Of all the filmmakers that one can call overrated, this particular film critic had to choose Martin Scorsese.
Yesterday, Scorsese was the subject of a highly controversial new essay in The Critic, which claims that director is overpraised and, quite frankly, not that talented.
Writer Sean Egan put it this way: “Scorsese has lazily settled on Mafia-Picture Director as a main calling” going on to describe Scorsese as an “uneven talent.”
The article has no doubt caused predictable controversy around the film community, but it severely triggered Guillermo del Toro who took to Twitter on Friday to criticize the essay and defend Scorsese’s cinema.
“I very, very seldom post anything contradictory here,” del Toro wrote, “but the amount of misconceptions, sloppy inaccuracies and hostile adjectives not backed by an actual rationale is offensive, cruel and ill-intentioned. This article baited them traffic, but at what cost?”
He continued: “To be clear: If God offered to shorten my life to lengthen Scorsese’s- I’d take the deal. This man understands Cinema. Defends Cinema. Embodies Cinema. He has always fought for the art of it and against the industry of it. He has never been tamed and has a firm place in history.”
Hey, listen, there are plenty of people out there who don’t like Scorsese’s input from the last 20 years. However, even if you scratch off everything he’s directed these last two decades, you still have a filmography that includes “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas,” “The King of Comedy,” “Casino,” “After Hours,” and “Raging Bull.”
Speaking of “Raging Bull,” one of the greatest and most beautifully photographed films ever made, Egan actually says it is “quite simply across-the-board bad filmmaking, afflicted by preposterously exaggerated boxing action, an atmosphere-flattening lack of a soundtrack, agonisingly repetitive dialogue, endless and tedious confrontationalism and irritatingly pointless black-and-white stock.”
As for Egan’s complaint that Scorsese has “lazily” settled on the mafia genre. What?! I’ve counted a total of FIVE mob-related movies that Scorsese has directed these last 50 years. If anything, Scorsese has masterfully genre-hopped in his career (Horror, Historical, Biblical, Comedy, Musical).
Egan goes on to complain about “The Irishman” as Scorsese using “the same actors over and over: seeing Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel in a Scorsese mobster movie for the umpteenth time.”
This is where Egan’s credibility gets thrown out of the window. When “The Irishman” came out, Scorsese hadn’t worked with DeNiro/Pesci in almost three decades. Keitel hadn’t been in a Scorsese picture since 1988’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
Suffice to say, reading Egan’s piece was akin to nails on a chalkboard. It’s such a preposterous essay that I wondered at times if he was just baiting us, if he was trolling the masses into believing that the greatest American filmmaker of the last 40-odd years was convoluted.