During the 2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival (14 and 1/2 years ago) Quentin Tarantino re-told Brian DePalma‘s “there’s always Martin Scorsese!” story. It runs between :50 and 2:20. It happened during the Director’s Panel at the Lobero theatre. I was in the third row and shooting my own iPhone video, but this YTS Digital Films version looks and sounds better. Great racounteur, great humor, great everything.

I’m posting this because in 2010 Scorsese’s big Oscar win for The Departed had happened three years earlier, and yet two of his least satisfying films — Shutter Island and Hugo — were in the works, and yet his six-year golden renaissance period — The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman (aka “Wild Strawberries with handguns”) — was just around the corner and down the road a piece.

And then came Scorsese’s Waterloo, a film that a critic friend believes may be his worst ever — Killers of the Flower Moon.

What a perversion of the Scorsese legend! A Scorsese film that for the very first time wasn’t “a Scorsese film” but a woke film…a film that said “oh, dear Lord, it wasn’t just those conniving white-ass Oklahoma greedheads of the 1920s who were so deplorable, but all of our forebears really, all white people going back to the founding of America…plunderers, murderers, rapists, seeds of evil…oh, God, we must drop to our knees and atone and cleanse our souls…we must throw ourselves upon the church steps and beg for forgiveness before all Native Americans and Lily Gladstone in particular”…a film that could have been epic or at least muscular if Scorsese had chosen to shoot Eric Roth’s original screenplay adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 novel…If only Marty and Leo hadn’t lost their nerve…if only they hadn’t been so scared of provoking the wokesters and suffering their wrath, i.e., “We’re done with white heroes! Only racists-at-heart would tell David Grann’s tale!”

Anyone familiar with the famous jail-cell scene in Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro‘s Raging Bull (’80) knows something about irony. For watching a crude and bestial man experience the absolute nadir of his bruising (and bruise-dispensing) life…his explosive acting out of feelings of absolute and overpowering self-loathing…this horrific episode results, for viewers, in something oddly cleansing and almost therapeutic.

This was DeNiro’s all-time peak moment…the kind of bravura acting moment that only a young or youngish fellow can capture or deliver. It was also the grand crescendo of DeNiro’s initial glory chapter (’73 to ’80), the highlights of which were Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, 1900 and Taxi Driver.