Sanity Challenger: Shutter Island

By Leo Owen

10th August 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Laeta Kalogridis
Release Date: August 2 2010
Studio: Paramount Home Entertainment
Number of discs: 1
Region: 2
Price: From £9.99
Running Time: 133 mins
Certificate: 15
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas

Before Shutter Island even appeared on mainstream release, Scorsese cleverly played with viewers by using the trailer to trick them into expecting a straight-forward horror film and luring them into a false comfort zone of misplaced preconceived notions.

On the surface Shutter Island is about US Marshall Teddy Daniel’s investigation of missing patient, Rachel (Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson) at Ashecliff mental asylum on Shutter Island. Armed with his own agenda, Teddy’s investigation is not so straight-forward – Teddy seeks another patient, Andrew Laeddis, the man who burnt down his home and in doing so, killed his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams).

Having previously met an ex-Ashecliff inmate and with the knowledge that the asylum is funded by The House of American Activities Committee, Teddy suspects the clinically insane are being used as guinea pigs for mind experiments and decides to blow Ashecliff’s cover and save all the human lab rats. As Teddy and his partner Chuck, try to find all the missing pieces of the jigsaw, Teddy becomes increasingly obsessed with uncovering the truth of the identity of the 67th patient and exploring the infamous ward C.

When the back-up generator fails in the storm, the whole electrical system fries and with the chaos this brings, Teddy is finally able to explore the lighthouse. Positioned at the bottom of a craggy cliff face covered in poison ivy on a rocky islet surrounded by a security fence and monitored by a guard, the lighthouse is where Teddy believes they open up patients’ brains, performing brain surgery to create the “ghosts” to go out into the world and do things sane men would never do. And all protected by the notion that: “People tell the world that you are crazy and any protest to the contrary just proves otherwise.”

Long before the credits start to roll, Shutter Island morphs from a crime thriller with horrific undertones into a mind-bending ingenious piece of psychological trickery. Its challenging plot line weaves between the past, present, future, make believe and down right delusional.

Shutter Island is located in the middle of the ocean accessible only by a limited ferry service the government control. After two days of its claustrophobic isolation and punishing climate, Teddy starts to get horrific migraines; begins to mistrust and doubt his partner’s intentions; is haunted by the voices of ghosts telling him he “should have saved [them]” re-setting “like a tape playing” and is tortured by traumatic visions of concentration camp mass exterminations and piles of frozen corpses.

Abound with disturbing flashbacks and haunting dream sequences and full of intrigue, Shutter Island is bleak and dire, questioning moral order, the definition of sanity, what makes the individual and the value of man. DiCaprio creates a range in Teddy’s character, successfully depicting the “tough guy” veneer for this troubled soul, while Ben Kingsley makes a mildly humorous humane Doctor Cawley and Mark Ruffalo plays the sympathetic partner.

An expertly executed psychological masterpiece to make you question your own sanity, Shutter Island sits proudly among Scorsese’s impressive body of varied and always captivating work. Testimony to his range as director, Scorsese explores the horror/thriller genre with gravitas, leaving us to ponder if it “ would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”

*****

Special Features:

• Behind the Shutters
• Into the Lighthouse

Watch the trailer for Titanic 2 – No this isn’t a joke…

By Katherine Romero

29th July 2010 | 5 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Unbeknown to us, a sequel to the hugely successful Titanic has been filmed and now the trailer has been released for our very eyes.

The trailer is quick to remind us that it is not a joke, which is always a sure sign that the film is complete rubbish.

The premise is that 100 years after passengers set sail on the Titanic, passengers aboard a ship taking the same route are about to suffer the same fate as an iceberg is hurled at the boat.

Funnily enough, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet and James Cameron didn’t sign on for this.

Quite possible the most pointless remake we have seen. No surprise, it’s a straight to DVD release. Whereas Titanic tried to recreate the real events of real people, this film tries to depict the Titanic as some sort of ghost ship, set to kill anyone who dares take the same route. Offensive and insensitive but it has to be seen to be believed. Watch the trailer here and let us know what you think.

Inception – Spellbinding Dreams

By Bridget Barrett

22nd July 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Written & Directed  by Christopher Nolan

Dreams are powerful, lucid dreaming is even more profound, Christopher Nolan’s has created an amazing journey with Inception. It pushes all the right buttons for an action packed film noir style emphatic movie. Leonardo Di Caprio, Joseph Gordon, Ellen Page and Marion Cotiland to name few of the outstanding cast that do justice to this outstanding sci-fi film.

Dominic Cobb- Leonardo  Dicaprio is an expert in his field, able to infiltrate people’s minds and extract important information as a con artist whilst they dream. Gathering the information they need is done with precision within a dream state world. But the dream world can become confused with reality, a surreal state that existed for his wife- Mal- Marion Cotiland which had severe consequences.

It’s corporate espionage at its best, DiCaprio – Dom Cobb is a slick businessman that must complete one last job before returning home. He has to influence the dreams and actually alter people’s sub conscious  to change the decision and shape the future. Nolan’s produces surrealism by layering one dream on top of another (a dream within a dream) and a memory backlog for Cobb.

The heist team that is put together by Dom Cobb take on a big job and have to extract the information from the mark Cillain Murphy and Robert Fischer without being caught, but even in a controlled dreamed world things don’t always go to plan!  With buildings folding on themselves and Ariadne – Ellen Page the young trainee architect pulling mirror doors shut then touching them so they shatter to reveal a more familiar surroundings that has painful backdrop memory for Cobb, is not only clever but plays with the human mind.

The film moves on to other spell binding cinematic wizardry, fights on ceilings and the team in dream like state suspended in the air in a hotel room; buildings folding onto themselves like a box and moving cars and pedestrians don’t fall down, people are actually walking up a vertical wall. With its stylish locations- Los Angeles, the snowed bound Alps and a strong storyline, bridges and stairways that have a life of their own, and an elevator that takes the characters Dom and Ariadne back to Cobb’s own dream when reaching each floor- states  that anything  possible in a dream-right!

With the strange imagery and the trickery with the law of physics, gravity and space it’s all mind blowing special effects, that is just breathtaking. The tension builds at a nice pace as the main narrative interweaves with sub plots and memory overload but it keeps you guessing right until the very end.

Why?  Because the truth and illusion element of what’s real and what is really part of the dream world is what actually makes this movie so great.

Review: Shutter Island – a thrilling melodrama

By Nicholas Deigman

4th March 2010 | 2 comments | 2 people like this

Dir: Martin Scorsese Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams

US Marshall Ted Daniels (DiCaprio) has his head “halfway down the toilet bowl” for the duration of his stormy trip to Shutter Island, a dark and jagged outcrop off the coast of Boston, home to the infamous Ashcliffe Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Unfortunately for Daniels, his headaches are only just beginning…

Daniels has been called in to investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando, and is joined by new recruit Chuck Aule (Ruffalo). But Professor Cawley (Kingsley) and his subordinates make life extremely complicated for the Marshalls, and Ted soon decides there is no point in continuing without the help of the FBI. But when a destructive hurricane strikes the coast, Ted and Chuck are stranded on the island; surrounded by rats, the criminally insane, and the morally questionable staff.

It is at this point that Ted finally confesses to Chuck why he really came to the island: Andrew Laeddis, the man who set fire to Ted’s house and killed his beloved wife, Dolores, is being held in the high-security ‘Ward C’. While checking out Laeddis, Ted also discovered a high-reaching conspiracy involving barbaric, government-run experiments in mind control conducted on Ashcliffe inmates. Suddenly a much more terrifying possibility becomes all too real… what if Ted has been lured to the island because of the threat he poses to Cawley’s experiments? And how can Ted prove his own sanity if Cawley tells the world he has lost it?

This is an unapologetically melodramatic and lugubrious take on the ‘psychological thriller’ genre, but it is also eerie and gruesome. As the classic, Soviet-styled, minimalist credits and the bombastic orchestral overture ebb away, we find Ted talking to himself in the style of a 1950s anti-hero (“It’s just the sea… just a whole lotta sea”) and stumbling through a galley filled with rusty manacles hanging from the ceiling to reach Chuck on the deck.

These early scenes –filled with jump cuts, still frames, and moaning, creaking, marine noises – also employ a purposefully obvious use of back-projection, and one of the most exhausting and pompous scores since Howard Hawkes set down his camera. There is humour, but there is also an assurance that we are watching one of the masters of the homage creating a truly ‘classic’ piece of filmmaking.

 The swirling storm clouds and jagged shards of rock erupting from the ocean bed convey one very simple message from the outset: the hospital might not be a ‘prison’… but the island is. Within this dank world, however, Scorsese is not scared to bring his love of vibrant colours and purposeful production design. The hospital itself, save for the menacing ‘Ward C’, is a charming community of red brick buildings and colonial gardens; Ted and Chuck’s ties are ludicrous; the wardens uniforms resemble Gestapo regalia; and the small graveyard is straight out of a Hammer film. There is an easy comparison to be made to ‘The Wicker Man’ in all this, and Scorsese does not make those comparisons any harder to draw up.

‘Shutter Island’ is a perfect example of why Scorsese will remain underappreciated by the vast herds of cinemagoers less cine-literate than himself. It would have been so easy to strip Dennis Lehane’s novel of it’s knowing genre conventions and subtle humour, and create a brooding and edgy ‘neo-noir’ that had audiences and critics cooing throughout the festival season. But instead, Scorsese has created an uneasy hybrid of ‘Douglas-Sirk-melodrama’ and ‘Stanley-Kubrick-horror’.

Leonardo DiCaprio is engrossing as the browbeaten Marshall. His Boston accent remains faultless, and is here imbued with a sharp 50’s twang made dull by years of drinking. His well-practiced ‘grimacing-while-choking-back-tears’ face – which served him so well during his dalliance with the greatest romantic tragedy ever told, not to mention during the tale of a certain hubristic cruise liner – is once again affecting and powerful. DiCaprio has rarely put a foot wrong in his career, and his partnership with Scorsese is fast becoming the stuff that legends are made of.

This is not an easy film to enjoy unless you have a soft spot for the melodramatic thrillers and films Noir of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Scorsese has created a wonderful, personal take on a ‘classic’ style of cinematic storytelling; and while ‘Shutter Island’ may lack the pace and raw modernity of recent neo-noirs, it makes up for it in zeal and self-confidence.

To read more from Nicholas Deigman go to www.t5m.com/nicholas-deigman