Directed to the hilt . . .

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2002)

knifeblade and otherwise. I suppose it's too early for a review, but I'll give it a shot and let the more logorrheic shred this as they might. Let's get this demotic party started. Saw it at a DGA preview in NYC--the words "epic," "bloodbath," and "shambles" come to mind. And that's just getting into the screening.
Here are a few impressions from having seen the film, inconclusive, and in no real order:
1. Scorsese is very forthright about his debt to Italian neo-realism (Visconti et al.), and the film is directed within an inch of its life. Not quite as dense and sickening as Age of Innocence's endless homage to the feast scene at the end of The Leopard, but still. Dolly shot cuts to dolly shot cuts to a dolly shot that turns into a whip zoom of a fight. Virtuosic, but what for?
2. Daniel Herschel-Gordon-Lewis deserves a Nobel Prize for acting. Bill Cutting supplants any Hollywood baddie you care to name as far as complexity and character is concerned, including every adolescent's favorite cannibal analyst. Scorsese spoke after the screening, and likened the Bill the Butcher character to some Melville he had been reading. It's very appropriate, and I could only wish for more of it (Melville) in films.
3. The movie's narrative trajectory is a bit off, with a climax (The hallucinatory "Butcher's Apprentice" scene) about two-thirds into the film. It goes a bit haywire in the end, with the characters becoming tiny parts in the sweep of history (think Bertolucci's 1900, but with smaller flags), but it's still very enjoyable.
4. Oh yeah. Leo. Good enough. The Darwinian grief muscle between his brows was working overtime. A callow youth playing a callow youth (with a vendetta).
5. The pop music DOES NOT WORK HERE. Pax Vox.
6. The tapestry doesn't really hold as dramatic narrative, but it's a heartfelt work of film art.
7. The daguerrotypes of Matthew Brady or Nadar that are shown near the end, of Union casualties of the Civil War, were somehow more immediate in their feeling. By that I guess I mean less mediated, less theatrical, and after so much the film puts you through, to realize that it is just theater is a jarring thing. The pictures have more impact than the film.
8. Damn but I hope this sumbitch makes some money.