I saw six movies in theaters in four days this past week so the fact I found time and energy to watch any more is a bit of a surprise, but that’s the job. I didn’t go too far back though, as I simply wanted to go back and watch a recent favorite and one I hadn’t seen since it first came out.
| X-Men (2000) |
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QUICK THOUGHTS: I was given the X-Men trilogy on Blu-ray for Christmas and I finally got around to watching the first film in the franchise for the first time since 2000. I was never a huge fan of this film, and watching it again for the first time in ten years it actually wasn’t as boring as I remembered it being, but it still isn’t anything spectacular. What’s more surprising is how much better the sequel is, which I hope to get to some time next week, although the NCAA tournament is starting up which means watching movies at home is going to be a little tough for a few weeks.
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| The Departed (2006) |
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QUICK THOUGHTS: As a piece of entertainment, The Departed is excellent, but I never thought it deserved the Best Picture win back in 2007. I would have probably given that to The Queen as I look over the list of nominees. Then again, I would have preferred V for Vendetta and Children of Men be nominated alongside those two that year along with, say, Inside Man. Suffice to say, the 2007 Oscars didn’t exactly mesh with my opinion and I guess they could have done much worse than giving Scorsese’s flick the top prize.
Anyway, back to the film itself, the one thing that’s always bothered me about this film (and there are going to be some story spoilers coming up) is Damon supposedly deleting DiCaprio’s personnel records at the end of the film. He even makes a point to tell him he’s done it on the rooftop, “Only one of us is a cop here!” Yet, at the end of it all, DiCaprio gets a proper fallen officer’s funeral. Huh? Is it really that easy to delete a personnel record? And if he did manage to delete his records, how did he suddenly become a cop again and get his funeral? And how did Damon explain the deletion of his files? Better yet, wouldn’t everyone have remembered him as Martin Sheen’s inside man from the day he came in and wonder what happened to his files? This doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it always bothered me, and it’s one of the main reasons I look at it as a solid piece of entertainment and not a film worthy of a Best Picture win. In the comments below a couple of people have already set me straight on my above complaint and I must cover up the shame on my face for not having remembered the envelope Leo gave to Vera Farmiga. A little embarrassing, but I’m glad I brought it up, I almost have to take back everything I said above.
Moving on, I think I finally answered one of the questions I had about this film. I always thought it was weird how exaggerated the sound effects were when the characters open their cell phones in this movie, even when they do it slowly there was still this scraping of metal followed by a click. But I noticed a little something this time. When Nicholson whips out a switchblade toward the end of the film it makes a very similar sound to what is being used for the phones throughout the movie. I’m not sure if it was an intended similarity, but I can only assume Scorsese is trying to hammer home how the cell phones were also used as weapons in the film. I mean, it’s always been obvious the phones were used in this way, but it wasn’t until now that I came across a reason as to why he would have used such emphasized sound effects on them until now. |
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There you have it. Now share your weekly recaps and weigh in with any thoughts you may have on the films I saw. And remember to connect with my Netflix queue by clicking here, I have already added several titles from those that have already linked up.
