Stuff I've Been Reading October

“Tessa’s feet were screaming in her fasionable boots.”

This sentence, dropped in the middle of a chase scene involving dozens of vicious automatons, apropos to nothing, should let you know all you need to about Cassandra Claire’s immense deficiency as a writer.

In my line of work it behooves me to keep abreast of at least a few YA titles. So when I came across Clockwork Angel, I realized “Hey I like both Victorian London and Eternal Battles against the Darkness! How bad can this be?” Hoo boy.

The blending of Victorian and Occult fiction is a natural one. Both depend upon the thrill of the hidden society concealed within the world. Wheels within wheels powered by arcane codes of conduct.

Anyway the story is the usual mumbo jumbo of a young girl caught in between the forces of darkness represented by blah blah blah. The point is she soon ends up predictably caught between two life support systems for abs and we go on from there.

All the usual flaws are here, characters who range from vapid to merely dim. A plot we’re several steps ahead of at all times. Writing that’s declaritive and dull (It doesn’t help that Claire makes the decision to start each chapter with some of the finest lines of Victorian verse. Reminding our poor brains what good writing does look like) and Banter that is jarringly contemporary.

But here’s the real bad news. There are scenes here, isolated though they may be. That actually suggest Claire could become a good writer. A scene where our young heroine stumbles into an abattoir where the corpses of the innocent are being fused with machines, are written with a vividness that suggests a dark and fertile imagination that Meyer’s and most of her ilk never had.

Should Claire ever shrug off her bad habits it’s possible she could become a hell of a writer.

As she has already been amply rewarded for those bad habits, that seems rather unlikely.






I have begun a delightfully unexpected late in life love affair with Ray Bradbury.

When I was the age when most discover Bradbury his indirect florid prose frustrated me. And to a certain extent, say in something like "Jack In The Box", it still does. But setting aside his stylistic ticks Bradbury is one of those treasured authors who marches in no one’s territory but his own.

Most of the stories in October Country aren’t quite horror, fantasy or sci fi, though some like The Small Assassin would fit quite comfortably. Most just hum along on a kind of all American wrongness. A feeling like you’re conversing with Will Rogers after ingesting a few tabs of acid.

The Halloween Tree exists on the same inimitable plane. It’s hard to imagine a children’s book with scenes as intense as the children’s encounters with Samhain and it’s grisly aftermath being released today. At least not without the school board getting buried in letters. But The Halloween Tree maintains a feeling of good natured malice, if not comprehensibility.




Yeah I’m pretty sure I dug this one.




Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk finds David Sedaris in an unusually vindictive mood. Though there are few writers better at ripping apart people behaving badly, Sedaris more vicious tendencies are usually countermanded by his inherent amusement and affection for people.

He apparently feels no such need when faced with animal characters, and most of his stories quickly fall into levels of bad behavior and misanthropy which are Ellisian. Things pick up a little at the end, when Sedaris lets up on his targets just a little. And his prose is witty and graceful as ever. But it can’t help but all feel more then a little pointless.

I was lucky enough to attend a reading of Sedaris earlier in the week, where he read a few stories. And as expected they worked much better (though unexpectedly, despite what his persona may have you believe Sedaris is borderline gregarious in person. He also drew an owl in my copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day. I have no idea of its meaning and it haunts me) Sedaris reading of his own material has always been as much a key to his success as his prose itself, if not more so. And Squirrel is no exception, in this regard. But perhaps it is an exception as it is the first of his works that cannot stand without it.



Bill Bryson an author of boundless curiosity, humane temperment, lucid civilized prose and a lacerating dry wit is one of the most purely pleasurable authors I know of. A Walk In The Woods is of course, no exception, and arguably his masterwork.

The saga of Bryson’s attempt to walk The Appalachian Trail, A Walk In The Woods is hilarious and unsentimental, and yet full of wonder. Accompanied by his obese fouled tempered Sancho Panza, Katz Bryson chronicles his attempt to hike the AT, intercutting it with musings on the trails history, the disastrous ecological state of America, bemused vignettes on the short comings of other hikers, a fear of bears to rival Stephen Colbert's and whatever else enters his mind.

It’s a worthwhile trip as it always is with Bryson, even if he grows a little defensive at the end. But for anyone who has yet to walk with him, this makes for a perfect introduction.




But in all these tales the dog is the innocent shoot star/
We all wish upon/
Until It burns up, aging fast and disappearing/
Beyond our jagged horizen

I already covered these in my five horror books column. I’ll just note that beyond all it’s affectation Sharp Teeth is a truly human horror story. And even if the master plot never really holds together as much as it seems it is going to, watching it get there is still a thing of beauty.

John Dies At The End is a tough book to review. Since so much of it’s pleasures come from it’s unpredictability. It’s rare when one of its 375 pages does not contain a turn on a dime plot twist, hilarious joke, or truly horrifying concept.

I regret even to inform you that there is a cock punching demon named Shitload (One of the books cleverest jokes. Think about it for a second.) Feeling vaguely like I’m robbing you of something. So if talking about what I like about the book spoils it, and talking about my very minor quibbles, like the fact that it’s really more of two or three novellas stitched together then a cohesive novel, make me feel grinch like, what does that leave me with to talk about?

Well how about this. Buy it! Buy it Now!



I’ll admit I did not have high hopes for American Vampire. I have an aversion to co-authored work And it seemed at first glance to be yet another toss off in a year of toss offs for King. Which he’s used to clear the pipes after Under The Dome.

So it as suprising and thoroughly gratifying to learn that I had thoroughly underestimated American Vampire.

It’s a stylish, funny, badass, dark, substantial, and yes scary reworking of the vampire mythos.

King sums the mission statement up perfectly in his introduction.

“Here’s what Vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and only work at Night, lovelorn southern gentlemen, anorexic teenage girls, and boy toys with dewy eyes.

What should they be?

Killers. Stone Killers who never get enough of that tasty type A.

At the heart of American Vampire lies a surpringly potent metaphor. The title is not accidental. The story follows as the increasingly decrepit and outmoded European Vampires fall in the wake of WWI as the titular American Vampire Skinner Sweet (Who puts the anti in hero then goes ahead and throws away the hero part) rises. His vitality inextricable from his viciousness.

If there is a flaw in the book its that the parellel stories really are parellel stories. Never quite meeting despite the final stinger.

They’re both fine they just plain don’t touch on each other. In the intro King writes that he requested to write Skinner’s origin. And given how the book is structured it’s hard to believe that Scott Synder wouldn’t have waited to reveal Skinner’s origins for a later issue, or perhaps even a miniseries. And for those annoyed by them, be aware that King’s idiosyncrasies as a writer are in full affect. Only King would introduce his full formed Vampire lead by having him burst out of his watery grave, like a pissed off jack in the box with the line “HELLO MOTHER FUCKER GOT ANY CANDY?”

Still I found American Vampire the perfect way to wrap up the holiday season.

TTDS EXCLUSIVE: First Review Of The New Dennis Lehane: Moonlight Mile

As any reader of this site knows I’m a big BIG Dennis Lehane fan. And the Kenzie and Genarro series is my favorite series period. Any genre. Any era. Any medium.

So when I opened up my box and found Moonlight Mile waiting for me a full month and a half before I could reasonably respect it to… Well “Freaking the fuck out.” And “Completely lost my shit” Are such overused terms. But they fit. Picture my insides as Abagail Breslin finding out she’s going to Little Miss Sunshine and you’re half way there.

But after the shock wore off (It took awhile) I found myself gripped with a deep and wholly unexpected fear. Fear I could trace to three sources.

1) Dennis Lehane is a vicious bastard. Did I really want to give him another crack at hurting these characters after they had escaped relatively unscathed? The characters, particularly the secondary characters, Bubba, Oscar and Devin live violent lives. What guarentee was there that they would survive the interval? Much less the actual events of the novel. (The last two ended up riding into the sunset in what is probably the closest to an unqualified happy ending a character in Lehane is likely to get.)

Who knew what shape they’d be in when the book opened, let alone when it ended?

2) By now it was common knowledge that Moonlight Mile was a direct sequel to Gone Baby Gone.

Even in a series direct sequels are tricky prospects (There’s a reason everyone remembers The Last Picture Show, and few Texasville) let alone a direct sequel to one of the most perfect and ambiguous endings in crime fiction history…

3) I hated Prayers For Rain.

I don’t think I was even able to admit to myself how much I disliked that book until I actually held Moonlight in my hand and eliminated it from the realm of theoretical.

But I can admit it now.

Prayers hummed along admirably for about a hundred and fifty pages. Until for reasons I still cannot fathom, Lehane basically decided that he always wondered if Gerry Glenn, his ultimate terrifyingly empty avatar of evil in Darkness Take My Hand, would had been scarier if he knew Kung Fu and lived in the lair of a James Bond Villian.

It was stupid.

Very stupid.

I hated it as a book, and hated it even more as an ending to my favorite series. And while Lehane’s post Kenzie and Genarro books were great. I was more then a little concerned that he may have lost the thread.

I needn’t have worried.

Moonlight Mile finds Kenzie and Genarro (or is it Kenzie and Kenzie now?) and for that matter Lehane are all back in full force.

They’re older, sadder and have more to lose then ever before. But they’re still their smart assed, fearless, fiercely moral, lovable selves.

Moonlight Mile opens with Kenzie compromising his values as much as we’ve ever seen him do so. In a twenty page scene that blends comedy, tragedy, a great plot twist and a bitch of tease so masterfully that any doubts I had vanished in an instant with this masterful vignette.

Not only is it an entertaining, occasionally howlingly funny scene, but it does a truckload of character and more difficultly thematic work.

Everyone in Moonlight is still reeling from the fallout of Gone Baby Gone. A fallout that exists because Patrick refused to compromise his moral code, no matter the consequences. Now he’s compromising himself to keep out of trouble.

Everything you need to know about who Pat has become in those last ten years is summed up there.

Unfortunately the consequences of that last moral stand remain. And they’re all about to bite him in the ass. All at once.

I’ll say no more about the plot itself. I have no desire to spoil the surprises of what Kenzie And Genarro have been up to in either the novel of the interim.

I will only say that Lehane’s preternatural vividness with setting and character, and dry ruthless wit remain perfectly intact. He even finds the time for a Casey Affleck Joke.

It’s not exactly perfect, a plot involving an ancient cross smacks a bit too much of Sacred’s pulp plotting, except even more conspicuous since it’s both A) completely extraneous and B) sitting smack dab in the middle of a plot about fifty times darker then Sacred. Also there’s a plot hole that is well, pretty fucking big.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s not a perfect book, but it is a perfect ending.

I was originally going to end this review with a joke, saying that if Lehane made me wait for another eleven years for a Kenzie and Genarro Book one of us would get hurt. As I rounded out the last fifty pages, I thought, “Well maybe if he wanted to let the story end here that wouldn’t be bad.” And then came those final ten pages and all I can say is, on the off off chance that Mr. Lehane reads this; if one day you come up with a story for these guys that just seems too good to be true. One you just can’t resist…

Don’t you dare write it. Let this be their end. Let what Kenzie throws in the Charleston stay there. God knows they deserve it.

Stuff I've Been Reading August

Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen, is another of Larry McMurtry’s slight semi memoirs which pop up in this column with the regularity of crab grass. Unlike some of the others though, this was actually a pretty good read. Eschewing the purposeful aloofness that plagues his later memoirs, Walter Benjamin finds McMurtry fully engaged, or at least as fully engaged as the laconic McMurtry allows himself to become.

Using the famous Essay on the death of the storyteller as a jumping off point McMurtry explores the vagaries of his life and art. A lot of this is material and anecdotes that I’ve read before, though this is as much my fault as McMurtry’s as he had the wisdom to put years in between these slight little reflections, and I have perhaps unwisely chosen to read them all in close proximity.

Still he seems more invested in their telling this time around. So if you insist on reading one of McMurtry’s nonfiction work, you could do worse then this one.

…


The Seventh isn’t quite the bold reinvention that Stark seemed to promise at the end of The Jugger. Despite the huge loss that Parker suffered at the end of that novel, he finds himself back on familiar ground at the beginning of The Seventh, relaxing in the aftermath of a heist.

The Seventh ends up being a fulfillment in a more important way though, creating for the second time in a row a Parker who is truly out of his element. In the field Parker is meticulous, leaving nothing to chance and indeed the heist in The Seventh goes off like clockwork. Its in the aftermath, when the loot is stolen in conjunction with a random crime that things go awry. As in The Jugger the real problem is good ole human stupidity. Which is something not even Parker can guard against.

What proceeds is such a slapstick tragedy of happenstance that it reads almost like the most ghastly Dortmunder book ever written, rather then the usual Parker novel.

…



Catching Fire the middle installment in The Hunger Games, aka the young adult sensation that’s actually good, carries over a lot of the same problems that the first installment did.

The first person present tense prose is distracting and declarative. The world Katniss inhabits is a patchwork one with pieces cribbed whole cloth from Battle Royale, 1984, V For Vendetta and The Chrysilads. Added to the problem is the fact that this feels like two books crammed uncomfortably into one. The first about the formenting revolution, which isn’t given nearly enough time, breathing room, or for that matter evidence to feel organic. The second the return to the arena which just feels like a rushed “greatest hits” version of the first installment.

But, and this is a big but, it doesn’t really matter. For all the flaws and nitpicks Catching Fire remains as propulsive a read as the first installment. And even if the world is cribbed it does so with a savagery and intent that honors its influences. It earns them, it doesn’t just parrot them.

The Games may not be perfect, but unlike a lot of the young adult dreck out there it feels like Fuel for the imagination not an anesthetic for it. Ideally it’ll act as a primer, leading the reader to other greater works, and in all fairness that’s exactly what it promises to do.

…


I reread Gone Baby Gone in preparation for my screening of it. I don’t want to talk about it too much right now, I said a lot of what I have to say about the novel in this article and I plan on revisiting the entirety of the Kenzie and Gennaro series in the run up to Moonlight Mile, so I want to save some of my comments for then.

Suffice to say Gone Baby Gone remains a brutally moving novel. The dark beating heart of the Kenzie and Gennaro saga and a master class in crime fiction. Dennis Lehane is a God.

Yes that’s a recommendation.

…
The Corrections is a Literary novel with a capital L. A densely packed encoded work that pulls off the difficult task of being just as clever as it thinks it is. It would be tempting to cosign it to the genre of “Horrible People Doing Terrible Things.” But the remarkable thing about it is that every time you’re sure that its about to overplay its hand and dip into distasteful miserabilism, it somehow manages to pull back and keep its balance with humanity and grace.

If this seems a slight review, that’s because it is. The Corrections is the type of novel one writes about in a fifty page dissertation or a blurb, the middle ground does not satisfy, and I have not the time for a fifty page dissertation. It’s a witty, literate, moving novel that manages to fit in more unhappiness per square inch of page then anyone since Chekov. And its more or less as good as you’ve heard.
…

And remember I also read An Object Of Beauty (Yay), The Fall (yay) and Tales Of Woe (Fuck you).

Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 6: Gone Baby Gone

(Previous Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something were part of a Film Noir and then Neo Noir series that I was asked to help program and host. Starting with this entry, I am now the sole programmer, and the films will no longer be just crime films. Once again this is written for speech so I apologize for any irregularities of cadence)

(I'm not going to lie its been pretty f-ing cool seeing these around town)

Dennis Lehane has gotten unusually lucky with his adaptations. Clint Eastwood did a fine job bringing his Mystic River to the screen, and just this year Scorsese delivered a fantastic adaptation of his Shutter Island. And yet I’d argue that out of those rather heavy hitting directors Ben Affleck has done the best job of bringing Lehane’s singular tone to the screen.

Unlike the other films made from his work, Gone Baby Gone is an adaptation of one of the Kenzie and Genarro books that make up the core of Lehane’s fiction. The five novels follow the two private eyes through the Boston underworld with a uniqueness of both setting and character that manages to set them apart from the glut of Private Eye novels.

Patrick Kenzie isn’t a bruised white knight like Phillip Marlowe. He’s not a smooth operator like Dashell Hammet’s continental op. Nor is he even a particular brilliant detective. He’s a smartass, whose managed to keep his good heart despite all the evidence the world has shown him. Casey Affleck gives nepotism a good name, bringing him to life with all of his conflict and wit intact. As does Michelle Monaghan as Genaro. Though if the film has a flaw its that its more of a Kenzie film. Mostly for narrative reason’s a slight change is made to series mythology and Genarro is made something of an outsider, so there’s someone there to have exposition delivered to. The problem is that it ends up making her feel a little less then a full on partner and sidelines her for far too much of the runtime.

On the whole though casting is one of the film’s strongest suits. Ed Harris gives one of his strongest performances in years, Morgan Freeman playing not so much against type but to it gives a great twist on his normal persona, Amy Ryan gives a career best performance. And perhaps most gratifyingly the under used Amy Madigan finally gets a role to sink her teeth into. Much of the rest of the cast is filled out by natives, which lends the film a realism that makes other gritty Boston crime films like The Departed, feel glamorized. No matter how intense Scorsese got, when you see an old man smoking through his tracheotomy is the type of image that you don’t get from central casting.

Most of these novels aren’t “who dunnits”. That’s not to say that Lehane doesn’t write some excellent mysteries into them. But the center of the books are always around a moral question. The question at the heart of each Dennis Lehane novel isn’t “Who kidnapped the heiress?” Or “Who has the money” but “How can I wake up and look at myself in the mirror?”

The fact that Ben Affleck has the talent, or even the inclination to address such a question may be surprising to those who know him best as the dopey would be matinee idol he was at the beginning of the decade, and not the talented character actor he has proven himself to be before and afterwards. It’d be easy enough to credit this to the fact that Affleck grew up in the neighborhoods and around the people that Lehane writes about. His familiarity and eye for people certainly adds a certain lived in feel to the film and his second film The Town coming out in a couple of weeks, returns him to this comfortable territory. But that’s certainly not the only thing Affleck brings to the table. Without giving away too much of the plot, there are scenes in here that could come out from a horror film, and scenes that could come out of a buddy comedy, and the way Affleck is able to juggle these tones both the grotesque and the light proves him to be a versatile skilled director. Though his next film The Town is based upon a much weaker novel, I’m looking forward to seeing what Affleck can do with it.

While this is the most recent film that we’ve shown so far in this series, Gone Baby Gone feels like a film from a different era. It’d be easy to imagine it as a lost film of the seventies from someone like Michael Ritchie or William Friedkin. It’s a dark film that asks hard questions and doesn’t bother with easy answers. In other words it treats it’s audience like adults. And a filmmaker whose willing to do that is a valuable one indeed.

This is a dark film, but its an honest one.

Why Did No One Tell Me...

(Not an April Fool's Post)

Why did no one tell me that Dennis Lehane has a new Kenzie and Gennaro book due in November?

Just like that Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour became the second most anticipated book of 2010.

Shutter Island

I’d like to know what goat Dennis Lehane sacrificed to what long forgotten Sumarian God to get the kind of treatment he gets from Filmmakers. First Clint Eastwood and now Martin Scorsese, we’re talking about a man so lucky with adaptations that not even Ben Affleck can fuck him up. And I wouldn’t trust Ben Affleck to hold eggs.

So yeah one of favorite authors being adapted by my favorite filmmaker period, to say that my expectations for Shutter Island where astronomical would be an understatement. When I found out I was going to see the film in Austin I’m unashamed to admit that my thoughts abruptly blanked out into one long “SQUEEEE!” Somehow they where met. In fact this is one case where I would venture to say the adaptation is an improvement on the source material. As Scorsese brings one last turn of the screw that even Lehane didn’t have the torque to pull.

Though many might be worried by memories of Cape Fear, Shutter Island is about as far from that film as you can get in terms of control and tone.

Shutter Island for those who’ve somehow managed to miss the film’s gignormous marketing campaign, follows two Federal Marshall’s (or as Di Caprio’s Boston Accent puts it Federaaahlll Maaaahshaahlls) who investigate a missing persons case on an island prison in Massachusetts bay. After an investigation that seems beyond shady it seems like there might be some good old fashioned conspiring going on and before you can say “Giant hurricane hits the place releasing several of the island’s most dangerous prisoners,” things really go to shit.

For those who complained that The Departed was just Scorsese doing Scorsese (as if he should be doing something else. I mean why keep making brilliant, darkly spiritual dramas that vibrate with authenticity and style) Shutter Island has him at his most experimental since Bringing Out The Dead (And the film so far has been similarly polarizing with a sixty five on Rotten Tomatoes and a sixty four at metacritic). Shutter Island runs ragged through as many references and disciplines as your average Girl Talk track. The obvious precursor is Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, with its frenzied paranoid style and madness as a contagion theme. But there’s also Val Lewton hanging around with the all consuming carnivorous shadows and the buried secrets in the past eroding the present. In the extreme imagery in dream sequences that make up so much of the movies meat its possible to feel the dark operatic tones of Chan Wook Park. There’s even a touch of Gialli here, albeit more Mario Bava then Lucio Fulci. But I think that the key to the movie is the one that Scorsese gave to us at BNAT, by insisting that The Red Shoes play before it. The fact that Scorsese is a Powell disciple is no secret, but I don’t know if its ever been clearer then here.

Powell’s was a cinema of dreams. More so I think then any other director. Yes more so then Fellini, Cocteau, Lynch, Gilliam, and all the rest. This might strike some as odd if only for the fact that most of Powell’s films are fairly straight forward on a narrative level. Break them down to their base components and they seem down right unremarkable, the story of the feuds in a ballet company, a film following the carrier of a dedicated military man, horny nuns in the Himalya’s. But watching his films is a completely different experience, sensual, overpowering, and occasionally nightmarish. Powell understood the ways in which dreams and cinema line up, the way both subliminally code through imagery and constant repetition, how both hinge on something ineffable, the way both can turn on you on a dime and suddenly sink their teeth into your neck. Think the expressionistic sets in Tales Of Hoffman, think of the horrifying climax (the whole thing really) in Black Narcissus and think lastly of that last horrible, inevitable piece of dream logic that Powell deployed like an A Bomb in The Red Shoes.

Shutter Island is a film that operates on that level. Its horrific in an indefinable way. A film that takes your subconscious and gnaws on it until its bloody.

But of course under all the influence and juxtaposition, the only person a Scorsese movie belongs to is Scorsese. His films often deal with morality and ethics, and if you look at it from this angle Shutter Island fits in neatly with the rest of Scorsese’s oeuvre. How much responsibility can you take for actions that are not entirely your own anymore? Shutter Island is an existential thriller. Its like Camus collaborated with Hitchcock. I am reminded of Joe Hill’s great passage in Heart Shaped Box that noted that “Its not houses that are haunted but minds.”

He assembles a dream team here. DiCaprio using his natural callowness to his advantage, Mark Ruffalo making an excellent straight man, grounding all the crazy. Ben Kingsley actually seems to be giving a shit for the first time since Sexy Beast, a sight so foregein that it took me a minute to recognize it. Max Von Sydow shows no ill effects from the vast amount of sodium penathol that Brett Ratner pumped into him when he kidnapped him and held his children at gunpoint to star in Rush Hour 3 (That’s what I tell myself happened anyway. Because the alternative is that Max Von Sydow agreed to be in Rush Hour 3) . He’s having the most fun in the movie hiding behind thick coke bottle glasses and a sinister German accent, and when he posits late in the film syringe hidden behind his back “Ven you See va Monsta vou must destroooy it!” well its kind of amazing.

Jackie Earle Haley and Ted Levine both do what they do best, name act like terrifyingly convincing nutjobs as does Elias Koteas, although his make up looks so distractingly like Robert De Niro’s in Frankenstein, that for a few confused seconds I thought it was De Niro, and was disappointed when I realized Scorsese hadn’t kept an amazing cameo hidden. Patricia Clarkson and Emily Mortimer both do strong work in what amounts to cameos, and Michelle Williams is kind of stunning and fragile, in the role that ends up becoming the dark heart of the picture.



Stylistically this film is top notch as well. I love it when Scorsese shoots with Robert Richardson (Who between this and Inglorious Basterds is having one hell of a year) and the fact that they get to collaborate makes me excited for Hugo Cabearet (even if I am disappointed Silence is getting pushed back again). There’s something in Richardson that brings out the daring side in Scorsese. The three films they’ve made together so far, this, The Aviator, and Bringing Out The Dead showcase Scorsese at his most extreme in terms of imagery. He sets himself up with some pretty challenging motifs here, people bursting into ash, pools of water and blood spreading, the dead bodies of the innocent. Not since Friedkin made the central image of To Live And Die In LA that of people being shot in the face has a major filmmaker in a mainstream movie made such relentlessly unpleasant imagery so front and center to his film. And yet far from being overwhelmed Scorsese makes these images harrowingly beautiful.


Shutter Island is not a safe film. Its not here to tell you everything is OK. Its here to take a piece out of you. And brother its gonna.