Scorsese DVDs, ranked in the order of my choosing

I'm not gonna lie, I dig Marty's work (we're on a first name basis here).  So, naturally, I've got an extensive collection of Martin Scorsese DVDs.  I admit, I don't own New York, New York (nor do I ever wish to), but I'll rank it anyway.  Because that's how my list works.

Because I've bought some of these multiple times (I've got at least three copies of GoodFellas) they'll get listed more than once.  With comments!

1) Raging Bull (Special Edition)

Probably the prettiest of the Scorsese releases (If you count packaging as a feature).  It's a Digipack  case, which I don't always like, neccessarily, but the fold out features pretty artwork (and pretty Cathy Moriarty, meow).

If you want to call this Scorsese's best, go ahead.  I won't.  It's hardly definitive in it's subject matter.  The themes of Wiolence and Catholicism, and the technique and film language, are Super-Scorsese esque.  But it's still hard to avoid the fact that this was really DeNiro's baby.  If anyone can steal a movie from Scorsese, it's DeNiro.  And he does it here.  It's all about Bobby and The Method, and that's OK.  But for that reason I always tend to think of it as a lesser Scorsese "work", in the terms of its creation.  But the presentation of the disc is supoib, and it's a great movie (that invites a great deal of tongue-in-cheek homage).




2) The Last Temptation of Christ (Criterion Collection)

I love this movie (take that Christians!).  I really do.

So far it's the lone Criterion disc of a Scorsese picture - if you don't count LaserDisc, and I don't.  So really, all things considered, it looks fancy on the shelf.

And it's really expensive.

I'm a closet lover of Biblical epics, so mix wide expanses of sand with tracking shots and sundry Scorsese flair, and I'm sold.  The Peter Gabriel soundtrack works, even if I'm not a huge New Age fan, and it's got Bowie as Pilate.

Oh, wait.

That's better.  Fucking Bowie, man.

Some people attack Schrader's use of Vernacular in the script.  I like it, because really, I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't give The Sermon on the Mount in 17th century Modern English either.

3) Gangs of New York

Not even Cameron Diaz can cancel the unadulterated awesome of Daniel Day-Lewis, so that's not worth bringing up.

It's well known that Scorsese always wanted to make two movies in his lifetime.  The Last Temptation of Christ was completed in 1988 (after several lulls and cancellations of Production) and Gangs of New York.

Scorsese's intended 70's version of Gangs is one of my all-time beloved never-made almost-films (another being Kubrick's unmade Napoleon project).  Had he made it then, it would have been a different beast, grittier and more evocative of the times (he even wanted an original Soundtrack by The Clash, which would have been the coolest thing since pretty much ever).

Instead, we got the slightly (ha) overblown debacle that was the 2002 version.  Scorsese tells a story about George Lucas visiting the set (built in entirety on location, in Italy.  It was monstrously expensive) and telling him that withing the decade the movie would be filmed digitally on a CG set.  Thankfully, Scorsese went the classic "It's Hollywood, let's spend oodles of cash on something impractical that will never be used again!" direction, and we get a movie that actually looks real (remember, there were no computers during the 1860's).

The movie is controversial for cuts made in post production, reportedly removing about an hour of footage at the behest of producer Harvey Weinstein.  Scorsese believes in the finality of a theatrical cut, so we'll never see the long cut of Gangs (forget it, it's almost 3 hours already).  So, the project isn't without faults, of which are written ad nauseum elsewhere.

This isn't actually a great DVD, but I put it this high so here it stays.

This is pretty long, so I'll put up part II later.