There once was a boy I knew. A right bastard by most accounts, most of the time. But he loved his Irish mother and he graduated CRLS with Matt Damon. And he always cried to the Stones' track "Let It Loose," from Exile. So he was very much in my thoughts tonight as the cinetrix settled in with my beloved WASPy in-laws to watch the near-sister-in-law's mum's Stones-scored SAG copy of The Depahted.
What tha faaack?
Dude, that shit is wickit retahded.
I mean, sehhhhhriously. Don't get me wrong: Mahky Mahk is faaackin' awesome. But Mahtin Sheen? What tha faaaack? Is he a faaackin Kennedy ah what?
I joke, but only a little bit. The cinetrix was educated in the suburbs of Boston, by nuns, no less, among the very progeny of the OFD crowd of Chowds this flick calls F/family. And I call faaaackin bullshit on The Depahted.
Forget that 90% of the film was actually shot on Marty's home turf, not Southie. And know that I plan on watching it again in more controlled circumstances than those that obtained tonight. I'm still sad that my second-favorite little Sicilian paisan--after my own 90-year-old, Brooklyn-born grandfather--will most likely finally get the Oscar nod for something that's just not his best work.
Ultimately, Scorsese fails to get inside these impenetrable, pig-headed Oirish people the way he did the East New York Eyetalians in Goodfellas--or even the high-brows in The End of Innocence. I had no bettah insight at the end of the film into the pseudo-Whitey Bulgers and their version of omerta than I did at the beginning--because there was no scene akin to Paul Sorvino slicing the garlic oh-so-thin, say, that truly gave the viewer a sense of who these people ahh and what they value. Just a lot of posturing and dropped "r"s and aerial shots of the red line going to Mattapan. Whatevah. Not even the brief, radiant presence of Kevin Faackin Corrigan could make up for my disappointment. The Depahted is less than pissah.
[Can someone please put the cinetrix in the way of a copy of the elusive The Friends of Eddie Coyle before she totally despairs of ever seeing her hometown properly portrayed onscreen?
And somebody needs to lend me Down to the Bone or some of Vera Farmiga's other, better work--double quick fast. I keep hearing she's the freakin' second coming, but here all I kept thinking was, "How nice that Claire Forlani's indie cousin found work. Too bad she got a shitty vocal coach."]
