Movies

[RagStagRagaFragit]

(Spoilers, Shutter IslandI knew when I said Shock  that it would be interpreted as a'la McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest, that's why I said "shock and awe" to mean the role play and detox (as a result of my limited vocabulary).

As to the "woman in the cave", yeah, as a physical entity there was an actor who played a role in the cave, but in terms of the story, her voice was soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright, but she's not there! (Sorry, the "she's not there" is also a poor attempt at communication, in the song it means she has blown her mind, but here I mean she is a figment of Teddy's blown mind) She's result of his detoxing from the whatever it was they had been giving him.

But what I'm most interested in now is if there is general agreement about the movie's end. The treatment worked, and Daniels committed Mental Suicide by proxy by going for the lobotomy?

Is there a debate worth having over the ethics of his decision (assuming he made it)? Is there any consensus as to what Scorsese was trying to say with the ending?

Beautiful movie! I don't buy DVDs anymore, but I'll own this one for certain.

[madupont]

I think that I'll settle for reading the book at some point and then decipher,ahah! where and why and how Scorcese dealt with transforming it visually and intellectually.  Sometimes the variant between literature and film is extreme;while at other times it is true to source.

The prominent effects of film can not be discounted, if you want to  hear something "Nutz": I picked up a tag stuck to a plant container yesterday and read it before throwing it out. It said the plant came from a greenhouse at Half-Moon Bay,California. Which figures as it was too cool here and not too leveled off, even out there,  either.

But this instantly threw me into one of those small reveries. A film shot at Half-Moon Bay, titled: Leave Her to Heaven.

Dealt with a "killer woman" opposite Cornell Wilde. As an actress, she became best known for spending seven years of her life in and out of "sanatariums" including the one at Rochester, Minn. that usually cures everything; but she never went back to acting in movies. That was Gene Tierney.

[madupont]

http://www.bvonmovies.com/2010/03/17/lee-daniels-british-david-oyelowo-mlk-selma/?icid=main|htmlws-bv-n|dl3|link6|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bvonmovies.com%2F2010%2F03%2F17%2Flee-daniels-british-david-oyelowo-mlk-selma%2F

[madupont]

RagStagRagaFragit
It wasn't Minnesota; it was Menninger in Kansas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Tierney#Health_Issues

If you begin reading between the two pin-up pictures -- at Health issues--and just read the three sections down, you get the immediate story pertaining to shock therapy.

But certainly read the entire wiki. bio at your leisure. As it turned out, it was after, Leave Her to Heaven, that she made the film for which she is most famous: Laura.  I think that I first saw it on tv because I was fascinated by Clifton Webb as an actor who had done comedy after comedy while I was a kid.

When the material under Health issues describes Humphrey Bogart's realization that something was wrong and that he fed her the lines in the script, you can imagine the severity when Tierney herself says that she never completely regained her memory.

I am not for a minute surprised at the account given of this connected to treatment in Connecticut because for quite some time the local attitude was socially so conservative and politically so concerned with the sex lives of the citizens resident to that state, that one ought to have been forewarned about actually ever traveling through there as a tourist.  No Joke.

[RagStagRagaFragit]

****SPOILERS Shutter Island****

That's not the kind of shock I'm talking about.

Blame it on the language that when I say "The schoking treatment of animals..." could be read in at least two ways.

They tried (and succeeded) to shock Teddy Daniels out of his delusional state. Not by using electricity, but by using the play act of the escapee drama/mystery.

I agree that Scorsese made a beautiful film, but for it to have overtaken the story would classify this movie as an abject failure. To my mind, it was not, but then you are not the only person I have had to recap this movie to.

Barton, I'm curious, did you see Teddy as truely "uncured" at the end, or did you think he walked into that operation (the lobotimizing) of his own well informed will?

[barton]

Not really sure, and that's part of the beauty of the film.  It does seem he got part of a cure,  a realignment of his reality that stuck for a bit and then started to slip out of whack again. 

It's rare to see a film that I would gladly view again only a few weeks later. 

[madupont]

Just for the hell of it, I went over to imdb. and found nine or ten people arguing on page (2) of the discussion under this heading --
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/board/nest/159186445

at the IMDb Boards for Shutter Island

and they call it:

END to Teddy sane/insane debate

That was two days ago.

[barton]

I'll pass on that, thanks.  It's been several weeks since I saw it, and I kind of like carrying the ambiguities around until I catch up with it again on DVD. 

Recently watched "Gone Baby Gone" and felt a certain parallel there to "Shutter Island" -- mainly in the ambiguity of the ending, the way you are left musing over the rightness of the choices made.  Then I noticed that both films are based on LeHane novels.  Oh.

Gone Baby Gone SPOILERS

Really liked GBG -- sometimes a story with double and triple-crosses tends to trip up on itself or seem a little contrived, but this one was darn near perfect.   The sofa shot at the end, with the little girl who is ultimately sort of alone -- we see her distance even from the caring detective Patrick -- plus the confusion over the doll's name (apparently, her own mother had the name wrong when she told Patrick) -- well, one of the best film endings of the new century so far.   My respect for Ben Affleck, as a newbie director,  has really soared.  And the stunning ensemble of actors -- Ed Harris, Casey Affleck (make this name a synonym for "quiet intensity"), Titus Welliver (that's the original MIB, to any "Lost" fans reading this), and Amy Ryan -- all just blew me away.   The moral conundrum at the end will have me thinking about this film for a long time.   At the very end, when we see how little the mother has changed, as she gets ready for a date, how perfunctory her attention to her child, it's a bit of a blow even if we saw it coming and we have to wonder if maybe Patrick should have just let well enough alone and not turned in the police captain (Morgan Freeman -- also great). 

     

[RagStagRagaFragit]

Well that is interesting. Thank you for the link.

[knoxharrington]

Didn't click on the link for Shutter Island, but it did seem like Teddy is at peace with the whole situation at the end -- the role-playing has made him realize that he must sacrifice a part of himself to the blade.  I don't think there was much of an ethical message -- more like the author is presenting what the options were in that decade and how none of them could guarantee to retrieve a lost mind.  Kingsley is presented as being as enlightened as you could be at that time, knowing what was known then, and was clearly going the extra mile to try and save a piece of Teddy.   I think the film did a good job keeping its secret, though I started to have an inkling when he meets up with that doctor in the cave and I was all WTF, what's she doing there, how'd she get there? 

[madupont]

I'll pass on that, thanks.  It's been several weeks since I saw it, and I kind of like carrying the ambiguities around until I catch up with it again on DVD. 

Recently watched "Gone Baby Gone" and felt a certain parallel there to "Shutter Island" -- mainly in the ambiguity of the ending, the way you are left musing over the rightness of the choices made.  Then I noticed that both films are based on LeHane novels.  Oh.

Gone Baby Gone SPOILERS

Really liked GBG -- sometimes a story with double and triple-crosses tends to trip up on itself or seem a little contrived, but this one was darn near perfect.   The sofa shot at the end, with the little girl who is ultimately sort of alone -- we see her distance even from the caring detective Patrick -- plus the confusion over the doll's name (apparently, her own mother had the name wrong when she told Patrick) -- well, one of the best film endings of the new century so far.   My respect for Ben Affleck, as a newbie director,  has really soared.  And the stunning ensemble of actors -- Ed Harris, Casey Affleck (make this name a synonym for "quiet intensity"), Titus Welliver (that's the original MIB, to any "Lost" fans reading this), and Amy Ryan -- all just blew me away.   The moral conundrum at the end will have me thinking about this film for a long time.   At the very end, when we see how little the mother has changed, as she gets ready for a date, how perfunctory her attention to her child, it's a bit of a blow even if we saw it coming and we have to wonder if maybe Patrick should have just let well enough alone and not turned in the police captain (Morgan Freeman -- also great). 

     

Somehow, I missed GBG and I liked Ben Affleck in: Superman (or whatever they called it?); although I actually watched it for the performance of A.Brody and the actress who had been appearing  on tv in Deadwood(as the wealthy goldfield heiress).

To resolve the heady atmosphere of the opposite camps on the problems various contenders have offered on Scorcese's,Shutter Island, I phoned last night so I can pick up the book in Large Print to be sure I do not miss a thing!

Not only are "both films" Lehane novels but, so is,"Mystic River" with Sean Penn, which manages to confuse quite a few people as well.  Obviously this is a knock-out writer with Lalaland connections.

[Lhoffman]

I don't want to give anything solid away, but if it's any help at all, Lehane's epigraph is a quote from Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel"....

...must we dream our dreams
and have them too?

[madupont]

knoxharrington.
"meets up with that doctor in the cave and I was all WTF, what's she doing there, how'd she get there?  ".  That's part of the role-play offered as the "remember when" scenario, if you are to believe that Kingsley/Cawley and his side kick Dr.Aule/Ruffalo are trying to jog Teddy's memory with the game of let's pretend some psychiatrists used in the Fifties and even earlier in the Forties as "acting" dramatization in which the analysand is involved in playing a part opposite the psychoanalyst. Unfortunately, an analyst is then in a position (and in this case you have two on the scene of the Lighthouse enactment)to induce you or Teddy to believe in the existence of another personality which must  prove you are schizoid at the very least, or perhaps merely a schizoid personality in danger of going "overboard" -- I am now in possession of literary information that I did not pick up in the film, Teddy's father first took him out in a boat; and later Teddy's father was lost at sea and his body never found.

Teddy has been seasick ever since, not to mention the water images so conveniently used throughout by the cinematographer, he can see or projects a body face down in a tide-pool but it isn't Ruffalo/ChucK Aule who is obviously present in one of the two lighthouses; and he even goes so far as to place the dead little girl (who opens her eyes and looks at him when he liberated a death-camp which would have been Auschwitz if it is in the contested Eastern sector of the Third Reich. I can hardly wait for Gintaras to see this film!) into the seemingly back-yard waters when you are offered that scenario as he comes home from work, goes to the kitchen for a bottle of whiskey, notices his formerly undeceased wife sitting on a bench-swing when he notices something floating in the water.

Contenders mention, odd how he fixates on the little girl (from Dachau, if not Oswiecim,Poland)and not so much on the two little boys, brothers, who are his sons?

Did you notice, and I know from the start of posting the trailer, that I mentioned the Tudor gateway to Ashcliffe sanitarium for the criminally insane, but did you notice even in just a flash that it resembled the missing gate recently stolen and possibly returned by some paraphenalia collecters, the one that says,"Arbeit Macht Frei"?

I did. Upon seeing the Scorsese film from start to finish. I was concentrating on that overhead shot he had of the car ride, was it an open car ride or was it a closed car(?) at an arbitrary speed along the country-groomed road to the gates where the two marshalls turn in their guns. On the approach, just for a flash, I got it quite clearly. Now, if that is not subliminal editing or original footage, I'll just go eat my supper and shut up.

What I mentioned about Scorsese and the Tudor gateway was, wasn't that clever of him searching the backlots for props in scenery to suggest by that Tudor gate and wall that you were entering a confining prison beyond the castle keep of the Tudor era, so you might experience it similarly to the idea of the Tower on the Thames river; if you want to check, I left a map of London in the Obama administration FORUM last night re: Dickens and Dick at odds about socialism.
SPOILERS APPROACHING
There is a lady over in the imdb. who tired of the ten or so arguments posted at a time, sometimes as few as five for some concept of Shutter Island finally offered her own and hit the jack pot with well over  500 entries after she posted(sic)"Have you forgotten what Scorcese uses to start off his film with all of Leonard DiCaprio's 'dream work'? She, at least I caught the lady-like details after the OSS gets confused with the SS by some of the posters at imdb, points out that Teddy is  a veteran with ptsd; and Scorsese makes super production of popular movies while making Art Films for himself all in one fell swoop.

She then goes on to describe detail by detail what Teddy knows after having looked coldly down on a concentration camp attendant who has tried to shoot himself in the head and did that pretty well but took an hour to die(who but Scorcese would tell you that) while Teddy Daniels nonchalantly steps on his hand, or does he step on the GUN moving it ever so cooly further away from the outstretched hand of the dying Nazi.

What is Teddy's next move?  Going to bait the Nazis in their den where we meet Dr.Naehling sitting in front of the fire  with a drink and who deigns to explain the music to Teddy and Auel(pronounced "Owl") whereupon Leo springs into professional authority that he definitely is a man as capable a trained killer as Max von Sidow whom Teddy has spotted for what he was as a doctor who did experiments in a concentration camp.

It doesn't stop there, she analyzes scene by scene, lest we forget.

[whiskeypriest]

Something to look forward to, if only to see just how the hell they plan to do it:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1401097/

[jbottle]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321509/

Interesting, in a WTF Neil way.