volunteering immensely (although I never saw my hero - Festival Founder Robert De Niro - I did encounter Hope Davis, Aaron Eckhart and other celebrities at the Village East screenings). The festival screened many extraordinary films, including Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me and Nicole Holofcener's Please Give. Volunteers were offered many chances to attend particular screenings - during my time as a volunteer, I saw Neil Jordan's Ondine, John Carney's Zonad, J.B. Ghuman Jr.'s Spork and James Franco's documentary Saturday Night, the very last screening of the festival. Mr. Franco answered questions after the screening of his documentary, a fascinating backstage look at the week-long preparation for Saturday Night Live. The film, interestingly enough, started out as a student project for one of Franco's film classes at NYU, and then expanded into a feature-length documentary.

I was extremely fortunate to catch two plays on Broadway during my last few weeks in New York City - the revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, starring Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johannson, and Martin McDonagh's new play A Behanding in Spokane, starring Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan. The former is my favorite play of all time - a brilliant tragedy with Shakespearean power and allusions to Miller's relationship with director Elia Kazan. The Gregory Mosher-directed production at the Cort Theatre was simply outstanding. As Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, the tragic hero of A View from the Bridge, Liev Schreiber was astonishing - all quiet rage and brooding inner turmoil, a stage performance underacted to perfection (in a role that usually calls for grandiose, over-the-top theatrics). Scarlett Johannson was equally impressive as Catherine, Eddie's niece and object of desire. The latter play, A Behanding in Spokane, was written by one of my favorite playwrights, Martin McDonagh, who wrote the powerful The Pillowman and wrote and directed the great film In Bruges (2008). A dark comedy acted to perfection by its incredible cast, A Behanding in Spokane is a perfect entry in the McDonagh canon.

In April, I also performed in the Tisch New Theatre staged reading of Rachel Lewis' play Consciousness, directed by my friend Alexander Fofonoff. There were many superlative movies released during the spring, as well - my favorites remain Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. The celebrity sightings in New York City are incredible, too - from seeing Mickey Rourke in a West Village frozen yogurt shop to running into Ben Stiller two nights in a row at Broadway shows to shaking Bill Clinton's hand outside a Broadway theater (see picture above), New York City is the place where the stars are everywhere.

This summer, I received a paid internship as a Teaching Assistant at a three-week filmmaking camp at The University of Texas at Austin from the Digital Media Academy, a great organization formed several years ago at Stanford University. I also wrote, directed, edited and starred in Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, a forty-minute film starring my friends (and fellow Red Dragon Players) Haleigh Holt, David Walter, Cora Walters and Mitchell Stephens. Although the film was shot on a mini-DV camera and is noticeably low-budget, I'm still very proud of the work accomplished by my friends and me. There is a link to the first part of the movie below.

Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, Part One from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

To conclude my first blog post in several months, I'd like to leave you with my thoughts on what I consider the best movie of the summer, Christopher Nolan's Inception. This breathtakingly original and fascinating film is not a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie or the latest installment in a film franchise. Nolan, who brought gravitas to superhero films with 2005’s Batman Begins and especially 2008’s The Dark Knight, is one of very few commercial American filmmakers taking risks and exploring new territory with his films, and Inception may represent his finest accomplishment yet. The film is a complex and thrilling heist movie, a tragic romance, an exploration of the human psyche and Nolan’s own, seemingly personal commentary on what separates our dreams from our reality. As far as science-fiction thrillers are concerned, Inception is the best of its kind since Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).

Leonardo DiCaprio, further cementing his status as the best actor of his generation, inches even closer to this year’s Best Actor Oscar (following his heartbreaking performance in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island earlier this year) as Cobb, a ‘dream thief’ who specializes in extracting ideas from people’s minds while they are asleep. What distinguishes Inception from nearly every other big-budgeted action picture in recent memory (particularly James Cameron’s Avatar, which seems less impressive with each passing day) is the film’s sheer originality in concept and execution, and, most importantly, Nolan’s use of a dynamic ensemble of actors, including Marion Cotillard’s deeply felt and powerful performance as Mal, Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s sly and ingeniously underplayed point man Arthur, and Cillian Murphy’s troubled tycoon Fischer, a character so compelling that he deserves his own film. When was the last time a science-fiction action picture broke your heart and engaged your brain simultaneously? With Inception, Nolan has set the bar extremely high for summer entertainment.

Which Would Be Worse, To Live As A Monster Or To Die As A Good Man?

If Paramount Pictures had released Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island last year – the original release date was October 2nd, 2009 – I would have considered the film the best movie of the year. As it stands, the rest of 2010 has a long way to go in terms of matching the quality and effectiveness of Scorsese’s new picture. It’s a fascinating character drama, an exciting and almost experimental exploration of the human mind, a reinvention of the horror genre and a dynamic acting showcase for its star, the incredible and still very underrated Leonardo DiCaprio.

Shutter Island is also an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated man haunted by his past. Add Teddy Daniels to the list of Scorsese’s tragic and multilayered antiheroes – Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Howard Hughes, Billy Costigan, Rupert Pupkin, Jesus Christ. The film also continues Scorsese's fascination with our understanding of violence (it should be noted that our perception of the lead character's violent actions changes dramatically when watching the film for a second time).

It's hard to talk about the film without referring to its powerful and jarring ending, and therefore while I may not explicitly state any major spoilers in the next few paragraphs, I will be making an effort to describe the overarching themes of the movie, which aren’t even fully apparent until the brilliant closing line of the film. For the average moviegoer, Shutter Island is a film to see at least twice; for cineastes, Shutter Island will hold up to countless viewings, offering something new and unexpected with each screening.

Shutter Island is eerie from the very beginning. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) steadily approach an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The year is 1954, and Scorsese and music supervisor Robbie Robertson of The Band (the subject of Scorsese's masterful concert documentary The Last Waltz) subtly incorporate vintage (and sometimes downright disturbing) 1950s music into the sound mix. Once on the island, Daniels and his partner meet with Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who explains to the Marshals that one of the island's patients has mysteriously disappeared overnight. The investigation that ensues is a fascinating exploration of insanity.

Hovering over every scene is a paranoid, post-war anxiety shared explicitly by our protagonist and thoroughly felt and realized by Scorsese. Tensions rise as Teddy recalls horrific memories from liberating a concentration camp during the war, and his suspicions of Nazism and conspiracy by the House of Un-American Activities on the island become our suspicions. The best Scorsese films force the audience to live inside the minds of moderately-to-severely delusional characters weighed down by an enormous and overwhelming guilt. Shutter Island does just that.

DiCaprio’s performance is superlative and even more layered than one initially realizes. With this performance, I think it’s safe to say that DiCaprio is the best actor of his generation. In the past six years, he should have easily won an Academy Award for his performance as Howard Hughes in Scorsese's The Aviator, or as doomed informant Billy Costigan in Scorsese's The Departed (if I had any say, I’d have given him both). His work in Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2006) and Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) proves that his great performances are not limited to Scorsese films.

Kingsley has an extremely complex role, having to simultaneously appear darkly sinister and trustworthy (it’s not unlike the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in 2008's Doubt). Kingsley brilliantly morphs Cawley into a character equal parts teddy bear and creepy doctor - we don't know whether to trust him or run from him. Ruffalo's performance is pitch-perfect, as well, in another tricky role.

Scorsese has once again gathered an extraordinary ensemble, rivaling the acting companies of his previous two non-documentary features (The Aviator and The Departed). Alongside DiCaprio, Ruffalo and Kingsley are some of the finest character actors working today: Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch and Elias Koteas. Each actor brings their own element of spookiness to the film; Lynch, for instance, is cemented in my mind as the likely Zodiac killer in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), and von Sydow is the center of several haunting Ingmar Bergman films, as well as The Exorcist (1973) and Minority Report (2002).

Shot by cinematographer Robert Richardson (who most recently worked his magic in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and deservedly won Academy Awards for his beautiful work on Scorsese’s The Aviator and Oliver Stone's JFK), the movie is impeccably shot and beautifully photographed. The art direction, in particular, creates a surrealistic, almost faux-looking world that is reminiscent of the greenscreen backdrops used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). It's not apparent why this stylistic choice is so remarkably effective until, as you may have guessed, the second viewing.

For all of the comparisons critics have made between Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Shutter Island, Vertigo is actually the film that Shutter Island most closely resembles. In fact, I think a case could be made that Teddy Daniels and Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) are very similar characters. There is an unease throughout the entire film, deliberate disturbances in continuity that some audiences might mistake for sloppy editing. That's simply Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker toying with the audience, making us question the reality we're watching and the reliability of our protagonist. But no matter how delusional our protagonist's vision may be, we still stay with him and him alone until the very end – no different from our immersion into the minds of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (1976) or Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) in Bringing out the Dead (1999).

The film is a brilliant melding of film noir, detective mystery and psychological horror, at its very core an exploration of an emotionally disturbed human psyche, disguised as a Hitchcockian thriller that works as both a homage to Scorsese’s favorite psychological thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s while simultaneously elevating itself into something larger and more complicated. When you watch Shutter Island, you're not just watching Scorsese's film – you're watching thousands of classic movies at once, assembled together in a picture conceived by a filmmaker whose encyclopedic knowledge of film history pours into every detail of every frame, so much so that an already-genuinely suspenseful scene of DiCaprio racing up a flight of winding stairs simultaneously serves as a homage to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948).

And yet most of the details I've mentioned about Shutter Island are not the reasons mainstream audiences will revel in the film's fascinating glory. The movie is, quite simply, very entertaining. I think audiences know they're watching a good movie when they see a Scorsese film, but I suspect they don't know how good the movie really is.

Unfortunately, Shutter Island has come under attack from, as my good friend calls them, the pseudo-intellectual crowd. From what I can gather, the general complaint is that the movie takes itself too seriously dramatically, and that some of the dramatic shifts in the film are laughable. Perhaps this is because Scorsese refuses to compromise his vision by winking at the audience. When discussing The Best Films of the 1990s with Martin Scorsese in early 2000, film critic Roger Ebert notes that at some point in the 1990s, existentialism, "the idea of what we do with our lives," was "replaced by irony, so that everything has quotation marks around it." He then adds, however, that Scorsese's "films are not in quotation marks...they are meant."

And he's absolutely right. Scorsese can’t make an ironic film - a film too afraid to deal head-on with real, palpable human emotion, therefore putting the actions of its characters in huge quotation marks. My favorite films of the past few years don't have ironic quotation marks around their characters, either. I don’t buy movies that do that – it’s a cheap way of pleasing the cynical, highbrow crowd who only accept genuine human emotion in films if it comes from Pixar Animation or a foreign-language film. I love those movies, too, but I haven’t given up on serious American films that aim for high character drama and succeed. I’m talking about Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2003), Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) and now, Shutter Island. These are films that take their characters and their plights seriously.

Every negative review I've read doesn't seem to consider how effective the film is on a visceral level, how strong and forceful the performances are from top to bottom and the powerful manner in which screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis keeps the story grounded in the deep emotional turmoil of its characters. Shutter Island is a real film, the kind they don't make anymore, exceeding the supposed limitations of its genre and offering its audience something challenging and psychologically fascinating. Scorsese doesn't have to make movies anymore - he's already made more masterpieces than any other living filmmaker - but we're lucky that he's still exploring his obsessions in new and inventive ways. Shutter Island should be met with applause, not simply because the film marks the latest work from our finest living filmmaker, but because it's also the best damn movie you'll see this year.

The Auteur: Martin Scorsese

In honor of my cinematic hero, auteur filmmaker Martin Scorsese, I am posting a lengthy essay I wrote about Scorsese, his magnificent films and his influence on me. The paper was written specifically for a Visual Media class I took my junior year of high school. No, today isn't his birthday, but it is the day after Paramount Pictures announced that his latest project, Shutter Island, is being pushed back from an October 2nd release date to next February. Not only does this move my most anticipated film of the year back four months, it also knocks Shutter Island out of this year's Oscar race. Alas, I am very saddened by this news.

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese is the greatest living American director. I won’t hide the fact that I absolutely worship Scorsese and his repertoire of timeless American cinema - the flurry of images, whiplash editing spiraling onscreen from the great Thelma Schoonmaker, his incessantly giddy use of popular music, the intensity with which each shot is prepared and executed - this man is filmmaking.

Above all, the man reveals truths about the human condition that both appall and fascinate me – I could not initially understand why I identified with Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver, 1976) or Jake La Motta (Raging Bull, 1980) but I was nevertheless awestruck by his wizardry in creating sympathy for so many violent and self-loathing characters. Scorsese could easily be called the savior of the antihero; indeed, his films often feature lead protagonists balancing the line between sanity and insanity.

When I think of Scorsese, I think of the great moments that make up his films: Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) punching the prison walls and beating his head against the stone in agony near the end of Raging Bull; Travis Bickle (De Niro), soaked in blood, staring at New York police officers while pathetically placing his index finger against his head pulling an imaginary trigger in Taxi Driver; Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) staring at his tortured image in the mirror as his obsessiveness leads to his demise in The Aviator (2004); the slow-motion, drenched-red entrance of Johnny Boy (De Niro) to Jumpin’ Jack Flash by The Rolling Stones in Mean Streets (1973); and, most recently, the shocking elevator confrontation between Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) in The Departed (2006).

Scorsese has crafted a superb cinematic niche involving conflicted, alienated lead characters who often resort to shocking violence as a means of being ‘accepted’ into a certain society. The morality of these characters is another recurring Scorsese thematic idea; originally interested in joining the Catholic priesthood, Scorsese uses religious undertones and motifs throughout his works, often unintentionally. Note the Christ-like poses that Frank Costello in The Departed and La Motta in Raging Bull emulate upon their ultimate defeat, not to mention the obvious symbolism in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Scorsese’s first masterpiece, Mean Streets (1973), is the story of conflicted New York hoodlum Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and his Catholic guilt as a sinner doomed for Hell. His penance comes in the symbolic representation of Johnny Boy, his dimwitted cousin who owes money all over town. Ultimately, Charlie’s attempts to escape this immoral world are undermined by the chaos caused by Johnny Boy.

Especially interesting in the film is Charlie’s repeated use of flames to burn his finger – as if he were testing the fires of Hell to assure himself that he will be ready for his judgment day. The opening lines of Mean Streets – "You don’t pay for your sins in church. You do it on the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it." – allude to the eventual penance that Charlie must face in the form of Johnny Boy. Scorsese also prominently features one of his most infamous camera angles – the so-called Priests-Eye View, which is not quite a Birds-Eye View shot but, rather, the angle at which a priest would look down upon his sinners.

The visual aura of 1970s New York City – the filth, the scum, the crime – serves as a microcosm for the hell in which many of Scorsese’s antiheroes find themselves spiritually. Certainly used as a visual imprisonment for the hustlers and hoods of Mean Streets, New York City is even more central in the narrative of Taxi Driver (1976), where disillusioned Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle becomes obsessed with the idea of saving angelic women from the evil scum of New York. The whores, junkies, pimps and hustlers all serve as symbols of filth to Travis, and as his nights become lonelier and lonelier, his obsession grows deeper with rescuing women who don’t necessarily want to be rescued - a thematic ode by Scorsese to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).

Taxi Driver is astounding because the film disturbingly depicts the alienation and social ineptitude of the post-Vietnam generation. When Travis goes too far – shooting down a whorehouse in an attempt to save prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) – we are shocked not only because he went there, but most importantly because we went there with him. His delusions of heroism become our delusions.

The film was only the beginning of Scorsese’s obsession with social misfits. After the release of Raging Bull, audiences complained that the antiheroes of Scorsese films were often too violent and brutal for audiences to sympathize with them. His response? The brilliant, under-seen The King of Comedy (1983), where pathetically fame-hungry Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) kidnaps late-night comedy show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). The picture is one of the darkest comedies ever made, as Pupkin's disastrous behavior is eerily similar to the anti-social quirks of Travis Bickle. The King of Comedy doesn't have any explicit violence, but it retains Scorsese's mark - the story of an outsider desperate to be a part of a particular society.

Raging Bull may be Scorsese’s greatest achievement. His idea of placing the camera inside the boxing ring – a technique thought absurd by generic boxing pictures such as Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen) – added an intensity and personal brutality that locks the audience within the blood, sweat and tears of Jake La Motta. From the astounding editing by Schoonmaker to the 1940s soundtrack of Italian favorites, this picture is widely considered one of the ten best films ever made. The ending sequence – as La Motta recites Marlon Brando’s lines from On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan) in a pathetic attempt to bring Shakespearean tragedy to his misery – is as powerful an ending as any motion picture in history.

Scorsese, however, was still generalized as a ‘male-picture’ director who could only work within the confines of an extremely violent piece of material. The antithesis to this argument was presented very early in Scorsese’s career, with his masterful Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975), which won a Best Actress Academy Award for star Ellen Burstyn. The film opens with a beautifully tinted color stock intended as an homage to the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz (1939), and features fine supporting performances from the male costars, including Kris Kristofferson and the brilliant Harvey Keitel.

The personal life of Martin Scorsese sheds a great deal of light onto his cinematic career. Diagnosed with severe asthma as a child, Scorsese was unable to participate in any athletic activities, leaving him with two sanctuaries: the Catholic Church and the local movie theater. Growing up in Little Italy, Scorsese was inspired predominantly by the Neo-Realist Italian filmmakers of the 1960s, endlessly influential in his early works as a film major at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. His first feature film after countless short movies, Who’s That Knocking at my Door? (1969), was a semi-autobiographical feature on growing up in Little Italy. The film also marked Scorsese’s first collaboration with Harvey Keitel, who would later serve as Scorsese’s cinematic alter ego in Mean Streets.

After the fall of the Hollywood studio giants in the 1960s, independent-spirited renegade filmmakers like Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet revolutionized cinema in an unprecedented fashion. Because of the emergence of the American auteur, 1970s cinema remains unparalleled in the complexity and brilliance of it's films. Scorsese especially astounded audiences with his deeply personal sagas of alienated New Yorkers.

But his experimental work in the 1980s was equally compelling, dabbling in the mainstream with The Color of Money (1986), infuriating right-wing Christians with the highly controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and further exploring the mean streets of New York with After Hours (1985).

Based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ presents Jesus Christ (Willem Dafoe) as conflicted and subject to temptation. Despite being a clear work of fiction by a devout Catholic, the film was banned in many regions for presenting Christ as human and flawed. I’d personally like to think of the film as a companion piece to Scorsese’s earlier efforts. There is an undeniable connection between characters as varied as Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta and Jesus Christ – they all fit into the imperfect antihero mold.

In The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese does some of his best work. The film earned him a second Best Director Academy Award nomination (his first being in 1981 for Raging Bull) and is as epically scoped as any Scorsese picture. Every gorgeous frame begging for attention and packed with imagery and symbolism (take special notice of the birds), this picture may very well be Scorsese’s best-looking film. The parallels between Judas (Harvey Keitel) and Joey La Motta (Joe Pesci) in Raging Bull are unmissable. Keitel, by the way, is riveting as Judas.

But the journey of the tortured New York soul is best defined in After Hours, where Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has a rather existential late night in New York City. Never before had Scorsese portrayed New York in a such a bizarre fashion – Paul’s entire experience seems a bit exaggerated and hallucinatory, but that is exactly the intention. Whether viewed as a black comedy or a visually stunning nightmare, After Hours represented a slight departure from the gritty realism of other Scorsese films.

I suppose attention must be paid towards Scorsese’s brilliant, career-defining use of music in his films; no director before him had ever so brilliantly infused popular music as a sort of omnipresent narrator. Mean Streets offers many songs by The Rolling Stones (who, upon viewing Mean Streets, told Scorsese he could use their music free-of-charge for any of his future work) and The Ronettes, whose bubbly Be My Baby is the haunting opening anthem for the street epic. Raging Bull has a classically nuanced soundtrack overseen by Robbie Robertson of The Band (the subject of Scorsese’s incredible 1978 documentary The Last Waltz).

But the crowning champion of Scorsese’s musical madness is Goodfellas (1990); using over forty-two songs throughout the movie (some more than once), Scorsese keeps the tunes coming fast and furiously, most noticeably in the cocaine-fueled final day of freedom for gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), where we feel the high with echoes of Jump into the Fire by Harry Nilsson, Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters, Memo from Turner and Monkey Man by the Stones and What is Life? by George Harrison. The charged camerawork led by the rapidly-changing discography serves as a unique contrast to an earlier scene in the film, perhaps the most powerful, when Scorsese pulls off an infamous tracking shot of Henry leading Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) through the backdoors of the Copacabana, set to the tune of Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals. As the world of the underworld nightlife unfolds right before Henry’s eyes, Scorsese pumps up the volume of the music, and what results is perhaps the best scene in any Scorsese film.

I am often asked what my personal favorite Scorsese film is, and I cannot help but heap the most praise upon Goodfellas. Some claim the film is not as deeply personal as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver; in a sense, they are correct, because Goodfellas is about the gangster lifestyle more than the human psyche. But the need to be accepted into a particular society – a theme circulating throughout all of Scorsese’s work – is the dominant subject of Goodfellas; the Italian mafia takes young Henry Hill under their wing and thirty years later spits him out as an aging Mafioso. There is something very shocking about Henry’s betrayal in Goodfellas when he sells out all of his wiseguy buddies to the Witness Protection Program, but also present is a lamentation on having to leave the very circle that raised him. Scorsese comes back to this idea in The Departed, where young Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is fathered by notorious gangster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and yet, in a Shakespearean act of irony, assumes his identity as a moral police officer and kills Costello by the film's end.

Casino (1995) is a brilliant film, as well. Betrayal comes in the form of wife Ginger (Sharon Stone) and best friend Nicky (Pesci) for casino manager Sam Rothstein (De Niro) in another piece oddly reminiscent of Shakespeare and the Bible. Even in Scorsese’s most ambitious epics (like Casino or Goodfellas), the focus is on the personal tragedy. Take, for instance, The Aviator, which can be interpreted as either a big-budget, glamorous Hollywood homage or as a personal odyssey of self-destruction and insanity. Knowing Scorsese, I think it’s easy to finger point which one is the correct interpretation.

Critics cite the off-putting violence in Goodfellas and Casino as the detracting factor of the respective films, and yet nobody seems to acknowledge that Scorsese is merely presenting things as he sees them. In the interview Scorsese on Taxi Driver and Herrmann by Carmie Amata, Scorsese says the following: “I hate violence, I’ve never ever been in a fight, although I grew up in a very volatile area. That, by the way, is what I tried to get into Mean Streets. But as much as I hate violence, I know that it’s in me, in you, in everyone and I want to explore it. That means the small violences, too. There are a lot of small violences, too. In Taxi Driver they come through in a lot of the dialogue, like when Bobby [De Niro] and Harvey [Keitel] are talking in the doorway for the first time. They’re playing with each other when Bobby asks him about the young prostitute [Jodie Foster], but there’s a very violent undertone when they talk about doing it with girls. There’s such a degrading violence about the way those two human beings are talking about each other and about other human beings.”

Further on in the Amata interview, Scorsese states the following: “No matter what you’ve learned in terms of dramatic structure and all, you ultimately make a film on your own. No school can teach you how to make a film. In other words, you have to know who you are, or you can’t really have your film mean anything to you, or to anyone else. Knowing who you are is a major necessity, and once you’ve fulfilled that requirement, you’ve got to make a picture the best way you know how and you can’t really think in terms of how to make it palatable for everyone.”

Such a quote is an attribution to the level of personal filmmaking that Scorsese exemplifies. In an age of impersonal direction controlled by money-hungry studios, this interview harkens back to the age in which Scorsese, Coppola and Altman were in charge of the system and created profoundly moving works that worked on meaningful levels. The above quote is in specific reference to Taxi Driver, but Scorsese might

as well have been talking about his 1999 feature Bringing Out The Dead, scripted by Paul Schrader and starring Nicolas Cage in a performance that echoes De Niro’s work as Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. Appropriately, the picture is about a wanderer in the nighttime streets of New York City, EMS ambulance driver Frank (Cage) who is haunted by the ghosts of the souls he couldn’t save. Frank, a failed savior of the night, struggles to stay awake and make connections with living people. He is more successful socially than, say, Travis Bickle, but just barely. Loneliness is never better depicted than in a Scorsese-Schrader collaboration, and the triumvirate of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Bringing Out The Dead are direct proof.

Scorsese never fails to bring an added dimension to his films. Even when remaking a seemingly conventional horror film like Cape Fear (1991), he drifts into a flawed character-study analysis that is nothing short of fascinating. In Cape Fear particularly, notice the dimensions he adds to the Nick Nolte character. Who is truly the bad guy in the film? Maybe Max Cady (Robert De Niro), maybe Nolte.

I fear perhaps his most misunderstood film is his 2006 triumph The Departed, which deservedly earned Scorsese his first Best Director Academy Award after countless nominations. Yes, the picture is startling and thrilling within the terms of an engrossing thriller, but more than anything The Departed is a film about two men literally hiding themselves within false personas. It is a film about identity and the very thin line between cops and criminals, and therapists, for that matter. On a side note, the movie is second only to Goodfellas as the fastest 150 minutes ever captured on film.

Perhaps through referencing so many of his films, I can provide an answer as to why I am obsessed with Scorsese and how emotionally attached I feel to his work as an auteur. Certainly, his physical limitations and obsession with expressing oneself through film appeal to my similar case, but even more so, here is a man who talks endlessly about his ideas and seems as unconfident about his work and lifestyle today as he was in 1983.

In the appropriately titled interview Martin Scorsese: Who the Hell Wants to Make Other Pictures If You Can’t Have a Relationship with a Woman? by Roger Ebert, I find myself smiling but also nodding. “The amount of rejection in this film [The King of Comedy] is horrifying,” Scorsese says in the article. “There are scenes I almost can’t look at. There’s a scene where De Niro is told, I hate you! and he nods and responds, Oh, I see, right, you don’t want to see me again! I made the movie during a very painful period in my life. I was going through the Poor Me routine. And I’m still very lonely. Another relationship has broken up. I’m spending a lot of time by myself now. I go home and watch movies on video and stay up all night and sleep all day. If I didn’t have to work I’d sleep all the time. I’ve never had such a long period when I’ve been alone.”

Ebert asserts that Scorsese’s remark “gives an additional dimension to The King of Comedy, a movie about a man so desperately isolated that even his goals do not include a relationship with another human being.” Ebert does, however, come to the consolation that “out of his pain, however, [Scorsese] has directed some of the best films ever made about loneliness and frustration.”

Since that 1983 interview, of course, Scorsese has found further pain and further rejection, but also success and love and children. I admire the man, though, because throughout even his lowest periods he has created artwork out of his tragedy. And his tragedy has been our cinematic reward. As an aspiring artist and active social misfit, I can only hope to accomplish something beautiful out of my personal failures. Because when you combine Howard Hughes minus the aviation, Jake La Motta minus the boxing and Travis Bickle minus the homicidal vengeance, you get something like Martin Scorsese. You also get me.