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domino harvey wrote: DePalma even manages to use popular music in a way which benefits the film, something I wish Scorsese could figure out (Not holding my breath).

What a neat contrarian opinion.

If you really think I'm the first to suggest that Scorsese needs to update his five-disc CD changer, get thee to a Google search. His music cues have descended into unconscious self-parody and I'm hardly alone in noticing

domino harvey wrote:If you really think I'm the first to suggest that Scorsese needs to update his five-disc CD changer, get thee to a Google search. His music cues have descended into unconscious self-parody and I'm hardly alone in noticing

Scorsese, or at least Jagger, noticed it at least a few years back.

domino harvey wrote:If you really think I'm the first to suggest that Scorsese needs to update his five-disc CD changer, get thee to a Google search. His music cues have descended into unconscious self-parody and I'm hardly alone in noticing

ahhh ok. My apologies. Armond White, you are not.

Yes, I think Scorese has definitely devolved into self-parody at this point, and he really needs to ditch the Rolling Stones Greatest Hits disc. From the wording of your post, I thought you were talking about Scorsese's work as a whole; not in the past 15 years (there was no implication of growing tired or stale.). Personally, even if we disregard his entire body of work, I still think his song selection in Goodfellas is perfect and the music itself throughout each scene is one of the starring characters of the film and essential to the progression of time/narrative throughout the 30 years depicted.

Well, to be fair, I was totally talking about his total body of work. My rebuttal admittedly wasn't as thorough as it should have been, as it should have said something like "...even though they were never that impressive to begin with" at the end. That said, I'm still hardly the only person here or elsewhere who remains unimpressed with Scorsese on the whole and that was the brunt of my quippy comeback. I have, like most people who watch a lot of films, my own vantages and tastes, many of which run counter to the overall consensus and many which don't-- but that doesn't make me a contrarian. Now, let me tell you about how Baby Geniuses 2 gets so much right that Taxi Driver gets wrong...

The use (and misuse) of popular music in films is an interesting topic. It always seems a bit cheap to me when filmmakers use a song overly familiar to the audience as kind of insurance for involvement. This is why I complimented DePalma for using his music cues to heighten the film's effectiveness rather than sort of making the scenes they appear in artificially "catchy," which is how most of the music usage in Goodfellas struck me.

domino harvey wrote:It always seems a bit cheap to me when filmmakers use a song overly familiar to the audience as kind of insurance for involvement.

I completely agree. But there are far worse offenders I can think of than Scorsese in this respect. Any one of the stupid studio rom-coms from the last decade or more have beaten this concept to a bloody pulp. A lot of Bruckheimer's stuff is guilty of this too, often spurring original crappy songs as opposed (or often side-by-side) to ones already played ad nauseum on the radio. To me, Aerosmith has never been the same since Armageddon.

I get the feeling that Martin (and Robbie Robertson) almost always use stuff that they feel works with the scene. Why he's used "Gimme Shelter" numerous times however, is beyond me (though it worked in The Departed for me). I think the only song from any of Martin's movies that became a hit on it's own was the one Clapton recorded for The Color Of Money (easily his best single of the 80's).

This seems like the best occasion to throw out an idea I've had for a while now: If I were a producer, and I were developing a musical as an homage to Arthur Freed, the number one director on my list would be Brian De Palma. I think this is the road De Palma should have taken instead of Hitchcock imitations. The man has a unique talent of being able to synthesize disparate film styles in an exhilarating, crowd-pleasing way, and which also seems well-suited to handle a series of unique musical numbers. Phantom of the Paradise is the obvious reference point here, but what shouldn't be overlooked is the totally out of the blue Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video in the middle of Body Double, a scene which De Palma wove effortlessly into the camp fabric of that film, but which a lesser director would have emphasized too heavily, causing it to come off as an attempt to bolster the film's hip credentials.

Now, of course, De Palma is probably too irreverent to recreate the joyfulness of a Freed musical, but if he could just reign it in a little. . .

It is somewhat upsetting that those directors so enamored with long takes and fluid cameras show little to no interest in reviving musicals, while edit-happy hacks like Marshall and Luhrmann are given keys to disasters.

It's funny, Scorsese used "El Watusi" in a movie about 25 years before DePalma. Worked great in both scenes.