Martin Scorsese

I don’t think I had seen this since the ’90s, at which time I scarcely noticed how deliriously over the top it is, with uniformly histrionic performances (including demented cameos from Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, and Martin Balsam, stars of the original 1962 Cape Fear) and spastic cinematography (courtesy of frequent David Lynch collaborator Freddie Francis). It’s very nearly a parody of its domestic thriller contemporaries (e.g. Fatal Attraction), ever teetering on the edge of… See more →

Why do all the Kansas City mafiosos in this have Brooklyn accents?

I’ve never shared the average cinephile’s effusive fascination with Scorsese’s brand of pathologically dishonest men, but I’ll give said men credit for consistency: their demands for much more than they’ve earned are always reflected in how much time the audience is made to spend with them.

I was 22 before I finally saw The Godfather. I previously had no interest in mob movies, mainly because of what I knew about Tommy DeVito, Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas, whose maniacal extortionist with an intolerable sense of entitlement I took to be the genre’s dominant archetype. While it turned out that wasn’t entirely off-base, I was pleased to find many Mafia stories richer than I expected.

Fifteen years later, The Wolf of Wall… See more →

I guess it’s been pretty quiet around here. In the last month: I braved the Philadelphia blizzard fallout to get to the sold-out Interpol show at Gasoline and was rewarded with a terrific performance. I caught the final two Andrew W.K. club dates of the year and even got kicked out of one of them (apparently the Chameleon Club in Lancaster has recently found reason not to tolerate members of the audience getting up on… See more →