The Departed
Posted on October 14, 2006 by Ching under Movies.
Please do not read any further if you don’t want me to ruin the movie for you…
Okay, you’ve been warned…
My father-in-law David, Brian and I went to watch The Departed after dinner tonight. We, and by we I mean, Uncle Kenny, Renee, Feifel, Grandma, Grandpa, their neighbor John, David, Donna, Brian and I, all went to Red Lobster for dinner to celebrate Grandpa’s 89th birthday and Grandma and Grandpa’s 65th wedding anniversary.
Dinner went great but back to the movie… The Departed is probably the best movie I have seen in a long time. Martin Scorsese knows his stuff. The movie is excellent. It captures you and entertains all the way through. I loved all the plot twists [incoming spoiler] and the unexpected way that DiCaprio’s character dies at the end.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of movies. In most movies the protagonist lives. So let’s say DiCaprio is our hero. You’d think he’d survive and then we have ourselves a happy ending, right? Well, that’s one of the things I loved about this movie. It’s not so predictable.
So let’s say Matt Damon is our hero. Well, guess what [another spoiler]… He dies, too. I love how everyone dies at the end. I know that’s morbid of me but it worked out great. The movie is more effective with everyone dead. I think the only top billed person who doesn’t die is Marky Mark. Go, Marky!
Anyway, the movie is great. I even told Brian that I wouldn’t mind watching it a second or third time. If you know me, that’s quite a compliment because I generally can’t stand to watch a movie that I have already seen. It is so good that I am willing to forgive a film flub.
Which film flub, you ask? If you recall the sex scene between the shrink and DiCaprio you’ll notice that her portrait is still hanging on the wall, she’s still packing stuff up and she’s still got most of her furniture at her place. Maybe you were too busy oogling the girl to notice, but I did and believe me when I say this is a flub. Recall that a couple of scenes before she had moved her stuff into Matt Damon’s apartment and the same childhood portrait of her was in that box. The movers rang the bell, remember? If that was the day she moved then why was her stuff still conveniently at her place when DiCaprio decides to pay her a visit?
Having watched a couple of episodes of Project Greenlight I’m pretty sure that Scorsese was well aware of this. I’m sure I’m not the only one who picked up on it. When you think about it, pacing is more important and if you have to make sacrifices to make the movie better then so be it. You gotta do what you gotta do. Ultimately I order that they went with in the movie works better as far the the pacing is concerned. If they would’ve gone with the correct chronological order then the pacing would have been off and the movie would have been less effective. That’s just my untrained opinion, though.
Regardless of the flub, it’s a great movie. Go see it already!
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P.S. The weird thing about going to the movies with David (but without Donna — she wasn’t feeling well) is that it felt oddly like Brian and I were on our first teenage date and his dad was acting as our chaperone. Brian did not misbehave during the movie. 😉
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