Salon.com > Shutter Island

The twisted, stupid brilliance of “Sucker Punch”

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 01:01:00 +0000

Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch" is like the Nietzschean Superman of CGI action movies. It's so far beyond good and evil as to make its morality irrelevant, and to undermine any verdicts you might render about its meaning or quality. A ridiculously ambitious and perhaps fatally flawed mashup of ideas, themes and influences, it's more like a Quentin Tarantino movie -- or more like the platonic ideal of a Tarantino movie -- than any movie Tarantino has ever personally made. I can't be sure whether it's brilliant or idiotic, although I'm pretty confident it's both, and not always in different places or at different moments.

This movie is going to be vehemently attacked as brain-damaged garbage that exemplifies everything that's wrong with today's filmmaking and today's audiences. It's also going to be vigorously defended as a subversive action-movie masterpiece that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch "The King's Speech." People on both sides will be partly right and partly wrong. Here's where I come down: "Sucker Punch" doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

7. “Shutter Island”

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Recent film history is filled with movies that have twist endings or twist narratives -- movies in which a character you thought was male turns out to be female, or the hero turns out to be a ghost, or the hero's best friend turns out to be a figment of his imagination, etc. "Shutter Island" isn't one of those movies. Minutes after U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) arrive on the island that houses the titular mental hospital, you know something is amiss -- that the mystery these men are investigating isn't the real mystery, that what we're seeing is some sort of projection on Teddy's part, although we don't yet know of precisely what. Which is another way of saying that although "Shutter Island" is a deeply subjective film, it plays fair with the audience, never leading you anywhere that it didn't at least hint that it would go.

“Inception”: A clunky, overblown disappointment

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

Director Christopher Nolan is such a master movie technician -- a combination of engineer, architect, game designer and God -- that it's startling to realize how constricted his vision is and how clumsily he tells stories. "Inception," Nolan's first film since his mega-googolplex hit with "The Dark Knight," and his first as a solo writer-director since the now-legendary puzzler "Memento" in 2000, is supposed to be a dreamscape movie. At one point, in fact, we travel with its central Scooby-gang of characters into a dream within a dream within a dream, and then into some deeper, still more unconscious, psychological limbo-state below that.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams: Cannes’ hottest couple

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:40:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay, "Blue Valentine" is not only the breakthrough American film at Cannes this year, but one of the best films here, period. It stars two hot young indie-oriented actors in Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, who are extraordinary as Dean and Cindy, a couple who live in rural eastern Pennsylvania with their 5-year-old daughter. "Blue Valentine" shines a spotlight on aspects of American life rarely seen in the movies, and it resulted from a lengthy and intensive period of preparation and discovery.

Director Derek Cianfrance has been working on the film on and off for 12 years, in between collecting unemployment, working odd jobs and making documentaries. Williams has been on board for six years and Gosling for four. To prepare for the roles, Cianfrance made the actors live together for several weeks in the movie couple's prefab home, buying groceries at the supermarket, baking a birthday cake for Frankie (Faith Wladyka), their fictional daughter, putting up a Christmas tree and wrapping presents. Gosling worked shifts for a moving company, one of Dean's jobs in the film. Williams gained a fair bit of weight to play her character, a nurse of about 30 in the movie's present tense.

Box office report: Is “Shutter Island” Scorsese’s biggest?

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:02:00 +0000

This will be shorter than usual. First of all, there isn't all that much news to report and second of all, I spent the day at Disneyland, which was far more crowded than usual. Curse you, "Captain Eo"! You marred my Sunday in three dimensions! Point being, I'm pooped. So "Shutter Island" pulled a repeat at No. 1 this weekend, dropping just 45 percent for a $22.2 million second weekend and a new total of $75 million.

Despite the mixed reviews and word of mouth, the Scorsese thriller is still the only real event movie out there for people who don't need a return trip to Pandora. While I didn't care for "Shutter Island" one bit, I am heartened that a moody, complicated, two-hour-plus, non-sequel, R-rated thriller from Martin Scorsese is a genuine smash hit. In this day and age, it's always refreshing to see an adult-driven genre picture to reach heights only usually accorded to franchises and animated films. The picture is Scorsese's fifth-biggest domestic grosser, and will reach no. 3 on that list by next weekend. Whether or not it can surpass the $132 million earned by "The Departed" is an open question, but it won't have any demo competition until "The Green Zone." That Bourne-goes-to-Baghdad thriller opens March 12. (I have no idea if that's an accurate summary, by the way, but it's sure how the Paul Greengrass/Matt Damon film is being sold by Universal).

Box office report: “Shutter Island” blows the doors off

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:23:00 +0000

The infamously delayed "Shutter Island" debuted to smashing business over its initial weekend, as the Martin Scorsese thriller debuted to $40.2 million. That's a personal best for both director Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio. Scorsese's previous best opening was the $26.8 million debut of "The Departed" in October 2006 (also starring Leonardo DiCaprio), while this was DiCaprio's second $30 million-plus debut, following the $30 million opening of Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can" back in December 2002. Since both the star and director have rarely opened anything over $10 million based on their respective names alone, credit should go to the marketing and the general concept of the story. As I've often said, adult thrillers are in rare supply these days and the few that make through the pipeline have a pretty decent track record (you think "Vantage Point" or "Law-Abiding Citizen" opened to around $22 million apiece due to critical acclaim?). Mix a genuinely intriguing concept (1950s lawman trapped in a scary mental hospital), factor the pedigree involved, and then add a compelling and pervasive trailer that has been running in every theater nonstop since August, and you had the recipe for a breakout weekend.

“Shutter Island”: Scorsese goes crazy!

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Within the first few seconds of Martin Scorsese's new psychological thriller-diller, "Shutter Island," Leonardo DiCaprio is vomiting into a steel toilet in a basement filled with chains and shackles. Beads of sweat protrude from his forehead -- with their own beads of sweat protruding from their foreheads -- and the modernist wall-of-sound score assembled by Robbie Robertson swells and coruscates, as if in vomitous sympathy. But seriously, that opening image tells you almost all you need to know about the character, his mental situation and the film he's in.

Scorsese is not a director who does things by halves, and his latest foray into genre film -- in this case, a 1950s period piece adapted from Boston crime novelist Dennis Lehane's bestseller -- is no exception. At first, it may seem as if Scorsese is venturing into formulaic cop-movie territory better left to Clint Eastwood, or following some obscurantist film-buff desire to imitate Howard Hawks by making movies in every imaginable genre and style. But there is method to the madness of "Shutter Island," or at least method along with the madness. From its menacing, neo-Gothic mental hospital on a Boston Harbor island to the Class 5 hurricane that traps all its characters there to the tormented psychology of its damaged hero -- hey, exactly who are the crazy people here? Hmm! -- this movie is purposefully and self-consciously overwrought.