Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed is now close to 18 years old. Ranking ahead on the Scorsese hot list are Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Last Temptation of Christ.

So The Departed ranks seventh, and that ain’t hay.

A new 4K Bluray of The Departed pops on 4.23.

And I’ll repeat my argument with two Jack Nicholson/”Frank Costello” lines. One, Costello describing Rome as a place with “nicer wops” but “no pizza.” I’ve visited Rome five or six times and pizza joints are everywhere. And two, repeating that cliche about Chinese laundry guys saying “no tickee, no laundry.” Except the line is “no tickee, no washee.”

I was looking at this Gone With The Wind overture clip, and I found myself curiously melting down over Max Steiner‘s music. Because it’s gentle and sad and lamenting, and because it conveys a sentimental longing for things — customs, attitudes, climates, cultural atmospheres — that are gone and never to return.

I’ve written five or six times that GWTW is not a film about slavery or the antebellum South or even, really, the Civil War. If it was just a Civil War epic or a Southern plantation drama or a marital misery piece it would have faded many decades ago.

It’s basically a parable about hard times and terrible deprivations, and most people (apart from the terminal wokeys) understand that today. It’s about (a) a struggle to survive under ghastly conditions and (b) about how those with brass and gumption often get through the rough patches better than those who embrace goodness and generosity and playing by the rules.

Yes, David O. Selznick‘s 1939 film is an icky and offensive thing here and there, but (I’ve said this also a few times) you can’t throw out the second half of part one…the shelling of Atlanta, the struggle, the crowd scenes, the panic, the burning of Atlanta, the anguish, the soldiers groaning and moaning, Scarlett’s drooling horse collapsing from exhaustion, the moonlight breaking through as she approaches Tara, the radish scene plus Ernest Haller‘s cinematography…you just can’t throw all that out.

Obviously the film’s unfortunate racial attitudes, which were lamentably par for the course 85 years ago, are now socially obsolete. And I wouldn’t argue with anyone who feels that portions of it are too distasteful to celebrate, but it just doesn’t seem right to lock all of that richness inside some ignoble closet and say “no more, forget about it, put it out of your minds.”

Legendary filmmaking is legendary filmmaking, and Steiner’s music is just too affecting, too transporting.

Steiner’s greatest scores: King Kong, The Informer, Slim, Jezebel, Gone with the Wind, Sergeant York, Casablanca, Since You Went Away, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, White Heat.

There are three things that a film has to do in order to qualify for eternal blue-ribbon, Mount Olympus status and the simultaneous allegiance of Joe and Jane Popcorn along with your elitist, dweeb-level, ivory-tower elites.

One, it has to deliver the plain, honest truth (or undercurrent of truth) about a given world or situation — along with a little entertainment value, okay, but without undue exaggeration, no shallow exploitation, not too much sugar or vinegar, and no blatant bullshit of any kind. (This requirement in itself leaves out at least 80% of commercial cinema.)

Two, it has to persuade audiences to emotionally invest in it — to trust what it’s doing and where it seems to be going.

Three and most importantly, it has to put you into a kind of alternate-reality mescaline dream state…a place that you want to stay in and never leave, or at least make you want to return to frequently — a realm that feels so inviting or stylistically transporting that you want to live in it, even if it seems a bit dangerous.

Yes, of course — all movies are dream states in a way. The better ones always lead to a certain primal feeling of alteration or discovery (the film has taken you to an entirely new but seemingly straightforward place) or emotional comfort and reassurance. But the ones that hit the jackpot are the ones that tell you what this or that slice of life on planet earth (or life aboard an intergalactic space cruiser) is basically like …how it really is…the full, honest, non-delusional truth of things.

Which of the 2024 Best Picture nominees did you want to literally move into and live in, or at least visit for a few weeks?

I hated the claustrophobic world of Oppenheimer…university classrooms, government inquisition rooms, meeting rooms, Los Alamos residential shacks. If a magical bearded wizard came up to me last summer and said “I can fix it so you can literally time-travel back to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s world…back to 1930s England, 1940s bomb-blast Los Alamos and 1950s paranoid America….would you like to go?”….I would scrunch my face up and say to that fucking wizard “are you fucking kidding me?”

I was mildly intrigued by the Oklahoma world of Killers of the Flower Moon during my first viewing, but the second viewing was hell…I was stuck in that godawful fucking world, watching and listening to those 1920s roadsters chugging along those muddy streets…those awful damp ditches where the bodies were dumped…studying Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbfuck facial expressions, stuck with Lily Gladstone‘s dreary, Native American passivity and Robert De Niro‘s pinched expressions and midwestern drawl…hate it, hate it…escape!

I loved visiting the trippy, furious-jumping, sound-stage world of Poor Things. but I didn’t want to actually live in it. Because it’s skewed and unreal and more than a bit arch — no offense.

I’m too much of an average, well-educated, moderate-minded white dude to want to live in the satirical, male-despising, super-feminized world of Barbie….sorry.

I felt completely comfortable with the 1970 realm of The Holdovers. If that same wizard offered me a chance to time-trip back to ’70, I would go if I could journey there as a young lad with twenty grand in my wallet…cool. I would love that.

The realm of American Fiction is a wise and intelligent one…my kind of place except all the whiteys are woke moron suck-ups. Not my cave, bruh.

I loved certain aspects of the dream-world of Maestro, but I hated the casual cruelties forced upon poor Carey Mulligan.

Past Lives was an under-energized drag, and it always will be — I would never want to hang with those three dull people.

Anatomy of a Fall? No thanks. I now associate Grenoble with stifling vibes and constipation

Would I want to live in the nicely tended home in The Zone of Interest, right next to the walls of Auschwitz? I need to answer this?

I will forgive a film for not being an inviting place to hang in or visit if it’s being relentlessly honest about itself and the world it’s depicting. But the best kind of film tells the truth and offers an extra-cool hang in terms of environment, style, vibes.

There is no bullshit and nothing but truth in The Bicycle Thief (notice that I didn’t call it The Bicycle Thieves), North by Northwest, East of Eden, Mean Streets, Repo Man, Election, The Hospital, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, David Fincher‘s Mindhunter series, Gunga Din, Some Like It Hot, Two Women, La Strada, Zero Dark Thirty, Vertigo, Fellini Satyricon, Manchester By The Sea, Paths of Glory, Vertigo, Nomadland, Only Angels Have Wings, Collateral and 12 Years A Slave.

Given the widespread loathing and the massive flop rejection of Madame Web, Dakota Johnson naturally has to distance herself from it (“who, me?) and more or less throw the carcass under the bus. Hence her chat with Bustle‘s Charlotte Owen (3.5.24):

“[Making Madame Web] was definitely an experience for me. I had never done anything like it before. I probably will never do anything like it again, because I don’t make sense in that world.” [Translation: ‘Nobody believed I was supergirl material….I look too passive or spacey or something.”]

“And I know that now. But sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ But it was a real learning experience, and of course it’s not nice to be a part of something that’s ripped to shreds, but I can’t say that I don’t understand.

“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made — and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out — decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee. Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms.

“My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”