I believe Hollywood is back

I just saw the new Martin Scorsese film and I must say I am speechless. That’s why I am writing. Let me tell you something about myself. I am a movie aficionado and for me the last few weeks have been drought season. After Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby , nothing else caught my eye until last week, when I watched the trailer of The Departed. A stellar cast, a brilliant director…I made a quick note to not miss this one.

As I grew up in India, watching in awe, the “English movies”, I wondered about the genius minds behind the scripts, the special effects and the actors themselves. How do they do what we can only imagine to emulate? Saving Private Ryan showed me why war is not what the world needs. Casino walks you through the lives of gangsters. Training Day threw light on corruption in the L.A.P.D. I feel The Departed is something like that. This post isn’t going to be a spoiler and so I’m only going to say the one thing you may already know. It’s an action thriller. For some reason the “Action Thriller” genre has been abused lately. If the screenplay doesn’t make you swear more than a couple of times, it falls short of being a thriller. However, this one is different.

When you are watching a movie, and you realize the lighting is different, the background score is overwhelming or there's not a lot of makeup, you know the director has something up his sleeve. In The Departed there are no heroes, no special FBI agents who pull out their guns every five minutes and yet survive till the end and walk away with the beautiful marine biologist or pro bono lawyer they met somewhere in first 20 minutes. Instead at the end, it will make you raise your eyebrows to your friend as they put the lights back on.

Looks like I finally got some rain.