In Which We Relive A Week That Scarred Us All Forever

Enjoy our celebration of a great Italian-American director.

Scorsese’s made a lot of films about celebrity. His Mafia films are about the localized version; neighborhood notoriety. It’s basically the same idea. You get recognized and receive special treatment. People help you out and want to give you things. But there’s a malevolent flip side, which is that people want to tell you about themselves. They are helping you in the hope that you will give them something in return. You most likely can’t and they will be disappointed. Fame is both convenient and a curse.

- Molly Lambert on The King of Comedy

Wharton is subtle, and not subtly at odds with Scorsese, whose métier can be defined as an ability to conjure and explode volatile male drives onscreen. Wharton’s best characters are delicate, injured conversationalists. Scorsese’s best characters tend to be walking ids: Jake LaMotta, Travis Bickle, Charlie Cappa. But the two have something in common, which is an obsessive consideration of American destinies. The basic thesis of Wharton’s novel is that there is nothing sadder than giving up on love. Worse than avoiding it or being denied it is surrendering it yourself. Her characters are constantly doing this, and Wharton’s genius was to propose it as a uniquely American form of tragedy.

- Molly Young on The Age of Innocence

"Impossible Bouquet" - No Age (mp3)

Having Obama prince Bobby De Niro playing Ace was a particular master stroke, one that further conflated Jewish and Italian ethnic identity - a major theme of Chase’s show - and transparently conveyed that the Jewish story is the american story. As the most moral and sympathetic character in the twisted universe of Casino, Rothstein rising above racial and class barriers only to be targeted by the government is basically the heeb Fountainhead. Come to think of it though, Howard Roark probably hung out with Al Qaeda when he wasn’t blowing up apartment buildings. He’s like the original suicide bomber.

- Alex Carnevale on Casino

The trajectories of movements seem right, but they’re slightly jerky, not fluid in a natural way. Whites are also overexposed throughout, most noticeably on the uniforms of the paramedics. They go through their motions, but their spectral glow suggests they are hovering just outside their bodies, disconnected from their dismal work out of spiritual necessity.

- Benjamin Mercer on Bringing Out the Dead

The Color of Money is worth its rental price alone for the scene in which Newman’s Felson gives Mastrantonio’s Carmen a tutorial in hustling 101. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do ya?” he asks with a mischievous smile and a touch of violence in his famous, blue eyes. Both Newman and his character prove the rule that what you lose in age, you make up for in experience.

- Jacob Sugarman on The Color of Money

"The Scarlet Tide" - Alison Krauss (mp3)

L’Avventura gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than Breathless or Hiroshima, Mon Amour (made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, both of them still alive and working). Or La Dolce Vita. At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked L’Avventura. I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why.

- Martin Scorsese on L’Avventura

Harvey Keitel is that other man in the bed, the burden of a budding but doomed mentorship heavy on his fingers and chest. Harvey Keitel makes it clear to everyone that being cool will one day be a matter of self-restraint if it is not already. There are a great deal of reasons why in the final scene of this movie he is maimed but not killed, crying into the street under the JMZ. He is in love with a woman but is embarrassed by her, preferring an image of man to that of love. Harvey does not love men, but he is in love with what men can do when they get out of town in time.

- Will Hubbard on Mean Streets

"Perennials" - Glorytellers (mp3)

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