Assignment #17- Miller Luhan- I can't Stop Watching

One of my favorite movies... EVER... is The Wolf of Wall Street- a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. So, over break I decided to re-watch another one of his movies, The Departed, because I hadn't seen it in forever. Now, while these movies are about two completely different topics, fit into different genres, and were created at different points in Scorsese's career, I found some similarities between the two films. 

I found that often Scorsese uses music to transition scenes. But, what makes this stylistic choice so unique is that the musics usually doesn't relate to the scene change that's happening. That's probably confusing, so for example, in The Departed, this obnoxious Irish type rock music starts blasting while they drive down the highway- and you see the people within the cars moving and talking, but they're on mute as the music behind them blares, this is also seen in WOWS, when scenes are depicted of them in the office.

Another stylistic type choice that Scorsese employs in his works is profanity- especially in excess. Almost every sentence that comes out of a character's mouth is expletive. What's interesting about this choice, is that unlike me, or really anyone, saying a profane word in every sentence and it losing its meaning, the characters somehow continue to be expressive. In fact, at some points in his films it even adds a sense of humor. This leads me to my next similarity between the two films, a dry sense of humor hat radiates with comments that are not "right in your face" laugh out loud.

The last similarity that I'm going to mention is his application of the same actors. Now, while this point seems kind of arbitrary, I think it is important to note that Scorsese obviously finds comfort in casting a similar crew with each movie. The actors are reasonably acclaimed, so he has a certain trust that they can play whichever part he desires. Plus, he has known these actors for a long time- meaning he can rely on them. Leonardo DiCaprio is the main example- he acts in numerous Scorsese movies.

Overall, Scorsese is an amazing film director. I used these two movies as a comparison, but many of his movies are very good. Scorsese somehow has a talent of making extremely long films interesting for every second, especially when implementing the stylistic choices above.