oh, hollywood.
no, i didn't watch the oscars, but i did happen to notice that the departed won best picture.
just gonna repost this:
my six word review of The Departed
INFERNAL AFFAIRS
WAS
SO
MUCH
BETTER.
no, really. i'll concede that the departed is slicker. and it did a lot more with the one major flaw of infernal affairs, that being the incongruously cheesy subplot involving the police psychiatrist. in fact, the relationship between the psychiatrist and the two main characters was incredibly well done and probably the high point of the movie.
and of course, the acting and direction were great. no surprise with the names attached to the film.
but no matter how much martin scorsese wants to deny that the departed wasn't a remake, every single brilliant plot point was lifted whole cloth from infernal affairs. every. single. important. scene. (again, apart from the psychiatrist ones.)
if anything, the only major difference in plot was the one that inevitably demonstrated the gulf between a sophisticated, complex rendering of human characters in the original and the standard americanized, hollywoodized, shallow black and white rendering of easily digestible symbolic representations of people.
i'll admit, the "development" of both leonardo dicaprio and matt damon's characters is passable as long as you haven't seen the original. it's no worse than what you would expect in any hollywood movie. but the deliberate flattening and simplifying of tony leung and andy lau's brilliant, humanistic original characters is utterly repugnant if you've seen infernal affairs.
(oh yeah, rereading this i also want to excoriate the flattening of eric tsang's character too. of course how much of that was just jack nicholson wanting to screw around with his character and make him the embodiment of malevolence, i don't know. but it was sad seeing yet another real, three dimension character get completely warped into a caricature of a villain.)
and of course, mainly as an inevitable result of this flattening you also get the dull, insipid "twist" ending at the end of the departed, the kind of ending you would expect in a hollywood film. ugh.
and then of course, as others have pointed out, there's the special irony of having solely racist portrayals of asians in a film whose plot is almost entirely lifted from a hong kong flick.
okay i will also note that i heard about how up until scorcese actually corrected the mistake 2 hours after it was made, the academy apparently thought Infernal Affairs was a japanese film. great. that about says it all.
just gonna repost this:
my six word review of The Departed
INFERNAL AFFAIRS
WAS
SO
MUCH
BETTER.
no, really. i'll concede that the departed is slicker. and it did a lot more with the one major flaw of infernal affairs, that being the incongruously cheesy subplot involving the police psychiatrist. in fact, the relationship between the psychiatrist and the two main characters was incredibly well done and probably the high point of the movie.
and of course, the acting and direction were great. no surprise with the names attached to the film.
but no matter how much martin scorsese wants to deny that the departed wasn't a remake, every single brilliant plot point was lifted whole cloth from infernal affairs. every. single. important. scene. (again, apart from the psychiatrist ones.)
if anything, the only major difference in plot was the one that inevitably demonstrated the gulf between a sophisticated, complex rendering of human characters in the original and the standard americanized, hollywoodized, shallow black and white rendering of easily digestible symbolic representations of people.
i'll admit, the "development" of both leonardo dicaprio and matt damon's characters is passable as long as you haven't seen the original. it's no worse than what you would expect in any hollywood movie. but the deliberate flattening and simplifying of tony leung and andy lau's brilliant, humanistic original characters is utterly repugnant if you've seen infernal affairs.
(oh yeah, rereading this i also want to excoriate the flattening of eric tsang's character too. of course how much of that was just jack nicholson wanting to screw around with his character and make him the embodiment of malevolence, i don't know. but it was sad seeing yet another real, three dimension character get completely warped into a caricature of a villain.)
and of course, mainly as an inevitable result of this flattening you also get the dull, insipid "twist" ending at the end of the departed, the kind of ending you would expect in a hollywood film. ugh.
and then of course, as others have pointed out, there's the special irony of having solely racist portrayals of asians in a film whose plot is almost entirely lifted from a hong kong flick.
okay i will also note that i heard about how up until scorcese actually corrected the mistake 2 hours after it was made, the academy apparently thought Infernal Affairs was a japanese film. great. that about says it all.