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Actor Leonardo DiCaprio's latest cinematic efforts have not seen him playing your typical protagonists. In Shutter Island, DiCaprio played a character whose psyche was so fractured that he had a hard time telling truth from fiction. In his new movie, Inception, his character is a thief who makes his living stealing ideas from people's dreams. In a recent interview with MTV, DiCaprio talks about the similarities and differences between his recent roles in the two movies and why Inception is "beyond anything" he's ever experienced before.
DiCaprio on fractured personas >> Posted 07.15.10 by BrentJS -
Nit-picky website MovieMistakes.com has crowned Iron Man 2 as the most mistake-ridden film of 2010 (and it's only July) with a whopping 45 flubs ranging from the frivolous to the flagrant. Rounding out the top 5 most problematic movies: Shutter Island had 34 slip-ups, The A-Team 31, Kick-Ass 15, and Alice in Wonderland with 12.
But who got the "best gaff" honor? >> Posted 07.07.10 by reelz -
With Martin Scorsese's thriller Shutter Island dominating the box office for the second week in a row, it may seem like no surprise that author Dennis Lehane approves of Scorsese's cinematic interpretation of his novel. However, considering the often botched effort of bringing a novel to the screen, Lehane was more than pleased with the movie, telling MTV that he thought Scorsese and his crew "nailed it."
What happens in the movie is ... it's my work being filtered through their vision. And with Scorsese, you're going to get a pretty indelible vision. It was quite the experience to see my work go through his head and ... I thought that was the final icing on the cake. He just interpreted it visually in a way that certainly I never could have predicted.
No stranger to seeing his novels get transformed to the big screen after Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, Lehane was pleased to seethe movie remain faithful to the original novel, considering the delicate, psychological nature of the story.
It's a book where it's a complete house of cards, and if you remove one it's all over. So you have to be exceptionally faithful to the material, at least structurally. It's impossible to mess with it ... without the whole thing collapsing. Marty was working within that framework, he knew that from the very beginning. I mean, you pull the wrong card and this thing falls apart.
It has to be especially gratifying for Lehane, who admitted he had "very little" to do with the screenwriting process, preferring to "stay the hell out of [the screenwriter's] way." Lehane was only privy to a later copy of Laeta Kalogridis's script, and had a few choice words for her screenplay.
I don't know which draft it was, but it was pretty late in the process. And what's become a running joke was actually true: my only objection to her draft was that it was a little too respectful of the material.
Posted 03.04.10 by Ryan -
Posted 02.28.10 by reelz -
Much of the unsettling, gothic feel of Martin Scorsese's new movie, Shutter Island, comes from its soundtrack. Produced by the legendary Robbie Robertson, the soundtrack offers a compilation of atmospheric scores and period radio crooners. Here's how one critic described the movie's music:
But the element that most strikes the senses in Shutter Island is the stunning use of music. Robbie Robertson serves as a super-savvy musical supervisor, supplying some of the great 20th-century modernists — György Ligeti, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Ingram Marshall’s haunting "Fog Tropes" — and coming up with the greatest use of modernism in an American film since ... ever.
ReelzChannel is giving away copies of the two-disc Shutter Island Soundtrack — enter here.
Posted 02.23.10 by reelz -
| Title | Weekend | Total | Analysis |
| Shutter Island | $40.2M | $40.2M | Generally positive reviews push Scorsese/DiCaprio pic to very strong $13K/screen average. |
| Valentine's Day | $17.2M | $87.4M | Star-studded holiday rom-com continues impressive run in 2nd week, and next week will be 2010 box office champ. |
| Avatar | $16.1M | $687.8M | James Cameron's epic actually moves up from #4 to #3. |
| Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief | $15.3M | $58.8M | It is probably safe to say this is not the second-coming of Harry Potter. |
| The Wolfman | $9.8M | $50.3M | Drove off a cliff with nearly a 70% drop in revenues. This will end up being one of the bigger bombs of 2010. |
Posted 02.21.10 by reelz -
With his latest movie, the Martin Scorsese–directed Shutter Island, in theaters now, and his follow-up movie, Christopher Nolan's Inception, in post-production, actor Leonardo DiCaprio has time on his hands to think about his upcoming projects. And, according to Deadline, one of those projects could very well be the Prisoners thriller that once had Antoine Fuqua (Shooter) attached to direct.
Alcon Entertainment partners Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson (The Blind Side) bought the script from writer Aaron Guzikowski last year and had initially planned to go into production this month. Kosove called the Prisoners script "the most interesting, morally complex thriller" that he has come across in his 12 years at Alcon. If DiCaprio signs on to Prisoners, he would be playing a small-town carpenter who takes the law into his own hands when his daughter and her friend are kidnapped (Taken, anyone?).
Even if DiCaprio does agree to star in Prisoners, it's unclear if it would be his next movie or if it would follow the as-yet-untitled online casino movie that his Appian Way production company has supposedly been developing for him since June of last year.
Posted 02.21.10 by BrentJS -
Teddy Daniels, the U.S. Marshal played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's new movie doesn't know what he's in for when he arrives on Shutter Island. But he learns soon enough. There are mysteries, conspiracies, dark secrets, and suspicious therapies. And above all else, there's no escape. Do you hear? NO ESCAPE!
And we say, "So, what else is new?"
If, like us, you've gotten the bulk of your education from the big screen, you know one thing is true: Islands are bad. Really bad. They're water-bound hellzones, natural refuges for the forces of pain, deception, and death. Really, can anything worthwhile happen in a place where the exchange rate is calculated in fish?
Just in case you doubt us, check out Shutter Island and 10 Others Not to Get "Lost" On before you plan that next beach vacation.
Posted 02.18.10 by reelz -
Originally slated to kick of 2009's Oscar season last October, Shutter Island was pushed to the depths of winter, apparently with excellent results.
"...a dark, intense thriller involving insanity, ghastly memories, mind-alteration and violence, all wrapped in a story about the search for a missing patient at an island asylum."
— Todd McCarthy, Variety
"The climactic scene won't be the only thing that leaves you shattered. Scorsese makes dark magic in this mesmerizing mind-bender."
— Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
"138 minutes is dangerously epic for a talky thriller, but you forget the time and even whether the plot makes sense—and if you don't notice, it doesn't matter."
— Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice
"The movie certainly keeps you in its grip from the opening scene: It's a nerve-twisting, tension-jammed exercise in pure paranoia and possibly Scorsese's most commercial film yet."
— Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter
"...never gains the traction it needs to succeed as a suspenser and never sufficiently sets a bottom-line 'reality' to ground an epistemological inquiry."
— Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine
Posted 02.17.10 by reelz -
A new featurette for Shutter Island opens with director Martin Scorsese explaining why he couldn't put the script down when he first started reading it late one night:
I have always been drawn to this sort of psychological thriller, with touches of gothic horror. There's a foreboding hospital on an island. An escaped convict that's insane. A storm. A situation where no one can leave the island.
The gothic tone is struck right from the beginning, as is evident in the first of two new clips from the movie. Everyone (and even the background music) is decidedly on edge from the moment the U.S. Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) set foot on the island. Then, in the second clip, the doctor (Ben Kingsley) puts on a curious show of pride in the progress of psychiatric care that dwells a bit long on the horrors of the past, and seems designed as much to disturb as reassure.