A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The Departed,  Martin Scorsese's 2006 Academy Award-winning remake of Hong Kong's  Infernal Affairs , marks the New York City native's return to the gritty crime drama genre in which he made his mark back in the 1970s. Instead of turning his cinematic eye on the mean streets of the Big Apple, Scorsese ( Taxi Driver, Goodfellas ) explores the dark underside of Boston, Massachussets in a tale about corruption, the rivalry between the Irish and Italian mobs, and internal strife within Boston's law enforcement officers. Written by  William Monahan ( Body of Lies, Kingdom of Heaven ) and based on the original  Infernal Affairs  script by Alan Mak and Felix Chong,  The Departed  features Jack Nicholson as an aging but wily mobster named Frank Costello. Costello (loosely based on the notorious Whitey Bulger) is a menacing yet seductive gangster who early in the film recruits 12-year-old Colin Sullivan (Conor Donovan) into his circle of criminals. (Costello i...

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet: Jack and Rose Redux? After the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s 1997 Academy Award-winning film Titanic , millions of its fans speculated if its two stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, would ever work together again, especially in a movie where they would be a couple again. What many Leo-Kate fans wanted to see on the silver screen was essentially a Titanic -like love story without the Titanic, which, like its real-life counterpart, had sunk after a collision with an iceberg several hundred miles off the Newfoundland coast. A direct sequel was out of the question; DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson was dead, and since Titanic lies in the historical fiction/romance genre and not science fiction, he could only have co-starred in such an unlikely project either in flashback sequences or as a figure in Kate Winslet’s character’s dreams. Finally, after a decade’s worth of reading Hollywood’s proverbial tea leaves for any signs of ...