Martin Scorsese’s hackery knows no bounds. Whoring himself out to any genre isn’t necessarily a bad thing (it was the norm in the 1940′s; just look at Howard Hawks’s filmography), but when he ends up making shallow dreck like The Aviator and Shutter Island, you can’t help but feel he’s be better off sticking to writing film essays and documenting rock gods like Bob Dylan. And now it seems that Scorsese, fresh from his 3D kiddie movie Hugo (out in November), is setting his sights on remaking The Gambler.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scorsese is planning to team up with writer William Monahan and cast Leo DiCaprio as the lead. The good news is that these three collaborated on the director’s best film in 15 years, The Departed (which wasn’t astounding but certain leagues ahead of everything else he has come out with recently).

The original 1974 film involves a New York English professor (who ironically teaches the Dostoyevsky novella which the movie is an adaptation of) who has a crippling addiction to gambling. James Caan played the lead role which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Hopefully, Scorsese and Monahan can bring something new and fresh to a story that’s over 140 years old, and not just rehash something familiar or superficially homaging a classier era.

He may be 68 but he’s making movies like a jubliant lad. Martin Scorsese is experiencing a highly successful time, what with his Oscar for The Departed, the huge financial success of Shutter Island, as well as TV series Boardwalk Empire, which will be seeing at least one more season on HBO. But this week’s news gives details of not one but two projects the director is going to rush into.

The latter film is getting the most buzz at the moment, with Deadline Hollywood reporting that Scorsese is going to direct recent collaborator Leonard Di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, an adaptation of Jordan Belfont’s memoirs. Belfont was a drug addict and ran an illegal sales trade flogging worthless stock. Think Goodfellas for economists. More details on the film are to come at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The other project will probably be filmed first. Years in development, Scorsese is finally ready to make Silence, an adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s account of a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who travels to 17th Century Japan and discovers violence religious intolerance. Years ago Daniel Day Lewis was attached, but recent rumours have Benicio Del Toro (a needed career boost for the actor) playing the lead.

This news does mean that the planned reunion of Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci, called The Irishman, will probably see a few years to emerge. But Scorsese fans do have another film to look forward to: his 3D children’s movie The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which will hit cinemas this Christmas. Indeed, Scorsese is a busy boy, though it’s hard not to see him as a sort of uber-hack, flirting with styles and genres but failing to reach the previous heights of films like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.

Ivana Nickolova is the winner of the Martin Scorsese signed poster from the documentary A Letter to Elia – congratulations!

A Letter to Elia, taking us through Kazan’s life as well as Scorsese with the realization that there was an artist behind the camera, someone “who knew me, maybe better than I knew myself.” The film is about being exposed to the right movies at the right moment in your adolescent life, when you’re wide open and ready to connect, to be spurred on by the work up there on the screen, and then, maybe, to chart a course toward making your own movies.

Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan’s autobiography and his speech on directing (read by Elias Koteas), a videotaped interview done late in Kazan’s life, and Scorsese’s commentary on and off screen, A Letter to Elia takes a close look at the life of art and its creation – the work, the distractions, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience.

A Letter to Elia, written and directed by Scorsese and his longtime collaborator Kent Jones, is a deeply personal film, a frank portrait and self-portrait, and an equally frank acknowledgement of the closeness and the distance between artists and their art. Scorsese focuses in the main on three films: On the Waterfront, East of Eden and America, America while touching on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Street Car Name Desire.

In film studies seeing On the Waterfront and Splendor in the Grass as a student of film was a life-changing experience. I was mesmerized by Elia Kazan ability to direct milestone performances and have followed his career ever sense.  I even quote him in my book, Breaking Into Film, as he describes what a director of film needs to do in order to be a successful director.

Although we are quite different, Martin Scorsese grew up in Little Italy, for him seeing On the Waterfront and East of Eden was a life changing experience as well. He appears on and off camera throughout A Letter to Elia, taking us through Kazan’s life and through his own as well, and through his growing realization that there was an artist behind the camera, someone “who knew me, maybe better than I knew myself.” The film is about being exposed to the right movies at the right moment in your adolescent life, when you’re wide open and ready to connect, to be spurred on by the work up there on the screen, and then, maybe, to chart a course toward making your own movies.

Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan’s autobiography and his speech on directing (read by Elias Koteas), a videotaped interview done late in Kazan’s life, and Scorsese’s commentary on and off screen, A Letter to Elia takes a close look at the life of art and its creation – the work, the distractions, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience.

A Letter to Elia, written and directed by Scorsese and his longtime collaborator Kent Jones, is a deeply personal film, a frank portrait and self-portrait, and an equally frank acknowledgement of the closeness and the distance between artists and their art.

Screenhead is sponsoring a giveaway of A Letter to Elia poster signed by Martin Scorsese, a true collector’s item. To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner November 11, 2010.

The Elia Kazan Box Set Overview

Master director Martin Scorsese brings you this unprecedented collection of fifteen cinematic treasures from fellow Academy Award Winner Elia Kazan. From classic film noir to timeless period pieces, Kazan made a singular impact on the art of the motion picture, while evoking milestone performances from Hollywood’s very best. Also included is A Letter to Elia (2010), the new, full-length documentary on Kazan’s life, produced and presented by Scorsese himself.

Wow. Color me amazed, folks–all sorts of amazed, in point of fact–but there’s word out that says the grandest confluence in all of action drama is coming back around again. Like a planetary alignment, it hasn’t happened in the last fifteen years, but it may well be happening again.

The it in question: Joe Pesci, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese all back together again for a new movie, currently titled The Irishman.

The Irishman, originally titled I Heard You Paint Houses, is based on the book by Charles Brandt, about Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a hit man who killed fully twenty five people during his career. Now, there isn’t a whole lot more than that out at this stage, but the casting is coming together, and it looks (right now, anyway) like this foursome is pulling together for the first time in a decade and a half.

Martin Scorsese is quoted in the national newspaper of India that he would like Al Pacino to play Frank Sinatra and Robert De Niro as Dean Martin for at least one segment of the film. 

 “[I’ve] yet to spot the actor who can bring back Frank Sinatra alive on screen. My choice is Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro as Dean Martin.”

I wonder if the movie will be shot in 3D.

Shutter Island scored big time Friday at the box office with $14 million, which proves that good things happen to those who wait.  When the studio decided to move the opening day from November 2009 to February 2010, skeptics formed at the door. All in all, the shuffle worked.  Hindsight is beautiful in the movie business.

The Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio film most likely will be their highest grossing debut collaboration by the time Sunday stats arrive.

Valentine’s Day came in second with Percy Jackson and the Olympians in third.  Avatar is holding at fourth while The Wolfman stays at fifth.

That’s the top five for Friday and a complete list for the weekend will be posted Sunday.

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Okay, folks, today we’ve got a doozy of a review for you, so brace yourselves because I’m going to tell you about Shutter Island.

Now, Shutter Island was a really awesome idea, make no mistake–watching the trailer suggested nothing so much as Silent Hill as directed by Martin Freaking Scorsese himself.  And while this concept is sufficient to give any geek worth his or her salt a case of the swooning vapors, it wasn’t quite what we got.

Shutter Island joins U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels, who’s just been dispatched to Shutter Island, floating off the coast of Boston and home to a gigantic, sprawling insane asylum.  Yes, we’re basically sending Leo DiCaprio to a giant floating Arkham Asylum off the coast of Massachusetts, but sadly, this sounds more awesome than it actually is.

Anyway, once Teddy and his new partner Chuck arrive on the island, to begin an investigation into a missing patient, a whole lot of things start to make themselves clear.  One, there’s a whole lot more going on on this island than anyone wants to admit.  Two, we’re going to get a good look at them all before we’re done.  And three, Boston is apparently susceptible to hurricanes.

One of those bizarre hurricanes (which should be about a one in a million event, if I remember right) socks in the island and thus leaves us with the perfect setup for a suspense thriller movie–a dark and stormy night on Looney Bin Island.

Admittedly, Shutter Island will not be quite as awesome as the trailers suggested.  If a movie actually WERE that awesome we’d probably need a cigarette and a change of pants after the credits rolled.  But anyway–Shutter Island is still an entertaining if a bit long title.

There’s a lot of people who say this sticks too close to convention, that it’s just an A-list director slumming it with a B-list movie, but actually, I welcome this.  We’ve been watching tropes get subverted left, right and center.  And where we haven’t been watching people strike out in lunatic directions we’ve been watching tripe so thoroughly warmed over that it carries the same titles as movies made ten, even twenty plus years prior.  If it’s not new, it’s a remake / reboot / re-whatever the hell you want to call it.

It’s therefore interesting to see a name like Scorsese take all the basic conventions (right down to that mythic “dark and stormy night” that was old and tired even when Snoopy was writing with it on top of his doghouse) and make something with it.  This is your grandmother’s recipe for horror, folks–this is what horror movies were like thirty, even forty or more years ago back before franchises and undead juggernauts and cheerleader-choppers and the gore-for-gore’s-sake school got in.

Movies like Shutter Island were part of why everyone was freaked out by Night of the Living Dead, because that was NOTHING like this.

But like every old recipe, it loses a little something.  This is not what you’re used to, folks.  This is something so old and so basic that we haven’t seen it in a long time.  Thus, it actually looks unique by modern standards.  There’s not a lot of blood in here–some, but not much.  There’s all sorts of twists and turns and more than a few mind games and all of it seems a bit familiar.

This doesn’t change the fact that Shutter Island is entertaining.  That movie ran almost two and a half hours and I scarcely noticed.  When something like that happens, I browbeat the Screenhead Ten Scale into handing out a nine out of ten.  It wasn’t the greatest movie I’ve ever seen–no wild exhilaration–but it’s a technically proficient film that hits all the right notes.  Just not all the notes I prefer.

According to Copenhagen film magazine Ekko, Martin Scorsese is apparently discussing the possibility of remaking Taxi Driver.

That’s right, Taxi Driver, the film with Robert De Niro as the anti-hero who saves Jodie Foster, very violently. I believe that crackle.com was showing this film for free last summer, and that’s when I first saw it. Honestly, I see no reason to do it any more than redoing the first Star Wars movie. I mean, I don’t see much wrong with it.

According to Ekko, there isn’t any word if Taxi Driver will be a sequel or remake, but it might be done by Danish Director Lars von Trier, who gave us Antichrist.

I can’t help but wonder if this rumor is true, and honestly, I hope that it isn’t.

Source

This second trailer to Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island shows more details without the plot twists.  I have read the book by Dennis Lehane and it appears that Scorsese is following the book pretty well.  The story covers psychiatric crimes and abuse, which is a bold and truthful move by both the author and director. The movie arrives in theaters February 2010.