God’s gangster brings guns and crucifixes

Seven projects underway as director have right now Martin Scorseseaccording to the specialized website Imdbranging from the adaptation of the novel The castaways of the Wager still biopic of Franklin D. Rooseveltpassing through a thriller “set in Hawaii.” At 82 years old, Scorsese He has more plans than your nephew on the scooter. Yet, Apple TV has seen the time to sit down with the director and ask him questions, review his life and his films and compose the great documentary about his artistic legacy. They have titled it Mr. Scorsese.

Es quite boring. One starts it with enthusiasm, because Scorsese, together with Quentin Tarantinoes the living filmmaker who best talks about cinemathe more passion he puts into it, the more films he has seen and the more illuminating ideas he is capable of producing per minute. However, it seems that the Scorsese of A personal journey with Martin Scorsese through American cinema (1995) or that of Made in England: the films of Powell and Pressburger (2024) becomes minor and almost vulgar talking about his own movies. It helps this reckless descent a lot that all the guests in the documentary are even simpler than him.

The fault, to look for, may lie with the product director, Rebecca Millerwife of Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York). The first scene of Mr. Scorsese (the title already denotes a cosmic creative laziness) shows us Scorsese telling Rebecca that he starts the camera rolling first and then takes out the clapperboard, and not the other way around. Mansplaining! After this strange beginning, the chemistry between interviewee and interviewer completely collapsesand you notice Scorsese uncomfortable all the time, wanting to go home, biting his lip to keep from saying what he thinks, or trying very hard to get on with his own thing. celebratory documentary. It’s sad to see.

I would tell you that the only thing I have learned in the five hours of the documentary is that Martin Scorsese has a film titled American boy: a profile of Steven Prince (1978) and that in it this Steven recounts in detail a polydrug-addicted adventure that, without skipping a comma, would constitute the famous scene of Pulp Fiction where John Travolta resurrects Uma Thurman with a giant syringe. This only indicates again how Quentin Tarantino would have made a tribute, or a small participation in this tribute, much more brilliant than that of all the others combined.

Spike Lee He just says “oh”, “ah”, “hahaha”, with his well-known unbearable theatricality. Robert de Niro confirms all the things they ask him (did Martin do this or that?; yes) and Leonardo DiCaprio he limits himself to showing a regulatory admiration. Isabella Rossellini I don’t know what it says. Then they bring gangsters from Scorsese’s youth district and they make them look ridiculous in a meeting room, thinking that they are going to say incredibly shocking things. So many people come out saying obvious things or nonsense that the only good thing about Mr. Scorsese es watch clips from Scorsese’s films.

The director, unfortunately, cries a lot. In the first episode, we learn about his troubled past, in a neighborhood of New York where all that mafia lived that later starred in their movies. We seemed to be doing well here. But, now a film director, with increasing success, all your life is, according to his own testimony, one suffering after anothereither because he takes drugs, or because no one wants to produce a film for him. The truth is that Scorsese has reached his octogenarian, so he wouldn’t take drugs that much; and that he has directed one film after another every two or three years for half a century, which does not seem to indicate that it has cost him the world to make films. Michael Cimino (The hunter) died at 77 and spent the last twenty years of his life without directing.

Scorsese’s cinema is so studied and commented on that Scorsese himself cannot contribute anything, let alone his friends.

Apart from self-pity, Scorsese appears very close to Catholicismwhich means that he directed gangster movies because those about priests sold less. What he would have really wanted to do is religious movies (The last temptation of Christ, Silence), I interpret, a bit of a joke. For this Catholicism What can I tell you, Scorsese has filmed very little sexhas been married three times and has had the holy patience to participate in Mr. Scorsese. for him These five hours are nothing other than penance.

For the spectator who is fond of his cinema, too, because we know everything. We know about Joe Pesci and his famous scene in one of ours (“Do I think I’m funny?”), and the Robert De Niro before the mirror in Taxi Driverand the Raging Bull fight was filmed following the planning of the Psycho shower scene. And what about Heaven’s Gate (1980) put an end to auteur cinema brilliant and pampered. Scorsese’s cinema It is so studied and commented that Scorsese himself can’t contribute anythingnot to mention his friends.

Missing from this documentary a more original look at Scorsese’s geniusanother pulse, another varnish, another approach. It’s like a medley of Instagram videos and single scenes of one of ours. The mafia, which seems frivolous in his films, here seems directly summery, as if having a mafia uncle or a delinquent friend were for a child a perfectly valid alternative to watching Sesame Street.

Seven projects underway as director have right now Martin Scorseseaccording to the specialized website Imdbranging from the adaptation of the novel The castaways of the Wager still biopic of Franklin D. Rooseveltpassing through a thriller “set in Hawaii.” At 82 years old, Scorsese He has more plans than your nephew on the scooter. Yet, Apple TV has seen the time to sit down with the director and ask him questions, review his life and his films and compose the great documentary about his artistic legacy. They have titled it Mr. Scorsese.