Wicked GoodFellas

We saw The Departed this weekend. Where to begin?

It lived up to the hype. Which is saying something, because The Departed's trailer was one of the best ones we’ve seen in a long time. And this made us nervous, because it wasn’t the first time we led a crew into the movie theater totally amped by a great movie trailer, only to be bitterly disappointed.

It's a great Boston movie. The Departed immediately gets ranked as one of the great Boston movies. (Among the others: Friends of Eddie Coyle, the bar scene from Goodwill Hunting, and , well, that’s about it.) Sure, its got lots of cool shots of the city and the neighborhoods, but it does a good job of establishing the mood of Boston without embarassing itself with a lot of over the top fake accents.

It's Violent. Well, duh. It's Scorsese, not Sesame Street.

It's funny. One of the funniest bloodbaths we’ve seen in a long time. The Departed has a wicked (we're referring to the proper usage of the word here) sense of humor. Two good examples are Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg, who are only in a few scenes but who steal the movie. Baldwin is a slob of a CO who likes to sweat thru his shirts on stakeouts, and Wahlberg is Staff Sgt. Dignam, an asshole of a supervisor. (Dignam’s name is too close to Diggler for our tastes. By the way, Wahlberg’s phallus prop from Boogie Nights makes a cameo appearance in the movie. Not sure how we felt that scene either, but we quibble.)

“Do you really want to come to work every day dressed like your about to invade Poland?” Matt Damon to a fellow State Trooper in the Departed

We saw an episode of Dinner for Five once where John Favreau, in between mouthfuls of pasta and dinner rolls, asked Dennis Farina, an ex cop, what he thought the best cop show was. His answer was immediate: Barney Miller, because it showed the cops making fun of each other. The Departed was written by a Bostonian, and he threw in a lot of local jokes just for the Boston folks. Jokes that people outside the City won’t get, but caused our audience to laugh their asses off.

The accents. They were OK. Damon and Wahlberg were naturals, obviously. DiCaprio, Sheen, and everyone else did well enuff that it didn’t grate on your nerves, and that’s about all you can ask for in a movie about Boston (Hollywood never understood the Boston accent. Which is understandable- as anyone who’s lived here long enough knows, there’s more than one type of Boston accent. There's the Irish version, the South Shore version, the North Shore version, and, worst of all, the Medford version. Most actors succeed in achieving little more than a broad stereotype. In this regard, we’ve got a lot in common with the English.)

Tough to really get into any more detail without giving anything away. Trust us – there’s a LOT going on here. So we’ll just say that this movie is not like any other Scorsese movie we've seen. Not like Goodfellas or Casino (with no narrator, the scenes are longer, allowing the actors to really take their time and serve up some very intense one-on–one exchanges.) Not like Raging Bull, or Cape Fear, or even Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. If we had to compare it to any one movie, it would be Reservoir dogs, but with a lot more locations.

Oh yeah, that guy. We deliberately avoided discussing the Whitey Bulger issue. As everyone knows by now, The Departed has shades of Whitey Bulger, but it’s a remake of Infernal Affairs, a Hong Kong movie from a few years ago. This is the saving grace- the connection to the Infernal Affairs movie relieves Boston-area audiences of the need to compare it too closely to the Whitey story. Well, almost everyone.