IMDb #113 Review: Raging Bull (1980)

Source: Wikipedia

A boxer's anger issues make and break his life. He blasts through the competition in the ring, but his outside life becomes so awful he wouldn't want to be anyplace else. A bull in a china shop, if broken crockery could sue for damages and file for divorce and hire thugs to pound his face to a pulp.

In the 1940s, while most young men are fighting in the world war, Jake LaMotta fights a war against the world -- and its pesky age-of-consent laws. He picks up a hot blonde teen at the public pool, treats her to a couple shitty dates, and despite his imperiousness and thick head manages to make it work. And withholds coitus to keep energy for fights. Nice going, champ.

Somehow he gets it into his thick head that his wife's cheating. He sure treats her like it. Then flips out when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

More importantly, he dominates the ring. He conks out opponents, despite small hands. His fast-talking brother manages his madness, though the beast on a short leash drags him places he would never go alone. The brothers share one big thing -- mistreatment of their wives. Them's the forties.

As much as the protagonist punishes everyone else, he punishes himself. Hard diet, hours in the sauna, slimming down to meet the bare maximum for middleweight. For one shot at the title. And if he wins? Sit around, watch TV, get fat. Until the collected rage breaks out and reduces his social life to Bikini Atoll.

Where am I going with this? Good question. Where is this going?

His fame goes nova, and he subsides into the white-dwarf shame of post-celebrity life. He opens a shitty nightclub. Becomes a cringeworthy stand-up comedian. And a jailbird, since it turns out acting on ephebophilia is still illegal.

Robert de Niro acts phenomenally, even when playing a character who's playing a bad actor. The best parts weren't even acting -- the physique, or subsequent lack thereof.

Then it just ends.

What's the point? I don't know. It'a a true story. The guy's still alive. You ask him. I'll...wait here.

129 minutes.

IMDb #139: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Source: Wikipedia

Financial whiz Jordan Belfort makes millions by screwing millions, and when the Fun Police decide he's made a sufficiently astronomical asshole-shaped dent in the karma-sphere, they screw him right back.

Like an extended sales pitch, our motormouth NYC narrator yammers us through his humblebrag beginnings to his peak of success.

As a bright-eyed newlywed stockbroker, he hits Wall Street -- they hit back. "You are lower than pond scum. Here's your shitty phone job. Get greedy. Curse constantly. Jerk off twice a day or more to keep your cool."

(You can practically smell Ayn Rand dustily jerking it in her coffin.)

Wall Street collapses, because like its constituents the stock market is fickle and unpredictable. So our case study starts at the bottom with penny stocks. Expands it into his own company. Which snowballs into a bigger company. His pushy sales formula, instilled into avaricious young idiots, explodes into a gargantuan operation with fat slimy tentacles in multiple orifices screwing everybody.

Cue the debauchery. Stripper parades and drug-fueled escapades. Office party midget-tossing. Quaaludes.

JB marries a 11/10 lingerie designer; throws a lavish fairytale wedding; incessantly cheats on 11/10 lingerie designer. He gifts her a yacht; he sails it into the stormy Mediterranean.

He makes stirring speeches to his cultish office workers. He disses disparaging Forbes profiles and pisses on official subpoenas. The staff adore their boss -- he made them rich -- so they don't crack under interrogation. He offers FBI investigators a sweet job at his company.

And just as he's unraveling, he's railroaded on the path to sobriety and getting the last shreds of his riotous life back together. The long arm of the law wraps around his neck, putting his crooked morals to the test.

It's a hell of a ride. Yet another Martin Scorsese fictionalized documentary.

Typical Scorsese, it's got every type of objectionable content you can imagine. Drinking, drugs, nudity, language, questionable sales practices. And better yet, it's basically all true.

180 minutes.

IMDb #140 Review: Casino (1995)

Source: Wikipedia

The magical land of Las Vegas. Planet of fancy suits and flashy lights and soiled consciences and staggering luxury. Where the desert blooms and savings evaporate and everything goes horribly wrong for the rich bastards who have it all.

Right from the get-go, our narrator goes up in a fireball that used to be his sports car.

Anyway, roll back to the seventies. Charming info-hoarding gambler Ace teams up with his violent Italian buddy Nicky to take over Vegas. Through hard work and uncompromising attention to detail, Ace soon runs a huge (crooked) casino, unhappily married to a beautiful sociopathic hustler. Through violence and threats of violence, his buddy Nicky takes over the underworld. And gets banned from every casino in Vegas in the process.

(Sometimes I swear Scorsese secretly wants to make documentaries. The rise and fall of organized crime syndicates. Failing that, he'll stage high-budget high-life dramas, fictionalized epics loosely adapted from true stories.)

Anyway, on with the eighties. As with everything else eighties, little issues from the previous decade snowball into an avalanche of problems. An exquisitely crafted crime machine breaks down. Sprockets pop out, springs are sprung, and a high-velocity thingamajig clocks the safety inspector in the noggin. Those kinda problems.

To wit. The law cracks down on the casino operation, courtesy of the cowboy county commissioner. Money disappears. The Kansas City mob bosses are seriously peeved. The anti-heroes fall out with their wives and kids and each other.

As usual in trying times, the only recourse is infidelity. (This list's single most recurring theme.) The other recourse, revenge, arrives just in time to clear off the chessboard and set up the pieces for the next round of the endless unwinnable game.

Mad props to the cast, for delivering some of the most brilliantly acted freakouts I've ever seen. Especially Sharon Stone as the drugged-up strung-out wife Ginger. And to the researchers, for packing enough juicy details into these tight three hours to make the audience feel like savvy inhabitants of a bright bygone age. And to the director, for making sure it all happened precisely as it was supposed to.

Hell, accolades all around, everything's just fantastic.

178 minutes.

IMDb #203 Review: Shutter Island (2010)

Source: Wikipedia

A brilliant psychological thriller set on an island asylum for the criminally insane during a raging hurricane? As unlikely as a successful collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. That is, entirely expected.

Lucky Leo stars as a scary-looking U.S. Marshal named Teddy investigating a murderess’s disappearance. A typical locked-room mystery transmogrifies into an experiment in gaslighting. Baffling evidence accumulates until audience members doubt their own sanity. Or should. Unfortunately, I had the ending spoiled for me. Savvier viewers might be able to guess it. The less you know going in, the better.

The question becomes, which is scarier, the patients or the doctors? The hotshot psychiatrist lives in a lovely house, displays disturbing artwork, and affects a convincing German accent. This being the 1950s, the World War II veteran hero rankles at being psychoanalyzed for his cutting remarks and praised for “impressive defense mechanisms.”

Those defense mechanisms/survival instincts break down in sleep. The dazzling dream sequences close the gap between reality and fantasy, practical effects and CGI. Bodies frozen in ice at Dachau; gunning down Nazi prison guards; his wife burning alive. The titular island’s creepy-ass abandoned (?) lighthouse.

As the investigation goes south, there wafts talk of psychotropic drugs, transorbital lobotomies, government conspiracies, and a crazy-smart hobo lady babbling in a sea cave.

Then the ending shanks you in the gut with a rusty scalpel. Everything suddenly makes sense, and I wish it didn’t. The final shot, with all its implications, is seared into my retinas.

Dark. Intense. Worth your time.

138 minutes.