Shutter Island

Back in October, when Shutter Island was originally to be released before being pushed back for unfathomable reasons, I wrote the following paragraph:

And guess what? I was nearly right. It is a psychological / supernatural nuttyfest, it does star Leonardo DiCaprio's big, constipated face and it does have some nipple-twistingly insane camera moves. It is not, however, cracking.

It's entertaining, but it goes on forever and DiCaprio's mush, constantly contorted in apparent sphincter-clenching agony, is in every single scene. Even his own Mum would get fed up of having to look at him for that long. Try staring at this picture for 138 minutes; that's what Shutter Island is like.

Martin Scorsese, the apparently infallible genius who hasn't actually made a great film since Goodfellas (unless you count that wine advert), aims for something a little bit Kubricky and a little bit Hitchcocky here, but ends up falling short of both. It feels a bit like The Shining meets Vertigo, and while (to me at least) that sounds like the most perfect film that could ever exist, Shutter Island is nowhere near as good as either. Its scary bits aren't scary enough, its plot twists too predictable (if you haven't guessed the ending in the first half hour you're a pathetic, hopeless failure) and its final act seems to last as long as most films' total running time.

So what is essentially a standard thriller is livened up no end by Scorsese's kinetic camera, but that's where the magic ends. You can't take a film seriously when it includes an embarassingly cliched use of anagrams or a scene in which a character wastes an entire box of matches trying to see better in an already perfectly well-lit corridor.

Anyway I've gone and done it again; banged on about a film's bad bits and made it sound like I hated it. I didn't hate it. It was just alright, like so many other films. And from Martin Scorsese, that's not good enough.

What Cineworld Enfield Did To Annoy Me This Time
Screen 9 has the noisiest projector in the known universe. It was like having someone waving one of those old wooden clackery rattles people used to take to football games in 'the good old days' for the entire duration of the film. Unbelievable.

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Nipple-Twistingly Insane Camera Moves

Watch this. It’s brilliant.

Good news, everyone! Martin Scorsese is making an unashamedly audience-friendly popcorn thriller. I’m excited about that even though the last time he did it the result was The Departed, which deserved its Oscars about as much as The Incredible Suit deserves to be awarded ‘Best Russian Dumpling Recipe of the Year’.

Much has been made over Marty’s inability to win an Oscar until The Departed, which made that win a clangingly hollow one, as it was startlingly average. If I was him I would have shoved the award firmly up the Academy’s collective poopchute and asked that it only be returned when the words “Whoops, in 1991 we meant GoodFellas, not Dances With Wolves, silly us!” had been engraved on it. And it had been thoroughly cleaned and sterilised.

In actual fact it has been scientifically proven in a poll carried out exclusively for The Incredible Suit, by The Incredible Suit, of The Incredible Suit, that Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese hasn’t actually made a great film since GoodFellas, so each new one carries the weight of expectation around its shoulders like a rucksack full of photocopiers.

Anyway, Shutter Island looks like it might be a cracking psychological / supernatural nuttyfest, even though it does star Leonardo DiCaprio and his big, constipated face. Somebody get that man a laxative mint before he bursts! At the very least it’ll look lovely and have some nipple-twistingly insane camera moves, which Marty does so well.

The infuriating thing about Shutter Island is that it was supposed to be released this week, but has been unceremoniously booted back to February because, according to Paramount CEO Brad Bigbucks: “Our 2009 slate was greenlit in a very different economic climate and as a result we must remain flexible and willing to recalibrate and adapt to a changing environment.”

I haven’t got the faintest idea what that means but I’m remaining philosophical because Up and Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (the irony!) are both released this week, and if I’d had to squeeze Shutter Island in as well I would have had to move in to the cinema and they don’t like it when I do that. Something about how going to the bathroom before I get dressed upsets the customers.

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Tittypiddle

With frenzied fanboys frothing at the mouth and I dread to think what other orifices, the first trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar splurged onto the interwebs today in a spasm of colour (mostly blue), action and nonsense. There’s little point in me embedding it here because it’ll only be yanked off by Cameron’s legalbots within picoseconds, and quite rightly too. Imagine the damage I’ll do to the potential squillions Avatar will make at the box office by showing the three readers of The Incredible Suit the trailer. So, for the rest of this post to make any sense, click here to have your eyeballs frottled.

Well wasn’t that underwhelming? For a trailer event so momentous it even got a slot on BBC News (in which George Alagiah hilariously spoke the words “stereoscopic 3D” with the scepticism of a man describing a machine that records your dreams, predicts the lottery results and then gives you oral pleasure) it wasn’t a patch on the trailers for District 9 or Shutter Island. In fact it seemed ostensibly to be a series of scenes from the last Star Wars film which were deleted because George Lucas thought the main characters were a bit blue, and not very convincing. And if something’s so unconvincing even George Lucas won’t put it in his movie, it’s time to worry.

Actually, what’s more worrying is this comment from James Dyer of Empire Magazine from the BBC’s story:

“You’ll see this film in 3D, you’ll be so blown away by it that from then on you’ll want to see all films in 3D, and that a 2D experience is incredibly flat by comparison.”

Apart from Mr Dyer’s astute observation that 2D is flat (give that man a raise!), what a load of tittypiddle. Did he not have to study 1950s cinema to get a job on a film magazine? The world went 3D bonkers for about five minutes with films like Dial M For Murder, House Of Wax and It Came From Outer Space, and then decided that actually, it’s not all that, let’s go to the hop and get a shake instead, Daddio. And will we really want all films in 3D? Wartime dramas? Romantic weepies? Anything with Shia LaBeouf? Not me guv.

Maybe I’m wrong. It’s happened before. Maybe Avatar will change cinema forever, maybe everything will be in 3D from now on, maybe James Cameron will actually be crowned Grand Poobah of the Cosmos. But I doubt it. After all, it’s only a movie; just one with an extra dimension to be overrated in.

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