Shutter Island Opinions

[Andrew Rieger]

Honestly, Scorsese films have never been known for their superb effects work. The body splat in front of Leo in the Departed looked horrible but that did not diminish my love for the film. I tend to ignore minor effects problems if the film is wonderful in all other aspects.

 

[Leo Ticheli]

Cinematography: great.
Acting: inspired.
Sets, wardrobe, and all the other magic stuff: wonderful.
Music: just plain awful. Maybe just the mix, but yuck.
The movie itself? Boring as hell.

Good shooting and best regards,

Leo

 

[Neil Larson]

I love how opinions can be so varied. It's a good thing to keep in mind when your film isn't loved by all. Someone will always hate your work.

 

[Steve Das]

terrrrrrible editing.. there were scenes for example.. where his detective buddy was going for cigs.. and his hand was just grabbing them.. then they cut to a different shot.. and the detectives hand was back at his side and going for the cigs again.. stuff like that all over the place.

She talks about not editing for seamless continuity and going for
performance in documentary film Martin Scorsese Directs
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765514/

She was married to the director Michael Powell from 1984-1990..
attended classes taught by Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell..
won 3 Academy Awards..those cuts are intentional..not mistakes..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelma_Schoonmaker

Thelma Schoonmaker is an American film editor who has worked with director Martin Scorsese for over thirty-five years. She has edited all of Scorsese's films since Raging Bull. Schoonmaker has received six Academy Award nominations for best editing, and has won three times (for Raging Bull, The Aviator, and The Departed).

 

[Zakaree Sandberg]

If you think that you can do better than Thelma, contact Martin and send him your resume.

im not an editor.. i was just pointing out what bothered me about the movie..
if it was done on purpose then nevermind my statement..
it just bugged me and i wasnt a fan

 

[Leo Ticheli]

It's been more than amply demonstrated that the perceived stature of the messenger greatly influences evaluation. If some unknown had directed Shutter Island, I doubt it would receive praise from many.

If the editor made the "bad" cuts on purpose, I'd call it a failed experiment. Bad is bad whether it's on purpose or not.

I failed to mention the ghastly ferry ride shots; the worst I've seen in a modern motion picture. Wish I had bolted then and there.

I think the NY Times review was spot-on.

Good shooting and best regards,

Leo

 

[Sidney L. Plaut]

I agree that the ferry ride did look fake, as did the jeep ride. Could it be on purpose?

Bad cut? I don't understand that all... what is a bad cut? - a cut which result is the opposite of what the director intended is a bad cut.

A hand with a cigarette CUT to hand without cigarette, has nothing to do with a bad cut.

 

[Sidney L. Plaut]

SPOILER ALERT:

in regards to the ending - I think it was quite clear - he could not go on living
with his memories of what had really happened - So he chose to have them cut away in surgery.

Oh and the SCORING: fantastic! oscar worthy score!

 

[Zac C]

I agree that the ferry ride did look fake, as did the jeep ride. Could it be on purpose?

Somewhere in my vast searches Scorsese wanted to shoot it like a Hitchcock thriller, thus tried to emulate the "projection background" effect through greenscreen

 

[Steve Sherrick]

im not an editor.. i was just pointing out what bothered me about the movie..
if it was done on purpose then nevermind my statement..
it just bugged me and i wasnt a fan

It's very common to go for performance over continuity. In fact, young editors often make the mistake of trying to go for continuity over performance, and then have trouble figuring out why the scene doesn't work. They are afraid someone will call it bad editing if things don't match right. The truth is, if it's a good scene, you shouldn't be aware of the editing unless there's intent to make you aware of it.

 

[Nigel Wallace]

The way I saw it (and this is probably a SPOILER ALERT type of thing, but if you're in this thread you already messed up) is that for the longest time i thought ruffalo was doing an awful job acting and that things seemed really out of place and a bit shifty. I almost tossed the whole thing out as being a good film until the ending came around, I didn't see it coming I guess, most did, I didn't think about what the ending would be, I wanted to be surprised. Though, after the ending came SO much more made sense to me, like ruffalo's less than usual great acting was because he was acting as a doctor who was acting as an agent. little things like that. Anyway, people were pretty split about it at the screening i went to of it two weeks back, but most favored it. I did. Reminded me of the shining a bit.

 

[Sidney L. Plaut]

Spoiler alert again.!

one of the best scenes for me was the first meeting with both of the doctors (or three) - when Max says great defence mechanisms... can't wait to see that scene again knowing what I know now!

- the "Hitch" look with rear projection explains it very well. also the fact that it is "fake", everything is fake... made up and arranged.

 

[Neil Larson]

Still though, I don't know that I'd have gone with the rear projection look. It was just too distracting, but who am I to second guess one of the greats?

 

[scott william]

Yeah i'm still deciding if i liked the rear projection look. I guess i did notice it but found it interesting more so than distracting.

 

[Jim Hoffman]

I think the editing was completely intentional. There was a risk to be too obvious sometime to throw off the viewer with the edit tricks. Cigarettes etc. The scene when Leo is interviewing patients and the woman goes to drink from her water glass that is no longer in her hand but on the table... Lots of this stuff scattered to create the "something ain't right here' vibe. I think this was a very good execution of a very difficult challenge. The great thing about the book was all these ideas ran wild in your mind you were experiencing instead of observing. When you become the observer things become much more obvious and difficult to pull off.

 

[Matt W.]

All of Scorsese's films have been edited in this way; it's nothing new. The combination of like everyone smoking cigarettes and Scorsese using odd, "authorial," and disjunctive shots makes Shutter Island seem particularly bad, but there are scenes in his other films that have equally egregious continuity errors.

This is Scorsese's most interesting movie since Bringing out the Dead, but it's very inconsistent and so the Aviator remains Scorsese's best film of the past ten years. For most of his career, and particularly in his gangster films and films set in NYC (Taxi Driver, Bringing out the Dead), Scorsese has taken on the dual tasks of anthropology and character study. In most of Scorsese's films, we're presented with a group or subculture (the mob, NYC at night, the boxing ring, high society in Age of Innocence) that has a specific set of "rules," and we're also presented with a (typically violent, male) character who lives at the periphery of this group. For much of a given movie, Scorsese studies both the group itself and the protagonist's association with and response to it. There's then a confrontation between the protagonist and the group he inhabits; this can best be seen in something like Goodfellas or Taxi Driver, but it's in virtually every Scorsese narrative. Along with that confrontation, Scorsese offers the question of who's morally superior: the violent man who reacts against his morally ambiguous surroundings or the people (members of this "group") against whom the man reacts. Taxi Driver examines this question most powerfully in the fever-dream ending that may-or-may not be Travis Bickle's fantasy. If it is, it means he's sicker than we think; if it's not, it means society is sicker than we think for rewarding him.

If that's Scorsese's MO (and it more-or-less is and always has been), Shutter Island is unique because it begins in just this way (nowhere, not even in the mob, is there a social system with more delineated rules and roles than the asylum and nowhere is there a better "violent outsider" than we find in Teddy) and then ends totally differently: all the madness is within Teddy's head. Scorsese doesn't really handle this ending particularly well; the asylum is much more interesting when it's Teddy's paranoid schizophrenic fantasy than when it's some guy writing Teddy's name on a chalkboard, but this is a really significant and unusual narrative step Scorsese takes. His "unhinged" protagonist (Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, Frank Pierce, Howard Hughes, etc.) is now just legitimately insane.

Scorsese is also riffing on the kinds of movies he grew up with (old b-pictures) and on mid-to-late Hitchcock films (he drew on them a bit in Cape Fear, too). Visually, Shutter Island looks very modern (Richardson always does incredible work) but the green screened shots look like rear projection, there are tons of whip pans, odd camera moves, and strange flashbacks, and everything feels very stylized and anachronistic. Scorsese also uses the old Hitchcock trick of giving us a range of narration almost exactly the same as the protagonist's and giving the protagonist all the POV shots in order to align us with him. The bizarre early scenes of the hurricane struck me as particularly weird and anachronistic visually, but not in a bad way at all. (I'm curious to talk with any DPs or composting artists re: the really bad conversation with the warden in the second act because it has some of the worst background /foreground matching I've ever seen, either like they rigged up too strong a piece of diffusion above the actors or they keyed in a bright noon background against a plate shot for overcast footage.)

I also believe Scorsese sees this as a bit of a meta-film, like Vertigo, wherein the first half is something you experience with the protagonist only to find out it's an experience created specifically to trick him (and trick you, the audience) so your experience of watching the film is the same as the protagonist's in the narrative. This is distinct from the "twist" in a film like the Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects or something because in both Vertigo and Shutter Island we experience the whole set-up firsthand and exactly as the protagonist does only to learn more later. Scorsese fails to capitalize on this technique, however, because he stays too close to Teddy throughout; the movie drags terribly in its third act and the scene at the lighthouse just hits you over the head with the same information over-and-over.

Scorsese should have given the audience the revelation that Teddy is delusional at the second act turn (by, for the first time in the film, cutting to a scene where he's not present and having the doctors discuss how he's the ultimate test of their new therapeutic methods)--maybe immediately after his scene with the "real"/imagined Rachel Solando. And then slowly after that we watch his psyche collapse completely as he starts to question what's real (this could be expanded from one scene to a gradual thing across the third act) and then puts himself and the doctors in danger and we hope he's able to recover and that no one will get hurt. The last scene could be the same. This is essentially what Hitchcock does in Vertigo, giving the audience privileged information at the second act turn to reorient the narrative, and it works much better than just loading up the end of the film with tons of exposition.

That said, this is Scorsese's first interesting film since the Aviator and contains moments that are just brilliant. I really enjoyed it, but it has a ton of flaws--and is just really, legitimately strange.

 

[mikeburton]

I loved it. It was a film that was unique in it's style, Leo's performance was amazing and overall i thought even though predictable the film was interesting enough in the way in which it played out. Loved the music, it reminded me of the score in Cape Fear which I love. The scene with the matches was awesome (full of continuity errors) but I didn't care one bit. Still thought it was amazing. As far as the green screen boat ride to the island I have one question for you all that are knocking it, what happened to your sense of wonder and ability to get lost in a film? Who cares if it was not the best effects work you've seen? Seems knitpicky to me.
Overall, I thought the film was great regardless of who's name came up in the end credits

 

[Wesley Scoggins]

If the editor made the "bad" cuts on purpose, I'd call it a failed experiment. Bad is bad whether it's on purpose or not.

But they aren't bad cuts, she explained it. She wanted to create a jarring disjointed environment, the guy is crazy with a fried re-setting memory, she did that one purpose since the film is from his perspective.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

How was "Shutter Island" shot by Robert Richardson, ASC you can read at March Issue of AC Magazine Digital edition:

"Mind Games" By Patricia Thomson, page 30>>>

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I think the 'rear projection' look was on purpose, and I loved it when I saw it.

If I'm not mistaken he did the same thing in Cape Fear, where I also loved it.

I'm not the worlds biggest Martin Scorcese fan, I think he's a bit overhyped. That being said, I really enjoyed Shutter Island (as I did The Departed).

The story wasn't very original, and the dialogue was sometimes very bad.
But I loved the way the movie was shot, the atmosphere, the kind of story it was, the acting by DiCaprio, ...
Maybe I'm going to even see it a second time.