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Animal Kingdom (2010)
The most tense crime drama in years
You have to see it to believe it, but the darkest, edgiest, meanest piece of crime fiction put on celluloid since The Prophet comes from Australia – yes, that sunny land down under...
Animal Kingdom chronicles the war raging in Melbourne's underbelly between a family of armed robbers and the local police forces. Our point of entry in this highly psychopathic but chillingly functional cop-killing family is Joshua "J" Cody, the estranged nephew of gang leader and borderline incestuous maternal figure Mama Smurf. Joshua, a passive, taciturn teen whose emotions and motives remain for most the film unreadable, is reunited with his monstrous relatives after his mother, who kept him away from them all her life, overdoses on heroin. J quickly remarks that the members of the gang, composed of his uncles Barry, Craig and Darren, are "all scared". At first, we think that it's the police's gung-ho behaviour that they fear (and rightly so) but it appears that Pope, the oldest Cody brother who is still on the run from a previous heist, is that pernicious, frightening presence weighting on the family despite his physical absence.
In the opening credits, first-time director David Monôd introduces a metaphor – the criminal family as a pack of lions – that he'll stretch till the end. It actually works great, giving Animal Kingdom its thematic unity and mean-spirited worldview – proof that sometimes a strong albeit limited idea can go a long way, if developed properly.
So we have the lioness with Jeannine "Smurf" Cody, the most evil mob granny since Tony Soprano's mom, and the alpha male with Pope, who strangely reminded me of Dustin Hoffman, if Rain Man was channelling Joe Pesci. Pope's quirky behaviour is absolutely disturbing, and the aura of mystery surrounding the fear he inspires (besides being a killer, he may well be an incestuous paedophile, as his nickname would suggest) just reinforces that uneasy vibe he brings to every scene. In terms of animalistic body language, Ben Mendelsohn got it spot on, with his flabby cheeks and awkward, drowsy demeanour – in tune with the image of the lazy lion sure of his power, as seen in countless National Geographic documentaries. And if you think I am milking this simile out of proportion, just wait for the scene when the cops go for a hunt in the outlands.
The film's look has nothing to do with documentary though, avoiding the naturalistic clichés in favour a very striking cinematography courtesy of Adam Arkapaw, all metallic blues and greens, with the right amount of slo-mo to coldly capture the tension, filming the protagonists in the familial home like caged animals about to devour each other. Every shot is superb, bathed in a very operatic light, displaying real pictorial flair. And while we're mentioning the technical stuff, massive kudos to the sound designer, these shrieking, feedbacking noises in the background kept me on the edge of my seat.
Another detail that elevates Animal Kingdom above your average gangster fare is the insidious way it introduces the sordid, violent aspects of the underworld, in a non- flamboyant, inconspicuous way diluted in the all-surrounding casual Aussiness. You won't see a close up of a heroin needle penetrating a vein for the umpteenth time; drugs are just there, on the coffee table, and so are guns. It is quite a bold (and clever) choice, since most of us aren't used to see Aussie gangsters, and they do look like your regular "mate", with the surfer build, vintage tee shirts and mid-long hair. An insecure director would have felt the need to prove that his criminals from Oz are as "hard" as the American ones with a couple of hardcore scenes, but not Monôd, who keeps the ubiquitous vice understated.
Animal Kingdom's exoticism is obviously part of its appeal, but it never spoils the film – it's authenticity more than folklore. Similarly to City of God, the geographic displacement adds some freshness to the exhausted genre, but is never overplayed to the point where the film will have to be filed under the embarrassing "world cinema" label.
Ultimately, the core theme of Animal Kingdom is pretty universal, replaying the Mephistophelean deal already seen in The Godfather II and The Prophet: if the weak embraces evil when his time comes, he will become strong. Too bad for the moralistic ending, it is another Darwinian tale of survival after all. Can't say the title didn't warn you.
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Les petits mouchoirs (2010)
The most infuriating French hit of the past few years...
A triumph at the French box-office despite the proper lynching it received from home critics, Guillaume Canet's follow-up to the also-incomprehensible hit Tell No One is the most depressingly Gallic flick I've seen in years - and I'm french myself. Indeed, some have said it's the defining movie of the Sarkozy era – self-aggrandising, hyperactive, bling bling and shallow.
Little White Lies (Les Petits Mouchoirs en Français) portrays a group of long-time friends in their late thirties taking their traditional summer holiday in Cap Ferret (an über-posh peninsula near Bordeaux) despite having one of their own lying on a hospital bed after a horrific road accident. Soon, everyone's dirty secrets and half-truths resurface as guilt creeps in, triggering a series of hysteric fits and embarrassing revelations. It's a classic premise for a comedy-drama, seen before in Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill: the death of a common friend as catharsis for collective existential crisis. It's the type of canvas that requires a bit of subtlety from the filmmaker not to turn into a melodramatic cringefest and restraint from the actors not to become an excuse to ham the s**t out of the patronising dialogue.
Instead, Canet decided to go for "SIN-CE-RI-TY" (his mantra during promo interviews), refusing to intellectualise his "most personal film to date" (translation: "I've been staring at my belly button for the last three years"). He shot on his favourite vacation spot and got his wife (Marion Cotillard, yes) and friends to play the main parts. Oh dear. He also decided not to bother editing: the film clocks in above the two and a half hour mark, while managing the extraordinary feat of feeling static while being all over the place in terms of location, narrative developments and story-arcs. Put simply, it's a mess. Did I also mention that every single character is either a self-absorbed bobo idiot – floppy hair, Lacoste polos and flip flops – with insufferable levels of Frenchness (no one kisses their friends that often) or a loud, hysterical woman?
Full review on permanentplastichelmet.com
The Fighter (2010)
A well-told boxing story appealing to the inside jock hibernating in most of us.
I loved The Fighter the first time I saw it. It probably has a lot to do with my infatuation with boxing films as a genre – Raging Bull and When We Were Kings rank high in my personal movie pantheon. Russel visibly knows the canon perfectly and manages to pay tribute to all these great virile sport flicks without ending up making a pastiche. The Fighter is full of intertextuality – from the font of the boxing matches' captions to the training routines – it's knowingly self-referential but also playing strictly by the rules, and that's why it works so well despite what could be easily dismissed as a cliché-laden script of another underdog narrative.
The Fighter is based on the real life story of Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a taciturn and limited proletarian grafter very similar to Rocky Balboa (if the latter was Irish and not Italian), trained by his brother Dicky (Christian Bale) like Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. The difference here with Scorsese's classic is that the only sane and sensible character is the fighter; his dysfunctional and self- destructive family (his brother has a serious drug problem while his mom is plain greedy) become his main obstacle on his way to victory. Loyal to his family till the end, Ward wastes his best years until his brother ends up in prison for one crack stunt too many. Now in the twilight of his career, and with the help of his girlfriend, a local barmaid, and a grumpy Irish cop (played by his real-life counterpart) Mickey finds his way back to the ring and stumbles on a chance to fight for the world title, his one and only shot at glory. Will he capture it? Or just let it slip? etc. You get the idea.
Christian Bale once again delivers the performance of a lifetime as the brother/coach of the title character, a local boxing legend turned crack-head. He adds a new dimension to the film, somewhat between cartoonish and pathetic, as if he came straight out of Trainspotting. His lame schemes to support his habit are hilarious, as are his friends from the crackhouse, depicted in the same warm, non-judgemental way of Danny Boyle's cult film. Bale's extravagant albeit touching portrayal is also reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson's performance in Jungle Fever, perfectly channelling the madness of the moment under the influence of crack, while maintaining the character's humanity and integrity, avoiding to turn into a white Tyrone Biggums.
In the ropes, Mark Walhberg does what he does best: toughness + Irishness. Bringing vulnerability, grit and authenticity to the film, he leaves the flamboyance to Bale, who in return happily chews the scenery. Marky Mark could have just as easily steal the show like in The Departed but chooses not to. Definitely an underrated actor – mainly because he's capable of restraint.
This is David O. Russel's finest movie since Three Kings, a long awaited comeback for the director who wraps it up perfectly, playing with the different takes on the pugilistic genre, from the ESPN Classic approach (the shooting of a documentary on Dicky unfolds as an important storyline within the film while offering a welcome mise-en-abîme) to the Hollywoodian reconstitution and dramatisation of reality. The boxing fights, alternating inside-the-ring shots à la Raging Bull and HBO's satellite coverage style, are infectiously gripping and perfectly edited. Finally, the recurring use of the song "How You Like Me Now" by The Heavy brings energy and coherence, appropriately opening and closing the film.
Admittedly, The Fighter is nothing that we haven't seen before, and was clearly made to provide Christian Bale with a custom-made Oscar vehicle. It is no Michael Man's Ali though, and it is to the credit of the director and the cast if The Fighter still manages to pack a serious punch. A well-told sporting story will always appeal to the inside jock hibernating in most of us.
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Boardwalk Empire (2010)
Not the masterpiece we all expected...
We have been told to brace ourselves for a certified television masterpiece, to be mentioned in the same breath as The Sopranos and The Wire. I admire the PR work behind this one, but having already seen the entire season, I am more than reserved about the hyperbolic praise pouring on Boardwalk Empire.
Of course, there is much to admire in Boardwalk Empire in terms of production values and savoir-faire: from the lavish set (the whole Atlantic City boardwalk was recreated, brick by brick) to the jaw- dropping costumes, from the slick panning-shots to the assured editing, probably never before has TV looked like big-budget cinema. Every single doorknob, period prop or jacket button look expensive; millions have not been spared, and it shows.
Atlantic City is a ghost-town full of dead-men walking, and despite all that illegal champagne flowing and decadent partying, it feels like the mob hedonism, Goodfellas style, is long gone.
Huge credits must also be given to the supporting cast: Michael Pitt, presumably filling in for the Di Caprio obligatory slot (it seems that Scorsese is now unable to produce anything without him, or anybody that looks like him), is by far the most fascinating actor to watch, dominating every scene he is in with a textbook interiorised intensity à la DeNiro; Stephen Graham is a great proto-Al Capone with his pudgy bulldog face; Michael Stuhlbarg pulls out an impressive metamorphosis from the nerdy Jewish academic he played in A Serious Man to the suave yet constantly menacing criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein ; the disfigured WW1 veteran with his mask and sniper rifle is genius but underused, and finally Michael K. Williams (a.k.a Omar from The Wire), providing a nice touch of self-referential casting (look at how much he enjoys himself declaiming countless "motherfuckers" after all these years of swearing deprivation). Kelly Macdonald inherits the most likable character with the poor Irish immigrant turned courtesan Margaret Schroeder, but she turns out incredibly irksome halfway through the season– mainly because of the stagnant nature of her story lines and the total lack of chemistry with co-star Steve Buscemi. Which leads me to the two antagonistic forces supposedly driving the show: Buscemi's Nucky Thompson, half-gangster half-politician, and Michael Shannon's Agent Van Alden, a quarter Elliot Ness, a quarter puritan and a good half pure sociopath.
This is where one of Boardwalk Empire's main flaws lie: in the miscasting of their two leading men, Steve Buscemi and Michael Shannon. I am not the first one to notice it; as good as Buscemi can be playing the off-kilter supporting role in independent flicks, he does not convince as the main focus of the show. He lacks Gandolfini's stature, DeNiro's charisma, Pacino's menace or Idris Elba's charm – to cite only but a few iconic on screen kingpins. Buscemi is at his best schmoozing during political reunions with his witty one-liners and wry smile, but fails to deliver any thrills when things are heating up. On the other side of the spectrum, Shannon delivers a madly theatrical, completely OTT performance, as the grimacing, self-flagellating federal agent. He never really fits in the show, and personally, I never managed to take him seriously
Finally, my main concern with this first season is the plot: it's all over the place, consisting of a disjointed bunch of not-so-exciting story lines; the series slightly taking off after five episodes, but never to really climax at any point and ending up with one of the most underwhelming finale I have ever seen. The attempts to introduce a solid socio-historical background are laboured and slow down the action, and in the end are too sporadic to really fulfil their pedagogic intentions.
Most of the events taking place in Atlantic City are dull, and the show only seems to achieve its potential when introducing historical characters like Capone, Rothstein, Lucky Luciano etc. or taking its protagonists to New York and Chicago – wherever Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) goes basically. The best episode of season 1 is by far "The Face and the Finger", a violent account of the territorial war in Chicago's Greek Town experienced through Jimmy's reluctant involvement. Nothing to do with Nucky Thompson then
Less of him and more of Michael Pitt's Darmody in season two would be a big improvement.
Like most of Scorsese's films of the last 15 years, Boardwalk Empire reaches perfection on a purely technical level, but it feels more like a trip to the museum than a movie – where are the urgency, the guts, the invention that made Marty's earlier stuff so indispensable? It also feels like the weight of expectations is burdening Terence Winter, nowhere near as creative and groundbreaking as he was when penning cult Sopranos episodes.
Maybe it was just a hesitant start to a classic in the making, and Boardwalk Empire, just like The Wire, may turn out to be a slow-burner. Or not.
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Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010)
Addictive, very entertaining and smarter than you think
I hate the term "guilty pleasure" – no one should be ashamed of their taste, or feel so posh that they have to file their popular inclinations under an effeminate and conveniently vague term. But if I ever were to use it, it would be for Spartacus. It's Gladiator meets 300, spiced-up with even more sex, gore and decadence than in HBO's Rome. How good can it get? The build-up to the climatic finale is expertly crafted (Sparcatus' story lines are more clever than you think) – and that last episode is one of the most unapologetically SAVAGE thing ever filmed for mainstream TV – it makes class genocide so appealing that you'll want to grab a sharp stick and rush to the streets to impale a few rich folks as soon as the credits roll. Past the first two episodes (admittedly a bit rubbish), this is some utterly addictive stuff, from beginning to end.
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Treme (2010)
A masterful celebration of character, culture and community, a humanist look at life and death – and music.
David Simon's new show, a heartfelt ode to post-Katrina New Orleans and the spirit of its inhabitants, is the best thing I have seen all year. It's The Wire with music instead of drugs. Many found this very concept boring – no blood, no guns, no romantic gangsters. Too bad for them. Treme is about everyday people trying to get by, a group of flawed but beautiful characters so real that it's bordering on the uncomfortable. It's not Eastenders after the levees broke though – nothing is soppy or melodramatic about these people's lives: romance is doomed or pathetic; tragedy is latent and ordinary.
Wendell "Bunk" Pierce and Clarke "Freemon" Peters reprise slightly altered versions of their Wire persona, but this time as local musicians. Pierce still plays the gregarious man who's real good at what he does (used to be PO-lice, here it's playing the trombone) but likes earthy pleasures a bit too much (women & booze, again). And Peters remains this charismatic, wise and brave old-timer (Morgan Freeman watch out!), as the Chief of a tribe of Mardi-Gras Indians. They are both great, but Clarke Peters once again steals the show: after transforming doll-house furniture building into a dignified past-time in The Wire, he pushes it further in Treme by making sewing pearls look like the manliest thing on earth.
The rest of the ensemble cast is on the same note, absolutely excellent. John Goodman is impressive playing the ungrateful role of the self- absorbed academic, who, despite having his beautiful house and life spared by the hurricane, lets his romantic love for the city draw him into a bleak depression. Khandi Alexander (yes, that sexy coroner from CSI Miami) redeems herself from all these years playing in that pathetic excuse of a show with her subtle portrayal of a bar owner looking for her missing brother in the aftermath of the hurricane. There is also the irksome but necessary figure of local white DJ Davis McAlary (played by the excitable Steve Zahn) who serves as a symbol for gentrification and the controversial issue of white appropriation of black music, also obliquely addressing the recurring criticism of David Simon as "that middle-class white dude pretending to talk and care about the black underclass".
Treme's pace is languorous, not dictated by the need to drive story lines or pile up cliffhangers. It's all about creating an atmosphere, getting a feel for the place. It is not, however, a sentimental postcard or a soppy mood piece: Simon's ambition is intact, layering the show with so many metaphorical story arcs (e.g. the great jazz debate between tradition and new jazz fleshed out by the feuding Lambreaux father and son) and socio-political observations, still pointing out the unfairness and contradictions of US society. In contrast to The Wire where institutions, like Roman gods, would crush the lives of the mere citizens, in Treme, no ones seems to care about institutions that are in even worse shape than the city anyway – symbolised by all that rotting, damp paperwork.
A quick word about the soundtrack: live music sounds like live music, and it's rare enough to mention – with sloppy notes, amp feedback, misunderstanding between performers, ego battles, failures to keep up, faulty equipment, etc. Whether you particularly like New Orleans jazz, southern rap, funk, second-line brass bands, Indian chants or not – the enthusiasm and freshness of the music will keep you interested (and there's a chance that you'll improve your iTunes library in the process).
In the long run, Treme could be considered superior to The Wire, as a masterful celebration of character, culture and community, a humanist look at life and death – and music. Let's hope Simon keeps it up with the next season.
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Ddongpari (2008)
Brutal, Intense and heartbreaking.
(MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS) Arguably, extreme violence – or ultra-violence as Burguess would put it - has been one the most prominent traits of Korean cinema in the last decade, to the point that for many mainstream cinema-goers, it came to define it.
The worldwide success and broad critical acclaim of Park Chan-wook revenge flicks, filled with gore and stylised perversity overshadowed the diversity of one of the most productive and inventive national film industries to create a stereotypical sub-genre: the extreme Korean thriller. Thematically, Breathless does not seem to disappoint the viewer's expectation: from the opening frame to the last scene, the film is relentlessly violent – but its depiction and meaning could not be more remote to Park Chan-wook's universe. Yang-Ik Jook, the director who also displays an impressive intensity in the leading role of his first feature, opts for a naturalistic approach to filming – all close-ups, simple shots and hand-held camera – light years from the complicated, westernised, post-Fight Club aesthetic of Park's vengeance trilogy.
The epitome of Park Chan-Wook's visual style when dealing with violence can be found in Old Boy, with the infamous brawl in the jail corridor, where the lone hero overcomes one by one all his attackers in a virtuoso tracking-shot directly inspired by the beat-'em-up video games. Violence here is unreal: "just fun" - like in a Tarantino movie. In contrast, Sang- hoon, the main protagonist of Breathless, a debt collector spending his days beating to a pulp every single human being in sight, doesn't even know what a Playstation is (which he actually calls a "Play-shit"), until he agrees to buy one to his nephew, in a rare display of kindness. In a film saturated with symbols and totemic items (western child toys, knifes, phones, hammers), the introduction of the Playstation can be read as a departure from this insensitive, immature and virtual approach to the issue that is violence; and more specifically in Breatless' case, domestic violence.
A moral tale about domestic violence and its consequences, the film reproduces the cyclical nature of child abuse. The bullied child becomes the bully; the victimised mother produces a traumatised daughter, a beating follows another beating and so on. This makes the film structurally repetitive and quite predictable, but remarkably, it also gives a forceful depth to the directors' hard-hitting argument about the responsibility that victims have in perpetuating the cycle originated by their tormentors.
After an uncompromising first hour letting the viewer astonished and weary of Yang-Ik Jook shock and awe approach, the director suddenly introduces a sentimental edge to Breathless with an unexpected touching montage of the two main characters (the thug and the high school girl) taking the gangster's nephew to the fair, where he can, at last, be a child again. This passage, with its cheesy oriental music, is very reminiscent of Takeshi's Kitano similarly tender moments in his romantic gangster chronicles. This is also the only time, along with another pivotal twist taking place later on in the film (the father's suicide attempt), that Yang-Ik Jook uses mood music – the rest of the soundtrack containing only diegetic sounds of incessant kicking, punching, slapping and screaming noises, which provide, like a percussion set, the internal rhythm of the film.
Littered with more swear words than a vintage Scorsese epic, Breathless, whose original title Ddjongpari could be translated "fly-shit", is also a study of the social alienation that comes with the lack of education that often originates in the trauma of child abuse: its main characters don't have the words to express their frustrations but only their fists and can only mimic what they have witnessed. Even marks of affections are sent through play-fighting (Sang-Hoon and his nephew) or verbal abuse (Sang-Hoon and the adolescent girl he calls "crazy bitch"). School education is regarded as important by all characters (the wannabe gangsters are always asked if they graduated from high-school by the mob boss) but remains a vacuous, distant, superficial dream, alien to their world of poverty and violence.
The ending works superbly in a series of symmetrical narrative motifs, leaving room for hope as seen in the concluding flash-forward. The transformation of Sang-hoon is brutally quick, but remains believable. A martyr of child abuse, his will to change his ways and break the cycle will eventually kill him but save his family. It is a powerful conclusion to an overly brutal film that leave bruises like a punch in the face, but also handles its gentle moments with a disarming sincerity.
More film reviews at ggendron.wordpress.com
Shutter Island (2010)
Above average, but a worrying lack of ambition from Scorsese
Almost two decades after the release of Cape Fear, it seems that this minor opus from a major American director was more of a turning point than anybody would have thought at the time. Considered as a slight bow to the mainstream, it was in fact an entire new direction.
Martin Scorsese's latest studio effort, Shutter Island, a period thriller with a schizophrenic twist a la M Night Shyamalan, adapted from Dennis Lehane eponymous best- seller, sums up what kind of filmmaker Scorsese has become in the last twenty years: a gifted craftsman, a world apart from the rebellious neurotic genius he was in the 1970s. One can easily draw parallels between the two films: retro atmosphere, B-movie material, some cheap thrills enhanced by a bit of gore and a soundtrack of Herrmann-esque strings constantly on the verge of parody. In an interview given during the promotion of Cape Fear and compiled in Scorsese: Inteviews by Peter Brunette, the filmmaker ironically calls his remake of Thompson's thriller a "real movie", an "A-to-B-to-C film": the same category that Shutter Island falls into. It is what the French would call an exercice de style – a shot at making a codified, straight genre picture, a mere study of style over substance.
Shutter Island tells the story of Teddy Daniels, a federal agent sent to a remote asylum on a barren island, home of America's most dangerous and deranged criminals, to investigate the disappearance of a murderess. The mystery soon thickens and Daniels realises that he may be at the centre of a frightening conspiracy. The problem with Shutter Island is that, even viewed as a "guilty pleasure" offering from a respectable auteur, it is not entirely successful.
Aesthetically, the film is often gorgeous: the set and costumes are incredibly accurate to Lehane descriptions; every shot is expertly framed and an abundance of Scorsese's cinephilic obsessions will satisfy the knowing viewer: a Powell & Pressburger homage here, (the spiral staircase from The Red Shoes, the high angle shot of the cliff from Black Narcissus), a Samuel Fuller reference there (Shock Corridor is still the benchmark of all asylum movies). The dream scenes are vivid, thanks to Robert Richardson's brightly contrasted photography (he was after all the man who shot all those glaring neons and flashy suits in Casino), particularly the concentration camp flashbacks: the haunting glimpse at a pile of corpses petrified in ice and the agony of the German officer are powerful tableaux of human savagery.
But despite all its graphic excellence, Shutter Island fails to be Scorsese's Shinning. Mainly because of its weak material: it is hard to recognise the touch of the writer of Gone Baby Gone or the contributor to The Wire in this half-baked story, which re-use a clunky final twist already seen in half a dozen films since Fight Club and his split-personality narrator. The flaws of the pedestrian script are laid-bare by the ridiculous length of the film, clocking at more than 2 hours and half, which is over-zealously faithful to Lehane's book and struggles to sustain interest in the plot past the first act. The delays in the film post-production (Shutter Island was shot in 2008 and its release reported several times last year) seem to indicate that Scorsese did not find the solution in the editing room, where he is usually at his best.
Generally, Shutter Island is victim of its sophistication. Scorsese, who should know how to wrap a B-movie since he went to Roger Corman's school back in the early seventies, pushes all the right buttons but the overall seriousness of the direction kills the joy. As usual, DiCaprio is not bad but remains bland, just as the rest of the cast, who all seem so impressed to work with the legendary director that they are unable to deliver a memorable performance.
Sadder is to see Scorsese gradually abandoning his themes and visual signatures (the virtuoso tracking shots, the reckless editing) in favour of a studio approach to film-making – flawless but impersonal. Now an Oscar-winner for his mediocre The Departed, the maverick has joined the ranks of the Hollywood establishment. Shutter Island is far from a total failure, but with all the talent involved, it feels a bit like a waste of everyone's time.
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