Director: Martin Scorsese

Producer: Jennifer Aniston, Brad Grey, Graham King, Brad Pitt, Martin Scorsese

Screenwriter: William Monahan

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark
Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Anthony Anderson,
Alec Baldwin, Kristen Dalton

I SMELL A RAT!
Just as Spike Lee took a basic caper and added his own pet issues to elevate Inside Man to the upper echelons of its genre, Martin Scorsese has taken The Departed, based on an intriguingly simple premise, to its own heights by infusing issues that have concerned him ever since Mean Streets. Along the way, he makes room for some memorable performances, not the least of which comes from the most likely of sources.

The Departed is based on the Hong Kong blockbuster Infernal Affairs,
in which a cop goes undercover in the mob while the mob places one of
their own as a mole in the police force. In Scorsese’s version, the
scene shifts to Boston, where mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson)
puts loyal-from-boyhood employee Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) through
police training. As Sullivan rises through the ranks, Special
Investigations Unit chiefs Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark
Wahlberg) recruit rookie Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to get
"kicked off" the force and do time to gain Costello’s confidence.

All of this happens before the opening titles.

Which is not to say that the pace of the film is all that brisk. Part
of the price Scorsese pays for taking the basic premise of Infernal Affairs and then digging for themes is a beefy running time — a solid 149 minutes to Affairs‘
97. That said, Scorsese hasn’t exactly packed the rest with fluff. He
keeps the basic plot of the original and revisits some of its best
scenes, but takes his time with the spaces in between.

Issues of masculinity, race, class, masculinity, Catholic guilt, and
masculinity tend to come up a bit in Scorsese’s oeuvre, and this film
is no exception. While Sullivan and Costigan circle each other, their
own roles as not just criminal and cop, but as affluent white male and
poor Irish thug come to the fore. Given Sullivan’s gradual
transformation from Southie to Yuppie, another title might have been The Assimilated.

Costello’s casual racism (it takes less than five minutes for him to
tell us what he has against black people) underscores the mistrust that
permeates not just his world, but the cops’ as well. An encounter with
a bunch of Chinese gangsters takes this to nationalistic levels, with
Costello raging on about how we do business "in this country." Like
Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York, he’s not just a sociopath, he’s a patriotic sociopath.

Scorsese also lets loose with a torrent of phallic symbols (well, one
isn’t actually a symbol, it’s more of an actual phallus), Freudian
references, and good, old-fashioned repressed sexuality. When
Costello’s moll (Kristen Dalton) purrs that she’ll "straighten him out"
after hearing him get all hot and bothered while threatening one of his
men, it’s one of many cues that maybe all this killing would stop if
the boys could just be more secure in their manhood.

The performances rise to meet the emotional complexity of William
Monahan’s adaptation. DiCaprio and Damon are as solid as ever, but it’s
Wahlberg who ends up being the scene stealer, with dialogue that sets a
new benchmark for the title of Abrasive Police Chief. Alec Baldwin, as
the head of Sullivan’s unit, chews whatever scenery Wahlberg misses.

In the end, though, this is Jack’s world and everybody else is just
acting in it. Nicholson infuses Costello with the effortless charm and
maniacal glee we’ve come to expect from our mob bosses, but makes room
for some petty desperation as well.

The Departed is not without its flaws. It gets a bit repetitive,
Vera Farmiga’s role as a psychiatrist torn between the leads is
underwritten, and the coda feels like it was tacked on by a grumpy test
audience. Regardless, it’s proof positive that neither Scorsese nor
Nicholson has lost his touch.

Started the day with another bout of sickness. Maybe it’s pneumonia or what…. It’s been 3 weeks of non stop cough without phlegm. Hay it’s a good day to die…. joke.  On with some of the updates that i have on my blog. For those who are waitng for pampagana posts…. you must wait somemore. Anyway good day to ya all.

First-time Kiwi director Jonathan King’s first film can be curtly described as:

Killer sheep… Bam! Bam! Bam!

The bizarre thriller, Black Sheep, features cute, woolly
animals who somehow have picked up the nasty habit of eating people.
There’s a genetic engineering project gone horribly wrong, which richly
justifies the subsequent rampaging hordes of carnivorous sheep that
make up for the rest of your film-viewing experience.

Messy splatterings of fake blood is assured every five minutes or
so, which is a very important requisite to suspend your disbelief and
make-out urge, as well as up the rate of your pop-corn-and-soda
consumption.