2024-03-04 21:36:06
“This is cinema!” “Absolute cinema.” The meme is well known to social media users: the phrase is accompanied by a black and white photograph of Martin Scorsese and is usually used, with a good sense of humor, to accompany a film or video that is not taken very seriously. serious: whether it’s Supermario Bros. or a kid who records what a morning with his grandmother going to the supermarket is like.
At 81 years old, Martin Scorsese is still in top shape. This year he has become the filmmaker who has been nominated for the Oscars the most times in the best direction category, surpassing Steven Spielberg himself: he has received a total of 10 nominations for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, One of the ours, Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, The Invention of Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman and The Moon Killers, his most recent work. Of course, the Italian-American has only won a golden statuette for best director, for The Departed.
His name continues to be synonymous not only with good cinema, but above all with love for cinema. A fame, that of a cinephile filmmaker, that he himself has cultivated: there are his documentaries A personal journey with Martin Scorsese through American cinema (1995) or My trip to Italy (1999), in which the director reviews those films that have marked him (not necessarily the best) in American and Italian cinema, respectively.
The world of social networks has also picked up on this side of Scorsese who is more of a cinephile, and his face has become a symbol to represent those anonymous users who say they feel a passion similar to his for the seventh art.
Scorsese has also been very present in recent years on the networks for his criticism of Marvel films and superhero films in general: “I have seen a few and they are not for me, it seems to me that they are closer to a theme park than the films that I have known and loved throughout my life. For me, that is not cinema,” he said in an interview with Empire magazine.
Some words that the filmmaker would later clarify in a column in The New York Times: “Many of these films are made by people of considerable talent. You can see it on the screen. The fact that those films don’t interest me is a matter of taste. “I know that if I were younger I would have been excited by these films and may have even wanted to make one myself.”
He also explained that the main criticism he has towards this type of films is that he considers that they lack taking certain creative risks that he considers essential in cinema as an artistic form, that the problem is “the very nature of film franchises: based on research market, tested with the public, reviewed, modified, reviewed again and modified again until they are ready for consumption.
“The cinema that interests me is about a revelation: aesthetic, emotional or spiritual. The cinema that interests me is about characters: the complexity of people, their contradictory and sometimes even paradoxical natures, the way they hurt each other and in which they love each other and how they suddenly come face to face with themselves. Some statements that the world of comics and superhero film fans have generally taken with a great sense of humor.
But Scorsese’s most recent launch as a social media phenomenon has come from his daughter, Francesca Scorsese, 24, a TikTok star. Francesca records videos with her father in which, for example, the filmmaker casts her pet (a dog named Oscar, by the way) and tries to direct it. Or in which Scorsese Sr. chooses his favorite film from two options with a nod of his head, in a knockout championship in which he ends up with only one film (let’s see if you can guess by watching it which one wins).
The impact of these videos is such, especially among younger people, that when Francesca accompanied Martin at the last Golden Globes gala, several jokes were made on the internet that underlined how adorable it was to see how the stars showed their most beautiful side. tender when taking his own parents to awards ceremonies.
The sympathy towards Francesca on the Internet is enormous, also motivated by statements in which she assures that she is willing to be “the best nepo baby possible”, thus referring to the term used in the Anglo-Saxon world to describe those who or who are dedicated to what same as their parents, or have parents who are somehow famous and who, presumably, would have helped them in their careers, making it easier for them, if only thanks to contacts and visibility. An idea that in Spain is manifested with the joke, also very common on the Internet, that says “I love it when I go to the Wikipedia of my favorite artists and I always see that their parents’ names appear in blue.” That is to say, these parents also have their own Wikipedia file, and that will have been of some use to their children.
Father and daughter also star in an advertisement for the Superbowl in 2024, they have recently announced that they will write a book together and, in addition, they have dropped that there are a couple of other things they are working on, suggesting that it could be a movie. And Scorsese’s second youth not only manifests itself as an internet phenomenon, but also in his films. In the last 10 years he has released films that are much more ambitious in their magnitude, duration and scope (The Moon Killers, Silence, The Irishman and The Wolf of Wall Street), than in the previous 10 years (The Invention of Hugo, Shutter Island, The Departed, The Aviator). Furthermore, he has already commented on more than one occasion that his new work will be a film about Jesus Christ set in the present day and that it will focus on the core of his teachings, and that it will be based on the book Shūsaku Endō, the same Japanese author who wrote Silence, the book of the same name that Scorsese already adapted. That is his way of responding as a Catholic to Pope Francis’ call to artists, as he made it known.
This new work in progress will be the filmmaker’s second adaptation of a story starring Jesus Christ, after his famous (and controversial) The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on the novel by the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis. Scorsese already has the script written, he assures that filming will begin this year and that the duration of the film will not exceed 80 minutes, an idea that is already being joked about on social networks, since most of his films, and especially his most recent projects, have not fallen below two and a half hours in length, often exceeding three hours. In fact, his shortest feature film was one of the first he shot: Bertha’s Train, released in 1972, and lasted 85 minutes.
We will see if the filmmaker can “improve his brand” and, above all, if he gives us a new complex, risky film that causes us some type of revelation, be it spiritual or artistic. What seems assured is that Scorsese will continue to enlighten us with his love for cinema and that the internet and social networks will follow him with great interest, led by Francesca.
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