2. The Departed
Martin Scorsese was notoriously snubbed by the Oscars for years. The most striking instance of this was at the 49th Academy Awards when Taxi Driver, one of the finest American films ever made, lost the Best Picture prize to Rocky, a movie about a meathead who punched things. This insult was only amplified a decade and a half later when Goodfellas, perhaps the greatest gangster movie made aside from the two prequels to that abomination Godfather III, lost the Best Picture award to a movie that starred Kevin Costner. In 2006, Marty remade the Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs, the story of a cop infiltrating the mob while a mobster infiltrates the cops. The Departed is a great film, and in many ways Scorsese's take on the story surpasses the original. DiCaprio puts on the best performance of his career, and who now isn't a skosh turned on by the song Comfortably Numb? The ending, unfortunately, doesn't live up. In the original film (and the original ending), the Matt Damon character gets away with his crimes, left only with the punishment of his own regret. In the American remake, Matt Damon gets capped by Marky Mark which ties the whole film up in a nice little box. A weaker ending, sure, but I can't even really fault Scorsese and writer William Monahan for that. What I
will blame them for is after Matt Damon is killed, the camera pans to his window and there's a rat scurrying across the railing. We get it, Marty. It's a rat and Matt Damon was a rat. The only way you wouldn't have figured that little conumdrum out was not having seen even a commercial for the movie, and even then it wouldn't be a great excuse.