The movie is as great as ever but the Q&A with Scorsese and De Niro at the beginning will live with me forever. What a special experience.
Nothing better than these long, eloquent answers from Scorsese and then W. Kamau Bell being like
“do you have anything to add, Mr. De Niro?”
“No. Not really.”
One of the few times where I’ll say Alex Garland should’ve adapted himself. His novel and all of its venom towards clueless white tourism becoming dangerous colonialism is reduced to a guy being scared off from the jungle because he can’t hang. A little embarrassing. Looks great, incredible soundtrack and that video game sequence rocks, but man. This one’s rough. The only Boyle I hadn’t seen in full before trekking back through his work and likely will never watch it again.
An extremely, shockingly dull and expository first hour that had me sitting there going “are they fucking BLOWING it??” leads to maybe the finest extended set-piece they’ve ever done and from there I was locked in. I like how weird and unwieldy these last two are, lots of threads that if you pull on enough you’re like “what?!” and I definitely got a lot of that here but you can really start to see the seams. Cruise heads are gonna…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
A second viewing of this opens up RaMell Ross's camera and his decisions with it in ways that are just so thrilling, it kind of left me a little in awe. Take, for example, the brief glances Elwood has early on at women. Looking up from a comic book to gaze at a woman in the five and dime store. Eyes being catching a woman as she walks away. Minor stuff, maybe, a teenager slowly developing a crush here or…
