Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Once called "Father Frank" for his efforts to rescue lives, Frank Pierce sees the ghosts of those he failed to save around every turn. He has tried everything he can to get fired, calling in sick, delaying taking calls where he might have to face one more victim he couldn't help, yet cannot quit the job on his own.
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What critics compared Bringing Out the Dead to
Not only to Vertigo (1958) but also to Spellbound (1945) is reverential homage paid by Scriptwriter Paul: a quite gratuitous shot down the long well of a tenement's fire-exit stairs-most of us would be aware that stairs have wells-is followed by the discovery of the street-refuge boss impaled on an iron railing spike which, unlike that in the boy of Spellbound, has missed any vital arteries, but sticks out through the 'exit' side like a heart staked in an old Hammer Dracpic.
I’m reminded of the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead , and the push-in on a security guard's face, saying with assurance “Don’t make me take off my sunglasses!”
Estelarizada por Robert Pattinson, inquieto y determinado, quien entrega la mejor actuación de su carrera con todo y peróxido en el cabello, la película es una trepidante exploración urbana que remonta a Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1973; After Hours, 1984; Bringing out the Dead, 1999) en su veloz pero detallada radiografía sociológica movida por un objetivo claro: en este caso, el poder recuperar al hermano de Pattinson (Safdie) quien padece una discapacidad intelectual.
Zoë Kravitz as a paramedic who might as well just gotten off a shift working alongside Nicolas Cage and Ving Rhames in Bringing Out the Dead…
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What Gilroy and Gyllenhaal are up to here is a kind of amped-up Broadcast News meets Network meets Bringing Out the Dead for the TMZ and reality show era.
Filmed primarily at night in Los Angeles, “Nightcrawler” feels like a twisted, more engaging, West Coast version of “Bringing Out the Dead.”
He would take advantage of all of those element and while his films would rarely hit the box-office peaks of contemporaries like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, his body of work would soon earn him the title of America’s Greatest Filmmaker, which he has worn with pride for decades, even as audiences and critics have sometimes and inexplicably overlooked a number of films (including “Casino,” “Bringing Out the Dead,” “Shutter Island,” “Hugo” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”) that would be regarded as peak moments in the careers of most filmmakers.
The film's cinematography is as gripping as any Scorsese effort, though we spend more time in suburban neighborhoods, country clubs, and pristine offices than the gritty streets we've seen in Taxi Driver or Bringing Out the Dead .
Sure, “Bringing Out the Dead” (1999) struggled to find its feet and made you wonder for a moment if the man weren’t losing his touch; but of course back near the top there’s his seminal crime drama, “Mean Streets” (1973), which started it all.
In anticipation of Martin Scorsese’s religious epic Silence, Chicago’s Music Box Theatre screened “three often overlooked gems from his extensive filmography”: Mean Streets, The King of Comedy, and Bringing Out the Dead.
Considering he had planned on becoming a priest before opting to become a filmmaker, this makes perfect sense, and additional musings on the matter can be found in projects as diverse as Mean Streets, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead and, most magnificently, The Last Temptation of Christ.
Beyond those examples, “Silence” also works as a wrenching portrait of a man caught in the midst of a personal crisis when he struggles to achieve the goals that he has been obsessively pursuing, whether it takes the form of making some kind of human connection (“Taxi Driver”), making it as a comedian (“The King of Comedy”) or of simply saving lives (“Bringing Out the Dead”), and is forced to contemplate whether those previously unshakable beliefs were all that they were meant to be in the first place.
Could he make another Bringing Out the Dead or The King of Comedy?
Like some of Scorsese's other second-tier works — "Casino," "Bringing Out the Dead" — the gulf between virtuoso technical facility and impoverished material cannot be bridged.
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A decade ago, Bringing Out the Dead suggested that Scorsese, perhaps with help from the Dalai Lama, had come to peace with himself at the expense of his art.
We get one or two scenes of the blown-out lighting and saturation look of director of photography Robert Richardson (who also performed the same task for Scorsese on Bringing Out the Dead).
When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there's even a moment when the smoke from Teddy's cigarette retreats into the butt)--and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy's fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle.
For me it’s my favorite Scorsese, the Scorsese of Bringing out the Dead, returned from a long hiatus.
It was 1999 with Nic Cage in Bringing Out The Dead.
But “Shutter Island” is atmospheric, absorbing and completely in the control of the man who made it -- unlike, especially, “Bringing Out the Dead,” which it sometimes resembles.