Yay Movies: Shutter Island

Welp, I've finally decided to do it. After some cajoling, and some deep consideration, I've decided to do what I should have been doing since the invention of blogs. I'm gonna do movie reviews.

This makes sense for me in more than one way. I absolutely love movies. I see a ton of them, usually in the theater. I usually have very strong opinions one way or another about the flicks that I've seen, and I have a thimbleful of writing ability (meaning I get where the period goes most of the time). I also cannot stand the way most critics write their reviews. Any time you start off your review with "I am not a fan of the science fiction genre" and then proceed to tear apart a SciFi flick, I usually want to pull my fucking hair out. If you're not a fan of the genre, then why the fuck would I care what you have to say about it?

With this "Movie Column" (and I'm using this term very loosely), I am only going to review movies that I have some type of interest in seeing, in the genres that I enjoy. In theory, I should be able to give an objective review untainted by my hate. Also, the only background I have in film is that I've seen thousands of them. Just a regular shmoe who enjoys to watch and talk about movies. I'm not some snobby shitbox who's just pissed his senior thesis paper on The Godfather at the Columbia School of Film only got a B- when it clearly deserved an A because Brando was obviously channeling the ghost of Charlie Chapman when he did the Favor scene because blah blah blah YOU SUCK, YOUR PAPER SUCKS, AND YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO FUCKING DIRECT TRAFFIC, LET ALONE A MOVIE. I have no grudges, I just dig movies.

Anyways, with that little intro out of the way it's time to get to the first flick: Shutter Island.


Shutter Island was adapted from the book by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone), and directed by Martin Scorsese. It follows the story of a US Marshall named Teddy Daniels who is sent to Shutter Island (a mental institution for the violently insane) with his partner Chuck to investigate the disappearance of a female prisoner named Rachel Solando. Not everything is as it seems on Shutter Island, which is not a surprise, because the movie would only be about 5 minutes long if it were. Actually, that would kind of be refreshing in a movie (though probably not worth the price of admission).

Teddy: "well, everything seems to be in order here! I'm going home"

//roll credits.

What follows is a mix and mash of various plot threads including the death of Teddy's wife, and his time spent in WWII culminating in the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau. Scorsese does his typical outstanding job of blending them together into a story that at it's worst keeps you interested, and at it's best actually kind of frightens you. The acting is solid, Leo DiCaprio doing his South Bahston accent just well enough to be believable. Ben Kingsly and Max von Sydow are awesome, and Mark Ruffalo is just kind of there. The best acting actually is done by Jackie Earle Hayley (he of the Rorschach fame) in a 3 minute scene deep in the bowels of the maximum security ward.

The movie checks in at just over 2:15 of running time, and while long, it's not to the point where you are sitting there checking your watch. I was pretty thoroughly engrossed, and only realized toward the end that the flick had been going on for about 2 hours. The only real beef I had with the movie was the score. Most movies like this use the background music to heighten the sense of tension during the scenes. A piano key here, a vibrato violin note there. It's finesse that usually works the best, creating a palpable wall of tension without you even knowing it. The score in Shutter Island blows through that wall like the Kool-Aid man. "Oh Yeaaaahhhh, this shit is TENSE!" the background music practically screams at you. There is a point at the beginning of the movie where Teddy and Chuck first get to the island where the music is actually distracting. There really isn't anything going on in the scene, just a wide shot of them driving to the entrance to the compound. They way the music was blaring however, you would think it was the beaches of Normandy.

That small gripe aside, I really enjoyed the movie. Good pacing, good acting, and a story that kept me on loose footing till the very end, Shutter Island is definitely a movie worth seeing. It also had me questioning my perception of reality in the same way "A Beautiful Mind" has done for some folks. Actually kind of scary if you think too hard about it. Please don't.

I give it 8.5/10