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SPOILERS ALERT!
Shutter Island has been a big topic of discussion around here and the whole of the movie-based internet sites over the past week and we’re obliged to continue that discussion as Matt Gamble joins in for a full on spoiler discussion of the movie – including hashing out the continuity errors once and for all! We also saw plenty of other great cinema since last week including a revisiting of Mulholland Drive and escaping back to the original versions of both The Collector and The Crazies. Kurt managed to catch up with the new version of the latter film while Andrew made time for the Oscar nominated (acting) The Last Station as well as the German mountaineering picture, North Face. So lots to get into here as well as some new DVD releases and other tic bits of awesome. It was a great show and we hope you enjoy the listen.
As always, feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comment section below and again, thanks for listening!
Click the Audio Icon below to listen in:
http://rowthree.com/audio/cinecast_10/episode_156.mp3
Full show notes are under the seats…
show
TIME LISTINGS:
Intros/Opening: :00
(SPOILERS!) Shutter Island: :43
The Crazies (2010/1973): 51:22
North Face: 1:12:26
The Last Station: 1:22:57
The Collector (1965): 1:30:19
Mulholland Drive: 1:39:00
DVD picks: 1:48:05
Outro music: 0:00:00 – 0:00:00
MAIN REVIEW:
Shutter Island (Kurt’s review)
OTHER REVIEWS (what we watched):
The Crazies (Kurt’s review)
North Face (Andrew’s review)
The Last Station (Andrew’s review)
The Collector (1965) (IMDb)
Mulholland Drive (Kurt’s review)
DVD PICKS:
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Andrew: Dead Snow (Andrew’s review) 
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Kurt: The Informant! (Andrew’s review) 
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Matt: Flame and Citron (IMDb) 
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BLU RAY:
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Andrew: The Informant! (Andrew’s review) 
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Kurt: The Informant! (Andrew’s review)
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Matt: I don’t pick a Blu-Ray disc! |
OTHER DVDs NOW AVAILABLE:
$9.99
Bliss
The Damned United
OTHER STUFF MENTIONED:
Jandy’s Mulholland Drive Finite Focus entry.
Kurt’s Mulholland Drive Finite Focus entry.
The Collector (1965):
Shutter Island poster mentioned:
Genre Masher Extraordinaire, Dan O’Bannon:
PRIVATE COMMENTS or QUESTIONS?
Leave your thoughts in the comment section below, or email us:
feedback@rowthree.com (general)
andrew.james@rowthree.com
kurt@rowthree.com
my take on the Scorsese ‘mistakes’
I think given his track record its wrong to say that there are no pure 100% continuity mistakes. I do give him enough credit though that he could have used some of them to his advantage. I think overall some are happy accidents, some are intentional and others are just pure accidents.
Andrew, when you rewatch Shutter Island closely watch the Michelle Williams scenes, you will see OVERT continuity errors, like I said before, her voice talking and a long shot of her with mouth closed staring at Teddy, The interrogation scene where the woman mimes having a glass in her hand (what Scorsese didn’t notice the prop was missing?)… he is definitely partially playing with this as part of his style.
Well again, I don’t think that he didn’t notice, I just think he didn’t care. And fair enough. If you don’t care, that’s fine. It’s your movie and you can do what you want.
Let’s say that Teddy did hallucinate. I guess I would ask what does that signify? What does it mean that a woman mimes drinking, but then the glass suddenly appears in her hand and then is suddenly empty? If you’re trying to show he’s hallucinating, I think it’s a really obscure way of trying to do that – if you’re trying to do that, why would you want it to look like a glitch rather than an obviousness? It’s purposeful in that he didn’t fix it, but I don’t think it was originally by design. If that was the only thing in the movie and it wasn’t obvious in every other movie Scorsese does, then I could buy it. But as is, no way was that part of the “storyboarding” of the scene. You can say that it happened to work out for this movie because of the nature of the film, but like I said in the show, that’s just an excuse.
The next Scorsese movie will come out in a couple of years and there will be a bunch of these same types of “errors” and what will we use to excuse them then? One of the characters has an eye-patch so this is Scorsese’s way of showing us how he might interpret the world? There are a couple of scenes in which Leo doesn’t even appear (I’m thinking specifically of Kingsley addressing the board members). How do you explain the technical glitches in that scene?
And the Michelle Williams scene is a flashback and sort of dreamlike anyway, so whatever there. In fact, I didn’t even notice anything there – I’ll watch again (soon I hope!).
There’s a difference between subtle, but deliberate glitches in continuity, which Scorsese seems to be fond and uses quite successfully and laziness. The interrogation scene in Shutter Island with the glass/missing glass issue adds to that 5th dimension in which the audience has to question their own reality. Similarly, the continuity “errors” in Gangs of New York mimic the to the edgy, dirty, defunct state of the characters and the quality of life at the 5 Points however, there are indeed mistakes. The scene where Tammany is feeding his caged birds while talking to Bill the Butcher simply looks sloppy as the over-dubbing clearly doesn’t line-up.
I just put The Collector in my Netflix queue – thanks for highlighting it. Sounds awesome. I was waiting for Andrew to mention Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, though…when Matt started describing The Collector, that was the first thing I thought of. But I guess Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! ended up a lot lighter and happier.
William Wyler may not be considered an auteur, but he was an extremely solid and consistent director throughout the 1920s-1950s (and I guess a little into the ’60s). If anything, he’s a classic example of the studio director who knew how to set up a scene (look at the mise-en-scene and deep focus in The Little Foxes, for example – of course, having Gregg Toland as cinematographer didn’t hurt) and then get out of the way of his actors. He did several of Bette Davis’s most memorable films; very proficient at those domestic melodramas.
yeah, I thought I did mention Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! during the show, because it sounds exactly like it. In fact I bet if you went back and found some early info on Almodovar’s movie you’d find that it actually is a loose remake of The Collector – though a breezier version obviously.
Yeah, you did – sorry, didn’t mean to make it sound like you didn’t. I apparently didn’t finish my thought in that part of the comment before I went on to the next part. I do that sometimes.
I just figured you had seen it and would think of it immediately, so was waiting for you to say it. And then you did, and I felt vindicated.
It’s not even important enough an issue to “pick sides,” but it’s fun to debate about anyway, so I’m throwing my weight behind Andrew on this one.
Say what you will about the usefulness of the errors in Shutter Island (certainly you can argue that they help add to the mood), but you can’t play both sides of the same coin. Are the errors (throughout his career) unintentional or a choice? Because to say that they are his “style” and then that he made a conscious decision to employ them in SI just sounds like fanboyism.
Mostly, though, I think I’m bothered by how making a movie about a guy that’s going/is crazy, combined with this continuity business, seems to have given Scorcese free rein to get away with anything. Intentional or not, it’s anything goes, since it’s nearly impossible to argue that whatever it is isn’t in service of the story. Pink flamingos in the background? Dude’s crazy. Underpants gnomes stealing his boxers? A hallucination. Cupid digging a hole with the ace of spades? All a part of the story. At what point is it a discredit to the filmmaker? I think that might be Andrew’s point as well.
Anyway, enjoyed the discussion (thus far) as usual. Can’t listen to the rest as I’ve yet to see Mulholland, but any podcast that talks about Cliffhanger is aces in my book.