And The Leaves That Are Green Turn To Brown

It's hard to believe that it's been an entire month since I moved back to New York City - it really does seem just like yesterday when my mother, grandmother and I arrived in the city and I moved into my new room at NYU's Coral Tower. Labor Day weekend, the weekend before classes officially started, my family and I saw the Off-Broadway production of Paul Weitz's new play, Trust, starring Zach Braff, Sutton Foster, Bobby Cannavale and Ari Graynor, and the Barrow Street Theatre's revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Both productions were outstanding - Weitz's play was an actor's showcase for Braff and his costars, and Wilder's play was as devastating as ever in David Cromer's brilliantly minimalist production.

Labor Day weekend was also a chance to reunite with my friends from NYU. Luckily, I have been spending just as much time this year with these great people as I did last year. My buddy Bobb Barito and I share a room together at Coral Tower - and we've already played host to screenings of Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), among others - and my friend Morgan Block lives just a few minutes away near Union Square. I spend an extraordinary amount of time with my pals Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff and Ben Dewey, as we operate in a rotating crew for my Sight and Sound: Film class, which meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:00 A.M. to 5:50 P.M. For this production class, taught by the incredible instructor Laszlo Santha, our crew shoots a total of twenty short movies on 16MM black-and-white reversal film with an Arriflex 16S camera during the semester. Every student writes and directs five films, works as a crew member on all other projects, and edits their own films by hand in the Steenbeck lab at the Tisch School of the Arts. In other words, this course is the opportunity of a lifetime. Up until this year, my filmmaking experience has only been with digital cameras - thankfully, NYU still grants students the opportunity to work with actual film and shoot some very 'old-school-style' projects.

The process of shooting on actual film is relentlessly stressful, but it's also extremely rewarding. There is a beauty to the black-and-white reversal film that simply cannot be captured with a digital camera. My crew and I finished shooting my first project yesterday on Ninth Avenue and Ganesvoort Street, and this next week I will spend most of my time in the Steenbeck lab at Tisch, editing and splicing my film and preparing the final cut for the class screening next week. My assignment was to shoot a chase sequence, and, with the help of my friends and talented actors Bobb Barito and Mike Cheslik, shoot a chase sequence we certainly did.

Two weekends ago, I took a day trip with some friends to Port Washington, New York, a town on the North Shore of Long Island where my friend Morgan Block calls home. Morgan invited my friends and me to have lunch at her house (her mother made some delicious Challach French Toast for lunch) and celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Interestingly enough, Port Washington is the town where Daisy Buchanan lives in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - in fact, there is even a house in Port Washington that likely served as Fitzgerald's inspiration for Daisy's East Egg home.

In the past few weeks, there have also been a number of very exciting events I have attended on the NYU campus. On September 21st, my friend Jeremy Keller invited me to the Season Premiere of HBO's comedy series Bored to Death at NYU's Skirball Center. At the premiere, guests included series stars Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and Oliver Platt, as well as series creator/ producer Jonathan Ames. After an introduction from Ames, Skirball screened the first two episodes of the new season - and although I had admittedly never watched the series before, I must admit that Bored to Death offers a great deal of laughs. On September 29th, Morgan and I attended the Global Poverty Project's 1.4 Billion Reasons presentation at the Skirball Center, hosted by actor Hugh Jackman. During the two-hour event, Jackman and Global Poverty Project founder Hugh Evans discussed numerous ways that extreme poverty can be eliminated from the globe. It was a fascinating presentation, and Jackman's presence drew the attention of a large crowd to this very important issue.

On September 22nd, I went on a tour of the Lower East Side Community Gardens with the Tisch Dean's Scholars group. Our tour guide, Mr. Howard Brandstein, gave us a fascinating history of the Community Gardens and joined us afterwards for some coffee and dessert. The Tisch Dean's Scholar group, led by the great Professor Chris Chan Roberson, has organized many fascinating events for the semester, and I am honored to spend time with my fellow scholars and the great professors who sponsor the activities. This Wednesday, the group is going on a tour of The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and I am very much looking forward to that experience.

The fall movie season has started off quite nicely with a series of outstanding features, both mainstream and independent, playing in theaters right now. Anton Corbijn's The American is a thriller so uniquely quiet, thoughtful and European that I am almost in disbelief that it is a mainstream Hollywood release. I have a feeling most American audiences simply don't know how to react to this picture, and it's a pity. In the 1970s, this sort of expertly crafted art thriller would have been the norm. Corbijn and star George Clooney deserve high praise for daring to even make The American - it's one of the riskier films I've seen this year, and one of the best. On the other side of the cinematic spectrum is Robert Rodriguez's explosively entertaining Machete, starring Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez and, my hero, Robert De Niro. I've been looking forward to seeing this radical, hilarious and unabashedly violent exploitation picture ever since my friend Steve White worked as the Location Manager on the film, and I'm happy to report that it's tremendous fun.

On September 18th, I caught a screening of Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton in a dual role as identical twins, one a college philosophy professor and the other a stoner criminal. Norton is better than ever, and Nelson has more on his mind - regarding philosophy, intellectualism and marijuana - than is initially apparent. Leaves of Grass is a funny and insightful piece of cinema that deserves more publicity and a much larger audience. After the screening at the Village East Cinema, both Norton and Nelson came out into the audience for a post-film Q&A. It was fascinating to hear Norton, one of the best actors of his generation, and Nelson, a fantastic actor - Minority Report (2002), Syriana (2005), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) - and filmmaker - The Grey Zone (2001) - discuss this independent project that was very close to both of their hearts.

The fall movie season officially exploded with the release of Ben Affleck's superb crime drama The Town. The writing, the direction and the performances - particularly from Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper and Affleck - are simply outstanding. On September 24th, one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Oliver Stone, released his latest film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I've heard various complaints about this picture (particularly regarding the ending), but perhaps I'm too biased in my favoritism for Stone to really agree with any of the criticism. There's something so unapologetically sincere, ambitious and absolutely nuts about Stone's filmmaking style that I can't help but admire each and every project he tackles, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is his finest work in the past ten years. It's relentlessly entertaining and surprisingly sentimental, and Manhattan has never looked better - or more corrupt - than in Stone's latest vision. Frank Langella, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan and, of course, Michael Douglas stand out among the very talented ensemble.

The cinematic elephant in the room is David Fincher's The Social Network, which stands alongside Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island as the best film I've seen this 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.

On that note, I will depart for the evening. If you haven't yet checked out The American, Machete, Leaves of Grass, The Town, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and especially The Social Network, then I recommend you do so. Until next time, I'll leave you with a list of highly recommended movies I caught in cinemas over the summer in Austin. Here they are: Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, David Michod's Animal Kingdom, Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Brian Koppelman's Solitary Man, Aaron Schneider's Get Low, Lee Unkrich's Toy Story 3, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, Jay Duplass' Cyrus, Nicole Holofcener's Please Give, Raymond De Felitta's City Island, Christian Carion's Farewell, Ricki Stern's Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child, Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, Adam McKay's The Other Guys and Daniel Barber's Harry Brown.

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.

Just When You Thought I'd Have Nothing More To Say On Scorsese...

Note: The following piece is an essay I wrote for my fifth and final progression paper for my class Writing the Essay: Art and the World at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Thank you to my terrific professor, Ms. Olivia Birdsall.

In the climatic bloodbath of the film Taxi Driver (1976), deranged taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) enters a Manhattan whorehouse and murders three men in his attempt to save the twelve-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster). After first murdering the pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) on the steps of the apartment building, Travis ascends upstairs into the hellish apartment building and simultaneously descends into madness. The color in the frame is desaturated, lending a sickening, ethereal nature to the whorehouse. The rooms appear so grimy and filthy that the audience actually wants Travis to clean up the mess, despite the fact that Travis is acting on his own delusions. As an armed man shoots Travis from behind, our experience of the violence is heightened by extreme slow motion; we see the violence the same way Travis sees it. Finally, as Travis busts into the room where Iris is entertaining a client, Travis murders the client and exhaustedly collapses on the couch in the room. He puts his gun to his neck and pulls the trigger, but there aren’t any bullets left. As Travis drops the gun and lies back on the couch, bloodied and wounded and drenched in blood, the camera looks down upon him using the Priest’s Eye View angle – a camera angle more or less invented by director Martin Scorsese, the angle at which a priest would look down upon his congregation – and takes pity on Travis, a fallen antihero, in a scene that is very similar to boxer Jake La Motta’s Christ crucifixion pose upon his defeat in the boxing ring in Raging Bull (1980).

This oddly empathetic ending to Taxi Driver (1976), a film that many have deemed a dangerous and demented picture, defines the personal cinema of director Martin Scorsese, who sees deranged Vietnam veteran and New York City taxi driver Bickle not as a villain necessarily, but as a misunderstood antihero. Traditional Hollywood movies would have Travis die at the film’s end (although surely no traditional Hollywood filmmaker would tackle this subject matter). But Scorsese instead gives Travis a relatively happy ending – after the bloodbath, Travis is finally crowned as a ‘hero cabbie,’ a man who stood up against the filth and scum of the New York streets. Scorsese ends the film with a reconciliation between Travis and Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), the woman that he loves but from whom he has completely alienated himself (although it should be noted that many critics and theorists debate whether the ending represents Travis’ delusions of grandeur as he lays dying or whether the ending is meant to be taken literally).

The juxtaposition of religious imagery with the scum of New York City street life should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Scorsese’s youth; raised by working-class parents in the Bowery, Scorsese was surrounded as a child by Catholicism and, before deciding to enter film school at New York University, he considered becoming a priest in the Catholic Church. His encounters with both the church and the mean street life lends itself especially well to stories of guilt-ridden antiheroes paying penance for their behavior in an urban setting. In the case of Taxi Driver, Scorsese broke completely new ground with his story of a non-traditional antihero who walks a fine line between sanity and insanity because, unlike other filmmakers, Scorsese demanded that the viewer empathize and understand things from the antihero’s point-of-view. Many filmmakers before Scorsese had made films about psychotic human beings (Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho comes to mind), but no director had ever followed a delusional character so intimately and intensely as Scorsese. Scorsese’s cinema is a cinema of isolation and loneliness, films preoccupied with the mindset and behavior of God’s lonely man, as Travis Bickle refers to himself. There is nothing particularly heroic about Scorsese’s antiheroes other than that they are human beings and suffer from the human condition.

Scorsese’s preoccupations and values come through in wildly different films in very different ways. In Bringing out the Dead (1999), the story of frazzled, sleep-deprived EMS driver Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), Scorsese uses the red cross of the hospital ambulances as symbolism for a holy cross that brings a religious weight to the roles of the paramedics, and therefore every time Pierce loses a patient in the back of his ambulance, he has failed to save his fellow man. Scorsese’s breakout feature, the semi-autobiographical film Mean Streets (1973), is the story of a young hoodlum, Charlie (Keitel) in Little Italy who struggles between his loyalties to the mob and the Catholic Church. Guilt and penance play similar roles in this film as in Bringing out the Dead, as Charlie repeatedly holds his hand over open flames as punishment for his sins – he must test the fires of Hell in order to make sure that he is ready to suffer when the appropriate time comes. Other films, such as The King of Comedy (1983) and the aforementioned Raging Bull and Taxi Driver are primarily concerned with deranged loners and their inability to make a lasting connection, particularly with women. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Scorsese’s works are intensely autobiographical in one sense or another. In the article “You’ve Got to Love Something Enough to Kill It: The Art of Noncompromise” by Chris Hodenfield, Hodenfield remarks that “Scorsese doesn’t mind putting his personal life up on the screen,” evident from the very early stages of his career, as “his first feature, an enhanced student project called Who’s That Knocking at my Door? (1968), was about an intensely religious guy and his struggle with a more worldly girlfriend” (48). Only fifteen years after Who’s That Knocking at my Door?, Scorsese directed the unsettling feature The King of Comedy, a film billed as a dark comedy, but in many ways actually a commentary on Scorsese’s failed relationships with people in general. In the 1983 interview “Martin Scorsese: Who the Hell Wants to Make Other Pictures If You Can’t Have a Relationship with a Woman?” by Roger Ebert, Scorsese observes that “the amount of rejection in [The King of Comedy] is horrifying” and that the movie was made “during a very painful period in [his] life” (56). Scorsese elaborates that “[he] was going through the Poor Me routine” while shooting the movie and now, upon its completion, “there are scenes [he] almost can’t look at” because of their extremely personal nature (56). 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,” an observation that holds equally true for Taxi Driver.

But Scorsese is a not merely a unique filmmaker because his movies are often preoccupied with his personal demons (guilt, loneliness, isolation and religious penance); rather, his aesthetic innovations that allow his films to resemble the landscape of the human mind are his most noteworthy achievement. Scorsese has an innate ability to approach tough subject matter and off-putting characters that most traditional filmmakers would villainize and, rather than taking the easy way out, grant his audience an unique perspective and understanding into the minds of his morally reprehensible characters through deliberate camera techniques and aesthetic decisions.

There is a scene in Raging Bull that reveals more about both Jake La Motta and Scorsese than any other scene in the film. La Motta (De Niro), on a losing streak, enters the boxing ring for his final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson (Scorsese refers to this scene as the most horrifying scene in the movie). At this point in the film, his state of mind is in a downward spiral of jealousy – he is convinced that his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), is cheating on him, and his animalistic behavior has alienated him from everyone he knows, including his best friend and brother Joey (Joe Pesci). Scorsese sets the match in a much larger boxing ring than many of the previous fights, in order to indicate the anxiety and anguish of our antihero and his inability to take control of his destiny. Smoke spreads across the ring, clouding La Motta’s vision and creating a foggy and uncertain atmosphere. La Motta knows, and we know, that he is going down in this fight. And as La Motta is brutally beaten and pummeled in the fight, Scorsese uses several sound cues to heighten the scene’s intensity (and I’m not just talking about the use of melons cracking substituting for the sound of actual punches). At one point in the fight, there are actual sounds of elephants and wild animals roaring and snarling at each other in order to accentuate the raw, animalistic qualities of the boxing. In the background, flashes of light bulbs recall the sound of machine-gun fire, further wounding our antihero in his last major fight.

But most importantly, Scorsese uses disturbing visual imagery late in the scene as Sugar Ray is pummeling La Motta repeatedly. Never falling down, La Motta hangs onto the ropes of the ring, his position recalling the image of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross. Scorsese’s obsession with Catholic repentance is apparent as we see Jake paying penance for his sins, not necessarily because he knows he has destroyed every meaningful relationship in his life, but rather because his self-hatred has consumed him. As he hangs from the ropes, defeated and broken, he shouts at Sugar Ray, “You never got me down, Ray.” Blood pouring from every pore of his face, La Motta is still standing, defiantly and pathetically, consumed by self-hatred but refusing to admit defeat. Scorsese looks down at him from his famous Priests-Eye View, and asks us not to like, but perhaps pity and even understand this violent, raging human being.

Scorsese uses these innovative aesthetic techniques to literally get inside the head of his leading characters because the ‘heroes’ of his films are so conflicted, flawed or sometimes outright unlikable (Raging Bull) or psychotic (Taxi Driver) that without literally putting the audience inside the mind of the character, we might not otherwise be willing to watch this particular antihero. Watching any of these men from afar would be extremely painful, but by placing the audience inside their heads, we understand the psychology behind why they do what they do, even if we end up disagreeing morally with their behavior. That is the key to Scorsese’s films – he doesn’t ask us to like Jake La Motta or Travis Bickle, but he does put the audience in a position where we can see how their mind works.

However, Scorsese is sometimes forced to provide some outside commentary on these semi-deranged characters, as a film completely from their point-of-view would somewhat limit the impact of their socially unacceptable actions. One of the most fascinating stylistic choices in Taxi Driver is Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s decision to frame the entire movie within the mind and perspective of Travis, with the exception of two very important scenes. That the actors loosely improvised the two scenes that do not feature Travis points to the fact that it was Scorsese, not Schrader, who wished to show scenes taking place outside of Travis’ mind. The first scene involves Betsy and Tom (Albert Brooks) flirting and chatting in Charles Palantine’s campaign office. The second scene shows twelve year-old prostitute Iris and her pimp Sport slow dancing and enjoying each other’s company in the whorehouse. These two scenes focus on the interaction, more or less, between normal couples, or at the very least couples that are comfortable with one another. This interaction is sharply contrasted by Travis’ awkward and socially unacceptable behavior that results in his inability to form a lasting connection with anybody. With this in mind, it seems that Scorsese somewhat concedes his vision of living inside Travis Bickle’s mind. By giving the audience an outside view of normal, functioning men and women (to some degree, anyway), Scorsese is asking us to contrast Travis’ interactions with Betsy and Iris with their interaction with other males. This is an example of Scorsese as storyteller providing the audience with a necessary juxtaposition that might not be apparent if the story were only to take place from Travis’ point-of-view. Although Scorsese is first and foremost determined to give the audience the experience of living inside Travis Bickle’s head, he sometimes has to step back and give in to standard narrative storytelling in order for us to understand the outside implications of Travis’ behavior.

Given that Scorsese’s films are so immensely personal and raw, it is important to consider his more commercial efforts and their relationship to the rest of the Scorsese canon. Although Raging Bull and Taxi Driver are two of the better-known Scorsese films (the movies that are most closely associated with the name Martin Scorsese), these films were not massive commercial successes at the box-office when first released. Scorsese has reached box-office and populist gold, however, with his “genre” films – the movies he has made with large budgets for major studios that, for the most part, speak to a larger audience than Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. These pictures include Cape Fear (1991), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) and Shutter Island (2010), each of which was marketed successfully into a specific genre category – thriller, biopic, gangster and horror. Because Scorsese’s more personal films are not immediately as popular as these “genre” films, the question begs, does Scorsese compromise his artistic vision for these significantly more commercial films?

In order to properly answer this question, I will look at Scorsese’s latest film, the immensely popular Shutter Island. The movie opens in 1954 as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) steadily approaches an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Once on the island, Daniels investigates the disappearance of one of the island’s patients while simultaneously attempting to uncover the mystery behind the menacing institution itself. On paper, the material sounds generic enough; however, the ‘twist’ of Shutter Island is that Teddy himself is actually a patient on the island, and, rather than reckon with the fact that he murdered his wife after she drowned their three children, he spins elaborate detective mysteries in his head as a means of avoiding guilt. With this in mind, Shutter Island is actually an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated, insane man haunted by his past and an exploration of an emotionally disturbed human psyche, deceptively disguised as a run-of-the-mill horror film. In this sense, Scorsese does not compromise his vision at all for the sake of mainstream audiences – he simply uses the guise of a popular genre to further explore his obsessions and preoccupations. Shutter Island is an unlikely companion piece, then, to Raging Bull and Mean Streets, as all three films revolve around men who, unable to cope with an overwhelming guilt, force themselves into ritualistic behavior that frees them from their guilt but also traps them in a heightened state of insanity.

That Scorsese’s obsessions consume any work that he creates – be it a genre movie intended for the masses or an intensely personal and autobiographical story – indicates that Scorsese has a need to creatively manifest his inner demons into his work, almost as a means of emotional survival. As Hodenfield observes in his article, Scorsese’s immediate aesthetic goal in any particular scene is to “create an intensity on screen that matches what he perceives/ suffers in real life” (48). The implication in this article is that Scorsese can only communicate through film, as his communicative and social skills, while perhaps not as brazenly unacceptable as the behavior of Travis Bickle or Jake La Motta, are not sufficient means through which he can express himself and, most importantly, allow other people to understand him. As Ebert notes, Scorsese oftentimes finds himself so desperately alone and unable to make a lasting connection with another human being that he retreats to his studio and pours his loneliness into the only friend that has consistently comforted him from the very beginning – the medium of film. Scorsese’s movies, then, can be viewed as stories about men who aren’t lucky enough to have the medium of film at their immediate disposal through which they can channel their isolation and torment, instead of resorting to animalistic behavior.

The artistic process is commonly referred to as a form of therapy for the artist and creator, but for Scorsese, it’s something even more intense. In fact, his artistic process is not that much different from the ritualistic behavior of Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island. You’d think that after forty years of making movies, Scorsese would allow himself to take a break every once in a while, but, as Shutter Island proves, he is still out there, obsessively retelling his story in new and different ways, furiously searching for an answer that may only exist in the films themselves.

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.

Grounds for Remembrance: An Essay by Jack Kyser

Note: The following piece is an essay I wrote for my fourth progression paper for my class Writing the Essay: Art and the World at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

As strange as it sounds, I will always remember the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed on September 11th, 2001 first and foremost as aesthetically powerful art pieces. Obviously, my view is a bit more complicated than that – the towers will always evoke painful memories of 9/11 for me. But ever since the age of five, I have been amazed and obsessed with the towers, as the architecture fascinated me, and the towers represented a larger and richer world than the one in which I lived. When I was seven years old, my mother and father took me to the top of one of the towers while we were visiting New York City, and I was even more amazed. From years seven to nine, I had an obsession with drawing and painting images of the towers – I simply loved them. I am someone who, when seeing images of the towers now, does not immediately think of September 11th, 2001. I think of my childhood and my memories, and I oftentimes forget that the World Trade Center towers became objects of terrorism on that horrible day. I prefer to remember them as art.

The Ground Zero site in downtown Manhattan today is a difficult site to comprehend and classify. After all, there is no historical marker setting a definite perimeter for the space, and therefore the nearby buildings and various unofficial memorials surrounding the site must be taken into consideration when attempting to fully understand this demanding space. For instance, does Ground Zero encompass simply the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center towers once stood, or might its limits be more far-reaching, extending into the neighborhood and district affected by that awful September day? Even blocks away from the site, American flags hang from buildings, some of them dusty and perhaps even still covered in ashes and debris from that horrible day in September of 2001. Outside of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, there is a 9/11 Memorial Cross dedicated to those who lost their lives in the attacks, but like many of the memorials near the site, this one does not seem to be an official memorial from the city, but rather the work of those who witnessed the attacks themselves.

The memorials are not difficult to identify; they include plaques from the Lawyers’ Association and several surrounding businesses, along with street signs that, every so often, present an image of the old towers when pointing toward Ground Zero. The space certainly welcomes travelers by asking them to preview the upcoming 9/11 Memorial Site and look at computed-generated photos of The Freedom Tower, which is due to be completed in 2013. Alongside the gated perimeter of Ground Zero, these photos illustrate the desired results of the current construction, and visitors are free to admire the pictures of the tower. And yet the space simultaneously expels travelers by asking them to step away from the site and keep their distance from the construction. Traffic guards direct pedestrians and visitors every which way, so that you can get close to the site, but not too close. Visitors wishing to catch a glimpse of the construction taking place inside the site will have a hard time finding a peephole through the fence, and attempts to enter the space itself are futile. The city wants the site to be embraced, and yet they are also protective of a wound that has not yet healed and perhaps never will heal.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of visiting Ground Zero is witnessing what seems to be a clash between those wishing to erase the memory of the old World Trade Center towers with the upcoming new tower and those clinging to the memory of the World Trade Center towers. On one hand, many small coffee shops and delis are decorated with large images of the World Trade Center towers standing in all their glory. There is also the Tribute WTC Visitor Center on Liberty Street, offering visitors the chance to remember that tragic day and its heroes – but even this tribute is in private, away from the mainstream view. In fact, there are many areas near the site where, if you had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, you might not know a major tragedy took place at all. The major construction that is in the mainstream view, however, is for the unfinished 9/11 Memorial Site, and pictures alongside the fenced-off areas of Ground Zero show images of the new tower and a calm, serene future against the Manhattan skyline. Images of the old towers are present but sparse, and nowhere to be seen are images from the haunting day of September 11, 2001.

Of course, tourists are far from being the only people who take in Ground Zero – in fact, citizens who work near Ground Zero are forced to reckon with the site and the tragedy that they very likely witnessed nearly every day. Interestingly enough, visitors vacationing in New York City often visit the site and snap pictures, but they leave rather quickly. Nobody lingers at Ground Zero the way that they linger at Central Park, or the Museum of Modern Art, or the Statue of Liberty. In fact, Ground Zero may be the only New York City tourist attraction that is not associated with fun and excitement. There is no community ice-skating rink or even a marvelous spectacle and awe as some might expect – there’s just a huge hole in the ground, and cranes constructing what might otherwise be just another new building. Many tourists I have observed seem to feel some sort of duty to visit the site, stay for a few minutes, and then quickly hop on the subway to get to that night’s Broadway show. Does this signify that a once-sacred memorial is now worth nothing more than a quick snapshot? If so, Ground Zero may become less and less of an attraction with each passing day.

Of course, this also has to do with the changing landscape and feel of Ground Zero. The area is very depressing, yes…and yet, it’s almost become just part of the landscape – you know, the giant hole that Wall Street bankers walk past every morning on their way to work. Maybe the public visits Ground Zero expecting grief and depression, but instead they see business as usual. As the years go by, I suspect Ground Zero will become less of a tourist and public attraction for this very reason.

Behind this conflict, of course, is my expectation that not only should the area memorialize the tragedy of 9/11 and the thousands of lives lost on that day, but also share my recognition of the former World Trade Center towers as art and memorialize their grandeur. A fear similar to mine about the original World Trade Center fading from the public consciousness is present in Jonathan Lethem’s essay “Speak, Hoyt Schermerhorn,” where he fears that the train station he loved and knew as a young man “[won’t] actually be able to be captured in depiction” and will be forgotten in the years to come (74). Just as he wonders “when…the last person to have purchased panty hose or a razor at Loeser’s [will] pass from the earth,” I, too, wonder when the last person who remembers the World Trade Center towers in all of their glory will pass from this earth (78).

Despite this assumption on my part, though, the question still begs answering – why has Ground Zero become just part of the landscape? One answer to my question may be found in the historical space surrounding the site. City Hall, only minutes away from Ground Zero, is the former home of Boss Tweed and the Tweed Courthouse, and the system of corruption that thrived during his reign (a corruption, perhaps, that made it’s way down to Wall Street and the entire Financial District). When taking into consideration the history of greed and capitalism that runs through the Financial District, from Wall Street to the buildings surrounding Ground Zero, it is important to remember that the World Trade Center towers were a part of the functioning city economy (and very possibly an extension of Wall Street greed). But how, you may ask, will the city feel about building a new business building on Ground Zero and allowing said building to become a functional part of the greedy Wall Street culture? Although I have a hard time believing that businessmen will so easily capitalize on the failings of others while working on a site that represents so much grief to the American people, it is very possible that the new towers that replace the World Trade Center towers will soon become associated with the same greed and larceny with which Wall Street is now associated.

The idea of Ground Zero going through corporatization is not unthinkable. In "Hybrid Place: The Experience of the Local and the Remote," Andrew J. Blum quotes Ted Relph as speculating that “‘in a world of multi-national corporations, universal planning practices and instantaneous global communications, we have to take seriously the argument that sense of place is just another form of nostalgia and that places are obsolete’” (1993, p. 25). If this is true, the public may at some point lose its sense of nostalgia for the old towers, and, as Blum puts it, “dismiss the idea of place altogether when faced with the absence of its more romantic characteristics” (7). This loss of nostalgia matters because it renders the original World Trade Center towers as symbols without meaning, abstract buildings familiar only in photographs but not in memory, the towers that once stood for the ambition and scope of New York City relegated to a distant memory and associated with an event that most people would prefer to forget.

There is another possibility as to why Ground Zero may have become just part of the landscape. In the article “The Synthetic Sublime,” Cynthia Ozick considers New York City to be a city that consistently destroys and rebuilds itself to the point where, in one hundred years, we wouldn’t be able to recognize or identify the city anymore. She claims that “our New York too will melt away, and a renewed and clarified city will lift out of the breathing breast of the one we know” (224-225). This will happen sooner than we know it with Ground Zero – not just in a physical transformation, but in the public perception, as well. I am in a unique position – fifty years from now, when new towers stand where the World Trade Center towers once stood, I will be able to say that I stood on top of the World Trade Center towers as a boy, only to watch them fall down and a new building to sprout up several years later. In New York’s historic custom of tearing buildings down and rebuilding them, will we soon forget that the cause of a new tower replacing the World Trade Center towers was an act of terrorism? Will the World Trade Center site just become another New York City building in the public consciousness to be torn down and then rebuilt again? It’s hard to fathom now, as so many people have the memories of 9/11 haunting their lives. But one hundred years from now, that will not be true. Are the current memorials enough to keep this horrible event part of New York’s collective history?

In general, sites and spaces that serve as public memorials seem to exist at first as solely a memorial. However, after some time, society demands that these memorials must also function as part of the place’s economy. Once the space begins functioning on that practical level, does it somehow cease functioning as a memorial? Can a space do both at the same time? Or does one annihilate the other? There is certainly an implied conflict between the surrounding space and the site itself, as if the city feels pressure for Ground Zero to function on a practical level similar to the buildings and offices surrounding the site. After all, memorials do not play a role in the city’s economy, and although the Ground Zero site is a sacred place that played host to a devastating tragedy, the construction suggests that the space must be used to the city’s economic advantage. If the new tower can simultaneously serve as a memorial to the victims of 9/11, then that is even better for the city; however, the tower cannot serve solely as a memorial (which may explain why most of the current memorials near Ground Zero are unofficial, almost makeshift ones). But with the rise of the new tower impending, the question arises: will the memorial aspect be preserved?

In order to attempt to understand how future generations will perceive Ground Zero and the building that is eventually constructed in its space, I am going to look at the city of Hiroshima in Japan, as both Hiroshima and Ground Zero are areas affected by warfare and destruction, by circumstance and tragedy. Although Hiroshima is a far more expansive area than Ground Zero (after all, Hiroshima is an entire city and Ground Zero is just a hole in the ground), I believe we can look at the Ground Zero site today as a microcosm of the city of Hiroshima in the years after the end of World War II. On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, effectively ending the Second World War. The atomic blast killed around 90,000 to 140,000 people, accounting for radiation and other chaos after the blast. In the years following its destruction, Hiroshima was rebuilt and reconstructed, and the Genbaku Dome (Atomic Dome) was opened as part of the city’s effort to memorialize the tragedy. Although many other memorials were built in reference to the devastating effects of the atomic bomb (including the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum), today Hiroshima is rebuilt and, for the most part, is a healthy and functioning city. Much like Ground Zero, Hiroshima is not so much a public memorial anymore as it is a functional part of the country of Japan. I am not suggesting that the Japanese do not remember and/or grieve the tragedy that took place in 1945, but I do believe that, more or less, business is back to normal in Hiroshima. If the memorials weren’t present in Hiroshima, would today’s youth immediately recognize that this city was almost completely destroyed sixty-five years ago? It’s hard to say. Years from now, I believe Ground Zero will still be recognized as a public memorial and a place of grievance – but, for the most part, it will function much like the rest of the city functions – for practical purposes.

The purpose of memorializing tragedy is to remind and inform the public of a horrendous event and honor those who suffered in the tragedy. The difficulty of such memorializing is that events as painful and raw as those that occurred on September 11th, 2001 are not comforting to the public, and therefore there is a reluctance to relive and remember the suffering of that day. This reluctance conflicts with the need to inform future generations of this tragedy, and the compromised result may produce a memorial in name only.

Because of the public memorials and art surrounding the space, I would hope that the public never will forget the original towers and the terrible tragedy on September 11th, 2001. Ozick ends her article by musing about our future generations and “what thoughts [they will] think” and if “[they will] think our outworn thoughts, or imaginings we cannot imagine” (225). Nobody knows the answer to those questions, but I can say this for sure: the public that is receiving the Ground Zero site at this moment will not be the same public as the one that receives it tomorrow, or the next day, or one hundred years from now. With each passing day, September 11th, 2001 fades from the public consciousness, becoming less of a memory and more of an abstraction. And as it goes, so do the World Trade Center towers.

Don't Ever Tell Anybody Anything. If You Do, You Start Missing Everybody.

And so begins the second semester of my freshman year at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Looking back on the fall semester, I really could not have asked for a better start to my college education. In November, my original play The Certifiable was produced and staged by Tisch New Theatre. Later that month, I placed second in the annual Third North Ultra Violet Live (UVL) talent competition, performing contrasting monologues from Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business. I was also selected to join a small NYU improvisation/ sketch comedy group called The Spork in the Road, which creates comedic scenes and short films for the public.

But more than anything, I am most proud of the work I accomplished in my classes. In my Storytelling Strategies screenwriting class, Tisch professors Michael Stern and Ezra Sacks (writer of 1980's A Small Circle of Friends and 1986's Wildcats) guided me to completing the first twenty pages of a feature script that I have been preparing for some time. In my Performance Strategies acting and directing course, acting professors Keith L. Davis (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Law and Order) and Peggy Gormley (The Last Temptation of Christ, The Squid and the Whale, Bad Lieutenant) observed as I directed fellow students in a short scene, while also performing in other short scenes for directors.

Most excitingly, I directed professional voice actors for the radio drama production of My Jackie. The script, which I originally wrote during my stay at the University of Southern California at their four-week Summer Screenwriting Seminar in 2008, was chosen by my Sound Image class to be produced as a Radio Drama. My good friends Morgan Block, Andrew Griego and Shaun Kim served as the Producer, Head Editor and Foley Technician on the project, respectively, while I directed the voice actors in the recording booth and revised my script accordingly. My entire group is incredibly proud of the final product, which I will post on this blog as soon as I discover the proper way to embed an audio file. Our wonderful professor, sound guru Florence Barrau-Adams, was very impressed, as well.

After a very relaxing holiday break in Austin, I returned last week and immediately launched into my new classes, all of which are extraordinary. First and foremost, my Frame and Sequence class (which serves as a complement class to last semester's Sound Image) mandates that I take endless amounts of still photography shots around New York City, which has proved to be great fun for my friends and me on the weekends. I have several other fascinating classes, including a Introduction to Psychology course taught by Professor Edgar Coons, who is a major celebrity in the science world for investigating hypothalamic stimulation in rats at Yale University in the 1960s, and a film criticism and studies class called The Language of Film, taught by brilliant Tisch professor Rick Litvin.

As a Cohen Scholarship recipient, this past Tuesday evening I had the privilege of joining Tisch School of the Arts Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, along with eleven other scholarship recipients, to a free performance of the new play written by David Mamet, Race, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. I was extremely honored to receive this invitation, as Mamet is quite possibly my favorite living American playwright, and the opportunity to spend the evening with Dean Campbell - a major voice in the film and theatre communities - was a dream come true. Race is a fascinating entry in the Mamet canon, with stars James Spader, David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington and Richard Thomas in top form. After the play, Dean Campbell took the scholarship recipients to the front of the stage to have a discussion with two of the play's stars, Kerry Washington and David Alan Grier. Both actors had extraordinary things to say about working with Mamet, who also directed the production, and their own personal acting process. This was truly a memorable evening of theatre and a fantastic way to spend time with my peers, esteemed Tisch professors and two acting giants.

Last Friday evening, my good friends Morgan Block, Bobb Barito and I ventured to the historic Film Forum theatre to catch a screening of Michael Haneke's haunting and brilliant The White Ribbon. I had already seen the film once over the winter break in Austin, with my friend and fellow film buff David Walter, and I knew I needed to watch the picture again to absorb its disturbing resonance. The story of a small German village spiraling into chaos a few months before the outbreak of World War I, The White Ribbon is a beautiful black-and-white ode to the finest work of Ingmar Bergman, and deserves every Best Foreign Film accolade it has received thus far this awards season. After watching the film again, I immediately updated my Top Ten Films of 2009 list. Haneke's film continues to haunt me - it is undoubtedly one of 2009's best movies.

On Sunday afternoon, I volunteered to play one of the lead characters in a reading of a new play by Gallatin playwright Lucia Diaz-French called "The Danderforth Phenomenon." The play reading was hosted by playwright, screenwriter and Tisch Professor Selma Thompson in her apartment, which is just across the hall from my dorm room. The play is a beautiful new work about two siblings caught in the destructive aftermath of their parents' deaths. The reading was an incredible two-hour experience, allowing the other readers and me the opportunity to stretch our acting muscles, and simultaneously Ms. Diaz-French the opportunity to hear her work performed aloud by strangers, as she is still workshopping the play. The performance was followed with a Q&A with the playwright, and I was extremely grateful for the chance to interpret and perform her work, made possible by my always-hospitable neighbor Professor Thompson.

Beginning next week, I will start volunteering at the Tisch Talent Guild on Fridays in the mornings and afternoons. The TTG is the calling center for both cast and crew members for NYU student film productions, and it should be a great environment to meet aspiring filmmakers and other students.

I should mention that I am truly lucky to have such a terrific and supportive group of friends at NYU. Morgan Block, Bobb Barito, Jeremy Keller, Mike Cheslik, Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff, Jennifer Kim, John Anunziata - just to name a few - are some of the finest people I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Morgan, for her genuine kindness and being one of the most understanding friends I've ever had; Bobb, for his dry and seemingly effortless sense of humor (alongside the fact that he's just a damn good guy); Jeremy, for not murdering me after I voiced complaints aboutAvatar and excluded the film from my 100 Best Movies of the Decade list...I could go on. But these are truly extraordinary and talented people. And I am lucky to spend time with them and learn from them, even if we are just cooking smores on a Saturday night while watching the Screen Actor's Guild awards.

Speaking of the SAG awards, last weekend's major awards ceremonies - the Producer's Guild of America and the SAGs - were a breath of fresh cinematic air after the previous week's Golden Globe awards, an appalling celebration of mediocrity. After watching the Globes, I angrily wrote that "it's a sad day when great films like Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker and (500) Days of Summer lose to the likes of James Cameron and The Hangover." Thankfully, the SAG award for Best Ensemble was handed to Inglourious Basterds last Saturday night, and on Sunday the PGA honored The Hurt Locker as 2009's Best Picture. Hopefully, the Academy Awards will lean more in that direction - I don't think I'll be able to not throw something at the television if James Cameron were to defeat Kathryn Bigelow for the Best Director Oscar. (My other hope? Give the Best Actress Oscar to Meryl Streep for Julia and Julia or Carey Mulligan for An Education - I am simply dumbfounded that Sandra Bullock has won what she has for The Blind Side).

Today - January 28th, 2010 - has been a particularly sad day in the art community. First and most importantly, legendary author J.D. Salinger died today at the age of ninety-one. Salinger is best known as the author of The Catcher in the Rye, one of my favorite books of all time. Famously reclusive, Salinger has long held tight to his belief that Catcher should not be adapted for the screen - even director Steven Spielberg was unable to secure the rights. It was exactly two years ago that a friend and I wrote a letter to Salinger, explaining to him (in thorough detail) why we were the people who should adapt Catcher from page to screen. In the letter, we noted that if the adaptation was written and directed by people around the same age as the novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield - we were seventeen at the time, just about the right age - then the production would avoid the Hollywood 'phoniness' that might otherwise come with an adaptation of Catcher.

Of course, he didn't respond - in fact, the letter probably didn't even reach the right address, as Salinger likely had his real address hidden from the public - but at least I can say I made an effort to adapt and honor the single most influential piece of literature I've ever read. In fact, everything I've written in the past two years owes something substantial to The Catcher and the Rye, sometimes very explicitly (in my original play, The Certifiable, the lead character is a modern-day version of Holden Caulfield, and the book itself is discussed in great length by many of the characters in my play).

In retrospect, however, I think Salinger made the correct decision by refusing to let The Catcher in the Rye become a mainstream film, or a film at all. Some books are cinematic by nature. Others aren't. One reason why The Catcher in the Rye is such an effective novel is that there's nothing else like it - there are pale imitations, sure, but nothing comes close to the brilliance of what Salinger did with that novel. And I think that's what a Catcher film adaptation would be - a pale imitation of something far greater and far more meaningful. Let the book simply remain as the book. I don't see how a film adaptation could expand on any of Salinger's ideas or offer anything more powerful than what the book already contains.

Salinger was a genius, and it's a testament to the power of his writing that The Catcher in the Rye is as popular and widely read today as when it was first published. I hope this very talented, influential and personal hero of mine rests peacefully in the afterlife. Thank you, Mr. Salinger.

The second piece of sad news today was the announcement that Miramax Films, which has been responsible for much of the independent film movement for twenty years, is being closed by Disney. Films released under Miramax include the incredible Pulp Fiction (1994; Quentin Tarantino), Gangs of New York (2002; Martin Scorsese), The English Patient (1996; Anthony Minghella), The Aviator (2004; Martin Scorsese), My Left Foot (1989; Jim Sheridan), Sling Blade (1996; Billy Bob Thornton) and The Piano (1993; Jane Campion). It's true that ever since the Weinstein brothers left Miramax, the studio hasn't exactly been the center of great filmmaking, but even still, it's closing today marks another blow to the great world of independent filmmaking.

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)