(I did too, but I know a lot of people were flummoxed by it.)
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Their loss!!! (We picked it up because of Philip Seymour Hoffman.)
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Attach a nose to the Sphinx of Giza while you’re at it, and paint some eyebrows on the Mona Lisa. Who, do you think, plays the fool in this drama? Scorsese, or the smart asses eschewing no effort to rush in and fix Scorceses’ “stupid mistake”? Can we just take our artifacts of industrial entertainment for what they are, instead of polishing them over and over, and spend our time on things that matter? I mean, you can of course spend your time and money on whatever the hell you please, but come on!
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Some Scorsese fllms (Cape Fear) do nothing for me. I thought Goodfellas was ok. On the other hand I liked After Hours and (in spite of its flaws) love Last Temptation. Presumably that puts me among a minority of film watchers.
P.S. auto-text thinks Cape Fear should be Vape Gear
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VFX artist here -
I have done more complicated shots for my kids, as favors to directors, or just for fun. Before you ask, yes I am underpaid, exploited and barely making ends meet. We need a union (like every other aspect of Hollywood has).
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I think they should replace the rat, with a squirrel. Cause it has a fluffy tail, and climbs trees and stuff.
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And cut it down to a tight 20 minutes.
I still can’t believe I watched the whole, incredibly stretched out series. A regular movie is about 1 page of script a minute. Anime is about a page of script an episode (or it sure seems that way :-/ )
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Replace it with a walkie talkie 
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I just watched that last scene (I’ve never seen the movie). I’m not a VFX artist, I’m not a graphic designer. I am a pro live audio/video guy though and I do know enough about video editing and Photoshop that I could remove that rat in just a few hours of work editing it frame by frame. Heck, I could teach my wife (who’s brilliant just not in a VFX way) how to do it. Once the rat stops moving it gets easy. Once the camera stops pushing in it becomes super easy.
No disrespect to hard working VFX artists. I hope this guy gets funded and pays it all to a good artist who deserves a big payout for an easy bit of work.
Edit:
I just read the actual kickstarter page. This guy is an idiot regardless of the rat or the legality of his project (which is super sketchy). It’s like he’s never heard of the concept of copying a copy and he has no idea how film-making is done. I now hope he gets nowhere near his funding goal and wanders off the Internet in shame and humiliation.
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I don’t think the rat is supposed to symbolise anything, I think it’s just a wry joke. I think this kickstarter guy is misunderstanding the spirit it was meant in. It isn’t supposed to be profound or deeply meaningful. It’s a gag. That’s all it is. It undermines the seriousness of the plot and the characters and brings some levity and distance to the story we’ve just seen… which is what jokes do! If you think it’s supposed to be a clever or subtle symbol which Scorcese has failed to pull off, you’ve interpreted it wrongly. In my view.
Added to which, The Departed isn’t actually that good of a film, really. It’s a tad boring.
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Don’t give your money to this potato salad nonsense. I digitally erased the rat from the end of The Departed for free:
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I am from Boston, so maybe I have a bias towards “The Departed”, but I came to “Gangs of New York” with an open mind was was annoyed and bored.
But I was really hoping “Kundun” would be good but it was . . . just okay, I guess. Maybe I expected more from a director who has made several unimpeachable masterpieces (“Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull”, “Goodfellas.”)
I totally forgot about Scorsese’s hands-down worst film “Box Car Bertha”-- his first directing job (for Roger Corman of course), and which Marty himself would probably claim is “not really a Scorsese film.” Back when I still had a VHS player I was scoring lots of cheap tapes of obscure films and picked up “Boxcar Bertha”-- standard Corman cheap B-movie, there are some shots that would be future Scorsese signatures, but it’s mostly forgettable.
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IKR? I thought BoingBoingers at least would be hip to this.
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Is that the Special Edition Meme? The first draft pissed off Joey more.
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I’ll just go about my business…
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No more so than usual.
For gritty New York gangsters, I like Mean Streets. A very young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel chew up the scenery, Proto-Goodfellas.
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