What a tragic shame that MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore. This is a dizzyingly creative video, fun to pause and watch frame-by-frame.

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is a spectacular mis-fire. This rambling and misshapen wreck of a film all but confirms that his Best Director/Best Picture combo Oscar for The Departed was merely a belated apology for the Goodfellas snub, and not a late-career resurgence.

With Robert DeNiro as his muse, Scorsese crafted cinematic classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. With DiCaprio, he’s delivered the abstruse and turgid train wrecks Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, and now, Shutter Island. Simultaneously noisy and tiresome, the film expends so much energy trying to conceal its central gimmick that it spirals out of control. And without any real point of focus, all the sturm und drang dissipates like a whisper in a hurricane.

From the opening frames, where a ferry slowly drifts out of an impossibly opaque fog bank, the film announces its agenda to deliberately withhold the bigger picture. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing the film decides to withhold, because the rest of the film is overstuffed with a collection of thrown-together noir movie cliches.

Leonardo DiCaprio scrunches his face into knots to play Teddy Daniels, a man who constantly insists that he is a United States Marshall. He arrives on Shutter Island with a brand new partner to investigate the escape of a prisoner while, naturally, a hurricane is bearing down on the island. The hospital is run by the mysterious Dr. Cawling, played by the shaven head of Ben Kingsley. When Max Von Sydow shows up as a German doctor, the alarm bells of suspicion turn into red flags of absurdity. Von Sydow couldn’t appear benevolent if he walked onscreen carrying a bouquet of roses, surrounded by animated bluebirds.

The escaped prisoner plot line quickly takes a back seat to implications of nefarious conspiracies, personal vengeance, and Nazi-science experiment surgeries. The facility on Shutter Island isn’t the only one with a hidden agenda. Teddy, it turns out, believes the man who killed his wife has been hidden away in the bowels of the hospital, and he’s on an unofficial mission to find him. It also comes as no surprise to learn that Teddy is a haunted man, plagued by visions of his dead wife and his experiences in World War II. As the investigation plods onward, Teddy devolves into a hospital orderly, an inmate, and a fugitive.

Unfortunately, the trailer tips off almost all of the plot, and every scene carries the scent of suspicion. Misdirection hangs in the air like a thick fog, and nothing that we can actually see is engaging on its own, semi-obscured terms. The mysterious flashbacks are inexplicably psychedelic, and the powers-that-be on the island are improbably obscure. As the incongruities mount, that sense of withholding becomes fatally distracting. When Teddy has a crucial confrontation with a prisoner, you can’t help but wonder which cliché will ultimately explain everything. Is it the Jacob’s Ladder purgatory? The Angel Heart descent into hell? The sinister conspiracy that ensnares Teddy a la Arlington Road?

The problem with Shutter Island is that it violates the trust between the audience and the storyteller. Movies that have a successful twist have to operate on two levels. With or without knowledge of the bigger picture, every scene has to make sense both ways. For all the logistical nonsense of Fight Club and solemn misdirection of The Sixth Sense, the first two acts of both films are comprehensible and emotionally engaging on their own. By the time the narrative is stood sideways, it’s an enhancement, not a relief. On Shutter Island, the director is part of the subterfuge. The mystery doesn’t come from the telling, it comes from the certainty that the filmmakers are withholding some crucial parts of the story.

Scorsese’s hallmark has always been intense realism, so the opportunity to squander an epic budget on psychedelic elements must have been attractive. It’s hard to imagine another film that would allow him to stage the graphic concentration camp shootout that is one of the best executed (pun intended) visuals in the film. The pretentious and CGI heavy images of fire and water homage European surrealism, and the extended flashback that caps Teddy’s story feels like it could have been lifted from an unseen Bergman work.

All that firepower is wasted on a film that perversely decrescendos instead of climaxing. Whatever cinema-historical references Scorsese set out to homage are best left uncelebrated. Perhaps an upcoming filmmaker working on a tight budget could have made a smart, claustrophobic thriller out of this material. Sadly, Scorsese and his unchecked ambitions have little to offer beyond unnecessary obscurity.

24 is currently early in its eighth day. For a show that uses real time as a premise and trafficks heavily in implausibilities to maintain that premise, perhaps the wildest thing to consider is “How old is Jack Bauer?”

Jack Bauer, at the start of season 1

Consider this – Jack Bauer has served CTU under five different presidents: the guy before David Palmer, David Palmer, Wayne Palmer, Charles Logan, and Alison Taylor.  He’s faked his own death, gotten hooked on heroin, and served time in a Chinese prison. [Read more →]

9/365, originally uploaded by Jeffrey723.

Just look at the parking lot, Larry. Just look at that parking lot.

From the gloriously imaginative wizards at WellMedicated.com, a great sample of 25 alternatively designed movie posters and illustrations.

25 Imaginative Illustrations Inspired By Film // WellMedicated.

Note that Justin Reed, the resident artist from the dawn of Good Is The New Bad, is represented here with 3 of his finer pieces.

Many of the remaining works are just as clever. The Highlander novelization is a personal favorite.

The mark of quality for a YouTube video is if it makes you laugh the second and third times you watch it. This amusing clip is really aimed toward the video editing professional, but since that’s exactly what I am, that’s why I’ll share it here:

We Got That B-Roll

Wonder what your neighbors are watching? Wonder about all the various ways your viewing habits are being monitored and tabulated? Or how about if audience stereotypes are true?

Thanks to Netflix and the New York Times, now you know some of the answers. Behold a breakdown of 2009 rentals by zip code:

A Peek Into Netflix Queues – NYTimes.com.

If you ever wondered how safe your personal data is on the internet, here’s a scary object lesson. Sure, it’s anonymized. And even scarier is the conformity among neighborhoods. Play around with the sliders to see which neighborhoods are renting what. The first, biggest, and most embarrassing surprise is the frequency with which everyone in America seems to be renting the terminally tedious Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

Looking at the patterns of Los Angeles rentals, for amusement check out the rental patterns for two Tyler Perry films – The Family That Preys and Madea Goes To Jail. Guess how frequently the residents of Malibu and Beverly Hills requested them?

Even cooler, and more telling (though only in ways that the ACLU would shit kittens over any meaningful attempt to draw conclusions from), is to drag the slider across the top 10-15 movies in an ersatz time-lapse. Watch the rental patterns – not just the intensity, but the areas where people are renting.

First, just about everybody in the Southland is renting The Shiteous Case Of Benjamin Buttass as their top pick, except for about half of the city of Los Angeles, and the good people of Lynwood. [Read more →]