Director Movie Assignment #1-The Departed

      For the first Director Movie Assignment, I watched The Departed starring Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and Mark Wahlberg. The movie is about two people who graduate from a police academy and start working undercover to try and find the "rat". The movie got a little confusing at times, since Collin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and William Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) are working double lives. Sullivan works undercover for Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and gets caught up in his job, lies, and his girlfriend. Costigan works undercover for Queenan (Martin Sheen) and gains Costello's trust, just so he and Queenan will be able to arrest Costello. Since we haven't watched any other Scorsese Films, I can't relate this film to another film, so I will focus on the goriness of this film.
      This film has many gory scenes. I was very surprised at how gory some of the scenes were. In addition to many numerous stabbing and shootings in the film, there were other scenes like when Costigan gets his arm that is already in a cast smashed on a pool table in a bar because Costello thinks he is hiding something in it. This scene was very brutal to watch because after the arm was smashed and the arm was broken, Costello started hitting the arm with a boot. This scene was especially painful to watch. Another example of goriness in the film is when Queenan falls off a building and lands right in front of Costigan and all we see is blood spray up. This scene was pretty bloody but, by this point in the film we had seen lots of shootings so it wasn't too surprising to see blood. One last example is one of the last scenes where Costigan takes Sullivan down the elevator and when the doors open, they find some unknown man standing there with a gun who immediately shoots Costigan in the head and blood splatters everywhere. In an article I found from the Chicago Sun Times, the author talks about what the meaning of this last scene really meant. Scorcese, who is quoted in the article, says that many people didn't like a gory ending, but that was how he wanted it.  I think that Scorsese added all the gore just because he wanted to and to make things more realistic, since the movie is about the mob.
          I think this movie was very good and I liked the gory ending because it didn't really leave us hanging at the end. This movie makes me excited to watch more films by Martin Scorsese.

Director choices

My group is: Andy Burbidge
Sean Curry
probably Mike Kieper and Erich Rectenwald but we still need to ask them.

Our top 3 directors are: Michael Mann
Stanley Kubrick
Martin Scorsese