My Favorite Cinema in Austin - The Regal Arbor at Great Hills

My favorite cinema in Austin, the Regal Arbor at Great Hills, has closed permanently as of last Friday, after 19 years of showing a wide range of art-house titles you couldn’t catch anywhere else in town. I’ve kept a list of every theatrical movie I’ve seen since 2001, and the Arbor is by far the theater I’ve visited most in my life (I estimate I’ve seen several hundred films there over the course of the last two decades). This was a very important place for me – a theater that helped guide me as a young person to the varied offerings out there beyond the standard multiplex fare, and ultimately made a huge contribution to my love of cinema.

The theater was formerly the Great Hills 8 (which was a childhood staple – I had my seventh and ninth birthday parties there, for screenings of Air Bud and Inspector Gadget, respectively). After being closed for a few years, the cinema re-opened in 2003 and announced itself as Austin’s new art-house beacon. I will never forget the stunning line-up of new releases playing near the time of the Arbor’s opening – Mystic River, Lost in Translation, 21 Grams, House of Sand and Fog, Big Fish, In America, Monster. At any other theater in Austin at the time (aside from the Dobie), you’d be lucky if one of these films was playing. But the Arbor was a refuge for adults interested in serious cinema, and it often felt like you could walk into any one of their eight screens and a fantastic movie would await you.

As a teenager, I quite liked that I was often the youngest person at the Arbor. I remember seeing Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004) with my mom at a packed opening weekend screening, and sitting behind us was my dentist and his wife, who seemed rather amused that I was there. In those days, I typically went to the movies with my friends two or three times per week – but we went to other theaters. The Arbor was a different place altogether. It’s where I went to feel like an adult, to watch a different kind of cinema, and it helped shape me into a person interested in real movies about real things.

I’ve had too many memorable cinema experiences at the Arbor to count, but I’ll try to list a few: going by myself to see Shattered Glass (2003) and being blown away by a performer I had never seen before – Peter Sarsgaard; waiting in a long line to see Brokeback Mountain (2005), genuinely impressed by the number of Texans eager to see the film; hearing the audible gasp of the audience as Martin Sheen’s body falls from the rooftop during The Departed (2006); being completely devastated by Into the Wild (2007), which marked one of the first times I can remember actually crying in the cinema; the lump in my throat as The Wrestler (2008) cuts to black and the Springsteen song begins; a double feature of The Hurt Locker and Moon (both 2009); the emotionally wrought experience of seeing Blue Valentine (2010) for the first time; opening night of The Tree of Life (2011), where an audience made up of folks who had worked on the film erupted in applause as the end credits rolled; a packed New Year’s Eve screening of Silver Linings Playbook (2012), during which the movie somehow hit me even harder than the previous three times I had seen it; numerous showings of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013), which was the kind of intimate heartbreaker that fit perfectly at the Arbor; and a spur-of-the-moment late night screening of Jojo Rabbit (2019) with my mom over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I’ll never forget that Jojo Rabbit experience, in particular. As the film ended and the lights came up in the auditorium, my mom and I turned to look at each other. Our eyes were welled up with tears, but we also had grins on our faces – now that was a movie. That special moment between us is indicative of the power of the Arbor – sometimes, if you went at an odd time of day and were among the only people in a large auditorium, it felt like the film was speaking right to you. 

When I was home from college the summers of 2010 and 2011, I practically lived at the Arbor. My mom and I loved to go to double features, often picking one movie we were dying to see and one we knew little about. This led to us seeing films like Beginners, Meek’s Cutoff, Everything Must Go, Another Earth, Terri, Submarine, The Guard, Tabloid, Page One: Inside the New York Times, The Conspirator, The Future – and that was all just the summer of 2011.

In recent years, the Arbor was unique in that it never catered to what Paul Schrader has described as “club cinema.” Although I have great fondness for the Alamo Drafthouse and other dine-in cinemas of its ilk, the Arbor was just a regular old theater – no frills, no waiters wandering around during the movie, no open bar (though they did eventually serve alcohol at the concession stand).

Two weeks ago today, my mom and I went to an Arbor double-feature of See How They Run and Vengeance. We had no idea these would be the last films we saw at the beloved cinema, and I can imagine the employees were blindsided by the news – one person at the box office that day matter-of-factly said, “We aren’t going anywhere.” Exactly one week later, they were shut down.

Everything about the closure was unceremonious – just a short email from Regal saying the cinema was closed. No fanfare, no chance to say goodbye, no final screening for its loyal customers of nearly two decades. Everyone deserved better. My heart goes out to the people who worked there – particularly Brenda, who was the Arbor’s long-time ticket-taker. When you entered through the Arbor doors and received a friendly greeting from Brenda, you were immediately welcomed back into a home away from home.

The pandemic could not have been easy for the Arbor. When it reopened briefly in September of 2020, I saw two films there – The Personal History of David Copperfield and The Last Shift. Both screenings were nearly vacant. While other cinemas remained open (and were similarly sparsely attended), the Arbor closed its doors a few weeks later, not opening again until May of 2021. Since its second re-opening, I’ve tried to see as many movies there as possible, but the adult audiences that the Arbor caters to simply aren’t returning to the cinema in droves.

It’s not for a lack of new releases – last fall and winter featured a murderer’s row of incredible first-run titles at the Arbor, including Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, West Side Story, C’mon C’mon, Parallel Mothers, House of Gucci, Mass, Belfast, The French Dispatch and Spencer, just to name a few. Nevertheless, you’d be hard-pressed to find more than 15 people in the cinema at a given time (though, to be fair, I often went at odd times to avoid big crowds).

Unlike other institutions that have closed during the pandemic, I don’t have any regrets regarding my recent attendance at the Arbor – by my count, I’ve been there at least twenty times since their re-opening. But I do wish I had a chance to say a formal goodbye – to spend a day entirely at the cinema, seeing as many films as possible.

What will become of the now-shuttered cinema? Considering the trend of Austin stripping away the local establishments that brought people here in the first place, I’m thinking a bunch of luxury condos. But the optimist in me wants to believe another cinema can take its place, just as the Arbor replaced Great Hills 8 (and, similarly, AFS Cinema replaced the old Lincoln 3 Theater). Given the way things are going in this town, though, it’s unlikely. But, as Bruce says, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact… but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”

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 Top 100 Movies of the Decade

I’ve seen many movies in the past decade – an almost embarrassing number, actually – and now, at the end of the decade, I have compiled what I believe are the 100 best movies, in preferential order. Of course, the rankings are fairly trivial – I can’t really argue that #36 is superior to #37 – but the list gives you an idea, anyway, of the movies that resonate with me, the ones that have made an impact on my life.

This is my list. Some people may laugh at some of the choices, but no matter – I believe in the greatness of these films and, in one way or another, each of the movies on the list has changed me. Inevitably, this list will change in the years to come, as I will certainly come to appreciate some films in a different way, and my opinions of others will fall.

But for today, at the very least, here are the 100 best movies of the decade, 2000-2009. By Jack Kyser.

1. The Departed (2006; Martin Scorsese)

2. Mystic River (2003; Clint Eastwood)

3. No Country for Old Men (2007; Joel and Ethan Coen)

4. The Aviator (2004; Martin Scorsese)

5. Lost in Translation (2003; Sofia Coppola)

6. Gangs of New York (2002; Martin Scorsese)

7. There Will Be Blood (2007; Paul Thomas Anderson)

8. Minority Report (2002; Steven Spielberg)

9. Brokeback Mountain (2005; Ang Lee)

10. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001; Wes Anderson)

11. Adaptation (2002; Spike Jonze)

12. About Schmidt (2002; Alexander Payne)

13. Zodiac (2007; David Fincher)

14. Munich (2005; Steven Spielberg)

15. Almost Famous (2000; Cameron Crowe)

16. Wonder Boys (2000; Curtis Hanson)

17. Into the Wild (2007; Sean Penn)

18. I’m Not There (2007; Todd Haynes)

19. The Wrestler (2008; Darren Aronofsky)

20. A Serious Man (2009; Joel and Ethan Coen)

21. Million Dollar Baby (2004; Clint Eastwood)

22. Sideways (2004; Alexander Payne)

23. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004; Michel Gondry)

24. Inglourious Basterds (2009; Quentin Tarantino)

25. 21 Grams (2003; Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu)

26. Milk (2008; Gus Van Sant)

27. Memento (2001; Christopher Nolan)

28. City of God (2002; Fernando Meirelles)

29. The Dark Knight (2008; Christopher Nolan)

30. Children of Men (2006; Alfonso Cuaron)

31. Up in the Air (2009; Jason Reitman)

32. Collateral (2004; Michael Mann)

33. Mulholland Drive (2001; David Lynch)

34. Slumdog Millionaire (2008; Danny Boyle)

35. 25th Hour (2002; Spike Lee)

36. Michael Clayton (2007; Tony Gilroy)

37. Capote (2005; Bennett Miller)

38. Syriana (2005; Stephen Gaghan)

39. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006; Clint Eastwood)

40. Babel (2006; Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu)

41. Synecdoche, New York (2008; Charlie Kaufman)

42. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007; Andrew Dominik)

43. The Good Shepherd (2006; Robert De Niro)

44. Black Hawk Down (2001; Ridley Scott)

45. American Splendor (2003; Robert and Sheri Springer Bergman)

46. Crazy Heart (2009; Scott Cooper)

47. Revolutionary Road (2008; Sam Mendes)

48. The Hurt Locker (2009; Kathryn Bigelow)

49. Road to Perdition (2002; Sam Mendes)

50. House of Sand and Fog (2003; Vadim Perelman)

51. Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004; Quentin Tarantino)

52. Traffic (2000; Steven Soderbergh)

53. Shattered Glass (2003; Billy Ray)

54. Far From Heaven (2002; Todd Haynes)

55. Little Children (2006; Todd Field)

56. United 93 (2006; Paul Greengrass)

57. Before Sunset (2004; Richard Linklater)

58. Match Point (2005; Woody Allen)

59. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007; Sidney Lumet)

60. Monster (2003; Patty Jenkins)

61. The Quiet American (2002; Philip Noyce)

62. The Pianist (2002; Roman Polanski)

63. Matchstick Men (2003; Ridley Scott)

64. Little Miss Sunshine (2006; Jonathan Davis and Valerie Faris)

65. Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005; George Clooney)

66. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008; David Fincher)

67. Walk the Line (2005; James Mangold)

68. Rachel Getting Married (2008; Jonathan Demme)

69. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000; Joel and Ethan Coen)

70. Ghost World (2001; Terry Zwigoff)

71. The White Ribbon (2009; Michael Haneke)

72. Passing Strange: The Movie (2009; Spike Lee)

73. Gosford Park (2001; Robert Altman)

74. Precious (2009; Lee Daniels)

75. A Beautiful Mind (2001; Ron Howard)

76. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003; Peter Weir)

77. Punch Drunk Love (2002; Paul Thomas Anderson)

78. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006; Tommy Lee Jones)

79. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009; Wes Anderson)

80. Finding Neverland (2004; Marc Forster)

81. The Fog of War (2003; Errol Morris)

82. Hotel Rwanda (2004; Terry George)

83. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001; Joel and Ethan Coen)

84. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007; Julian Schnabel)

85. Frost/ Nixon (2008; Ron Howard)

86. Sin City (2005; Robert Rodriguez)

87. American Gangster (2007; Ridley Scott)

88. This is England (2007; Shane Meadows)

89. The Squid and the Whale (2005; Noah Baumbach)

90. The Pledge (2001; Sean Penn)

91. (500) Days of Summer (2009; Marc Webb)

92. Shine a Light (2008; Martin Scorsese)

93. A Single Man (2009; Tom Ford)

94. About a Boy (2002; Paul Weitz)

95. Public Enemies (2009; Michael Mann)

96. Insomnia (2002; Christopher Nolan)

97. Burn After Reading (2008; Joel and Ethan Coen)

98. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005; Shane Black)

99. The Last King of Scotland (2006; Kevin MacDonald)

100. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004; Wes Anderson)

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.

I Think This Just Might Be My Masterpiece

Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is quite possibly the best film Tarantino has ever directed, even when considering his masterpiece Pulp Fiction (1994), which is one of my favorite films of all time, and the absolutely brilliant Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill Volume One and Two (2003, 2004). After catching the 11:30 AM screening with my girlfriend Anne and her brother Jamie, I tried to pinpoint the last time I felt such unadulterated joy and cinematic delight while watching a movie.

The excitement of watching The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) for the first time comes to mind, but I don't think I've really seen something with the same raw energy and gleeful excitement found in Inglorious Basterds since Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006). I saw The Departed five times in theaters alone; something tells me I'll be going back to see Inglorious Basterds again.

Christoph Waltz, who plays the despicable yet oddly fascinating Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, has his name written on this year's Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (after winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for his incredible performance). Tarantino's labyrinth screenplay, which introduces and employs dozens of memorable characters, is only partially devoted to the tale of the Basterds, the Jewish-American rogue soldiers on a mission to kill and scalp every Nazi they can find in France. Instead of filming a traditional revenge movie, Tarantino has made a distinctly European picture full of fascinating, three-dimensional characters who are the unsuspecting stars of a spaghetti-western-turned-war picture.

Tarantino holds back on the relentless violence his younger audiences will certainly crave, in favor of a terrificly-written series of events in which characters meet each other, discuss film and play games, and are eventually subject to very brief outbreaks of violence. It's not that different from the structure of Pulp Fiction (although Inglorious Basterds is told in chronological order).

Brad Pitt has impressed me once again as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the head of the Jewish Basterds, with a thick Southern accent and a serious problem with the Nazi Party. Pitt's performance is both wildly comical and seriously frightening; it's worth noting that Pitt has given brilliant performances in uniformly superb movies for the past few years, including Babel (2006, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik), Burn After Reading (2008, Joel and Ethan Coen) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, David Fincher). Bravo to actors like Pitt and George Clooney who use their star power to make bold and daring films.

Costars Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Til Schweiger and even Mike Myers deliver excellent performances in the scenes which ultimately lead to the inevitably blood-soaked finale, in which the Jewish people get their revenge against the Nazi Party at the film premiere of a German propaganda movie.

Aside from writing and directing one of the most entertaining and joyous odes to cinema ever put onscreen, Tarantino has also crafted a film that is a rumination on the wonderful power of cinema to destroy evil forces and change the course of history. If there's a better message to be found in a motion picture this year, I'd like to hear about it.

With apologies to Public Enemies (Michael Mann) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), Inglorious Basterds is the best film I've seen this year. To hell with the fact that Tarantino has rewritten history - I think this just might be his masterpiece.

Tomorrow I will write about my extreme disgust regarding Paramount Pictures' decision to move the release date of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island from October 2nd to next February. Martin Scorsese is my man, and I don't appreciate this release date change (unless, of course, Scorsese himself requested the change). The absence of Shutter Island in this year's fall movie calendar leaves me without much investment in any of the other new releases this fall (other than Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, and Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man). Perhaps Inglorious Basterds will remain as my #1 film of the year, after all.

Nostalgia and Goodbye Bolton Eckert

Tonight, I attended the fourth dance party in the past year held by my good friend Cora Walters, who will be a freshman at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in the fall. Cora and I starred in countless productions together as Red Dragon Players at Austin High, from Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden (as Norman and Sarah) to George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (as Undershaft and Lady Britomart). She is an incredibly smart and well-read young woman who has no problem with being completely pretentious in taste, which is probably why we get along so well.

Among the many attendees were my beautiful girlfriend Anne Goode, countless theater buddies from Austin High, and four of my best male friends - Bolton Eckert, Matt Potter, Lucas Loredo and Austin Kingsbery.

On the midnight car ride home in my 1988 Ford Bronco II, Bolton and I had an unusually nostalgic conversation about our friendship, which began in fourth grade at Casis Elementary School, and the many tragedies and celebrations that have come our way in recent years - the death of my father in 2002, which exposed nearly one-hundred fifth-graders to their first real funeral service; the suicide of two classmates, Blake Theriot and Ian McCormick (both hangings), in 2007; a tragic car wreck killing classmates Audrey Ducote, a lovely human being and one of my past girlfriends, and Lauren Hoffman in 2008; and the suicide of our friend's father earlier this year.

Why were we discussing such depressing matters on the way back to his house after a cheery 1980s dance party? I believe the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia was weighing heavily on Bolton; he leaves in only one day for his first year at Texas Christian University. He is on the brink of leaving his life as he knows it behind, something I can avoid facing for another two weeks - something that, I should note, I do not want to face. But his sadness was a forewarning of what I will be experiencing very soon.

I believe there is something very powerful and profound about experiencing great joy and great pain with a certain person over a number of years - a bond develops separate from any preexisting friendship - and that is exactly the sort of bond Bolton and I share. From the aforementioned tragedies to the much brighter times - the advance screening for The Departed (2006), a film that would soon become our cinematic obsession; our stay at Harvard University, where we shot and edited short films at a summer camp with The New York Film Academy; trips to everywhere from New York to Colorado - he is a friend with whom I have shared many important experiences.

Before he leaves for TCU, we are holding a screening tomorrow at his house of A Family of Sharks, a forty-five minute film I directed my freshman year of high school starring, among others, Bolton and Matt. The film, which is actually quite impressive considering my age and the production equipment available at the time, is a testament to these better days. Also in attendance at the low-key screening will be my girlfriend Anne, who has never seen the movie, and Matt and his girlfriend, Rebekah Yurco. I am looking forward to watching the movie, but I am not looking forward to Bolton's departure.

I will be posting many more goodbyes in the coming days, as my best friends depart for their first, second, or third year in college. I will also write essays on my wonderful experiences with The Red Dragon Players and at Austin High School in general. Why? Nostalgia. Even someone as critical of cheap sentimentality in Hollywood movies as I am must admit to sometimes getting very emotional about the good ole days.

Incidentally, Bolton's relative is the legendary, Oscar-winning playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who sadly passed away at the age of 93 this past March. Because of the efforts of Bolton and his family, I had the chance to meet Mr. Foote on several occasions, including at his 90th birthday party in New York City in 2006, and talk to him in great detail about my ambitions in acting, writing, and directing. Mr. Foote, who won Oscars for writing To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man From Atlanta (1995), kindly wrote me a letter of recommendation last October that I was able to send to colleges. His incredible influence and support of young artists will be the topic of a later post.