The Movies...

On Saturday I saw The Departed, a good, and violent, movie. I’m not writing a proper review, as I’m sure several hundreds have been written.

The story takes place in Boston, where the movie was partially filmed and where I almost live. Only one actor (Vera Farmiga) completely fails to somewhat simulate the Boston accent. Why can't any one in Hollywood do a Boston accent? I don't understand it. Of course, two of the stars of the movie, Matt Damon and Marky Mark (sans Funky Bunch) are from Boston, and as a result, don’t have much of an issue with Boston lingo. Tonic! Rotary! Pocketbook!

***SPOILER ALERT***

Everybody dies! Bang! Bang! Pow! Pow! The end.

Leonardo DiCaprio did a good job. Sometimes, in my mind, his "boyish good looks" often affect his ability to portray roles other than that streetwise homeless kid who lives in a dumpster on TV's Growing Pains. And I hated Titanic "with the passion of a thousand burning suns." That's a cliché, but it's one that I've always found funny.

As I was leaving the theater, I heard an older woman make a complaint to her companions about the "language" in the film, i.e., the swearing. According to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), the word "fuck" is said 226 times during the course of the film. (Whose job is it to keep these sorts of statistics?) I've never understood this issue about "language." Wasn't this woman familiar with Realism? If a movie contains beatings, shootings, and other such dramatics, wouldn't you even consider that a character might, just might, say, "fuck?" What if, instead, that same character, facing a loaded gun or a serious beat down said, "Nuts to you?" I dare to claim it would not possess the same emotional impact.

For example, in Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel Sister Carrie, the title character has an affair with a married man, and unlike most other contemporary novels, Carrie doesn't end up suffering from some horrible calamity dealt to her by fate: she is a "fallen" woman who survives her chosen course of action unpunished. Carrie's outcome defies the popular but unrealistic theory that bad people are punished and good people are rewarded. If Dreiser had written a more conventional story, resulting in Carrie suffering for her "immorality," his novel would read like a fairy tale. What Dreiser writes instead is revolutionary. What am I talking about, Willis? Realism. Weren't you paying attention? I took the time to make a literary reference and then actually explain it. Sheesh!