OnPoint by Keith Ng

Ah, but the headshots!

It's impossible for Jack Nicolson to be TOO frazzled and insane.

I thought The Departed hung together better than Internal Affairs (though I don't speak Cantonese).
The love triangle thing was a little far fetched and the female lead looked disconcertingly like Heather Mills McCartney but I thought it improved the film (except for the sex scenes)

Communicating with Morse code? I think it was reasonable to leave that out of The Departed.

I liked the rough Boston setting. I think they communicated a really good sense of the Boston location. I noticed the bagpipe link which was quite interesting considering Hong Kong and Boston are fairly different sorts of places but they both used bag pipes at police funerals.

One of the best films I have seen in a while. I thought Di Caprio was pretty good.

Ah, but the headshots!

Jack Nicholson masticating the scenery like a P-crazed termite! Everyone trying to drop more F-bombs on the Scorsese canon than Joe Pesci managed in Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino combined! Corn syrup sprayed around the sets with a water blaster!

I own both parts of Kill Bill and the even more bloody 'remix' director's cut (hack, gouge and splatter) of Sin City, so I'm not exactly some cinematic prude. But I don't consider either film the best of their respective years - and for much the same reason I ultimately hated The Departed. You can't fault Scorsese, Tarantino or Rodriguez for their technical chops or the visceral sugar-high of artful mayhem. But in the end, is eating your own weight in eye-candy going to leave much behind other than a vague memory of a gut ache.

In short, The Departed never really moved or engaged me. (With all due respect to Rosie, I understand the English subtitles on the DVD are fairly accurate, though naturally don't catch the full flavour of some of the more *ahem* idiomatic and slangy lines - and I didn't find them hard to read. That's a matter of personal taste, I guess.) Infernal Affairs did.

I don't know why Keith is displaying so much misplaced parochial pride in Infernal Affairs. After all, as the Oscar announcers pointed out, The Departed was "based on the Japanese film, Infernal Affairs." Oh yeah, and apparently, Penelope Cruz is Mexican. Thanks Ellen!

Communicating with Morse code? I think it was reasonable to leave that out of The Departed.

Heresy!

"based on the Japanese film, Infernal Affairs"

I laughed & laughed! At least they didn't announce that Letters from Iwo Jima was about the Chinese in the Pacific.

TXe Ming:

To be fair, at least Martin Scorsese swung into uber-film geek mode and reminded everyone that Hong Kong and Japan are two different countries - not that you'd know from the cast list of Memoirs of a Geisha, but least said soonest mended. Then again, there seems to be some confusion that Guillermo Del Torro made a movie speaks Spanish, made a movie set in Spain but Mexico and the Iberian Peninsula are on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

At the risk of being po faced, Americans mightn't be so quickly stereotyped as insular, racist ignoramuses if they didn't make it so damn easy.

Craig: Indeed, the vernacular was flavoursome. Not quite as flavoursome as Elections, though. Having worked as a translator, I got so miffed when they translated a line as "There's nothing I can do", when the original was literally "He's holding my little brother" (which means: He's got me by the dick, or, as we would say, balls).

Cross-cultural profanities is a tricky, tricky business. It's very easy to sex it up.

--

Still, I guess it's mostly faithful. Unlike the Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai... grrrrr...

Hey, my major (hell, my only) academic achievement in 7th form was teaching a Japanese exchange student the finer nuances of English obscenity: There is a difference between telling someone to fuck up (cease your tiresome prattle!), fuck off (depart from my sight!) or just go fuck themselves (you are a most distasteful individual!), after all.

oh well at least it was better (slightly) than the pompous twaddle that was Babel..........eek. Very mediocre films nominated for best picture this year methinks.

Oh, yes... Babel is the cinematic equivalent of Mike Leigh and Spike Lee co-editing The Guardian. Alejandro González Iñárritu and his writing partner Guillermo Arriaga are full of worthy (if banal) sentiments beaten to death by a disjointed narrative that is very clever but I can never quite see the artistic necessity for.

They showed Infernal Affairs (HK version) at a film festival a few years back in Wellington, maybe 04? Great big screen action film.

Yup, <i>Infernal Affairs</i> and it's two sequels (well a sequel and a prequel) hit the festival circuit in '04 - fun, but by the end you needed a flow chart and a lot of aspirin, as 90% of the characters either died or were recast between one film's intricate clockwork of double double crosses and the next. If there is a film God, Scorsese has a full slate until he dies peacefully in his private screening room while watching a pristine restored print of some obscure Italian neo-realist gem.

LOL?? Penelop Cruz is Spanish ¬_¬

Yup, <i>Infernal Affairs</i> and it's two sequels (well a sequel and a prequel) hit the festival circuit in '04 - fun, but by the end you needed a flow chart and a lot of aspirin, as 90% of the characters either died or were recast between one film's intricate clockwork of double double crosses and the next. If there is a film God, Scorsese has a full slate until he dies peacefully in his private screening room while watching a pristine restored print of some obscure Italian neo-realist gem.

Oh I don't know. I picked up the box set cheaply a while back and loved all three movies. I liked the Departed but agree Wahlberg's character was weak compared with Infernal Affairs and combined the three movies really are greater than the sum etc. Interestingly, the original Infernal Affairs series is less violent/menacing than the Departed I thought.