madness | the m0vie blog

209. Shutter Island – Summer of Scorsese (#156)

Posted on November 21, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Jay Coyle and Darren Mooney, with special guest Kurt North, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, continuing our Summer of Scorsese season, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.

Martin Scorsese is one of the defining directors in American cinema, with a host of massively successful (and cult) hits that have shaped and defined cinema across generations: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Boxcar Bertha, Cape Fear, Casino, The Aviator, The Departed, Silence. The Summer of Scorsese season offers a trip through his filmography via the IMDb‘s 250.

Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels makes a trip across Boston Harbour to visit the psychiatric institution on Shutter Island, investigating the mysterious disappearance of one of the patients. However, as Teddy probes deeper and deeper into the workings of the facility, it becomes very clear that things are not as they appear.

At time of recording, it was ranked 156th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: b-movie, ben kingsley, boston, conspiracy theories, dream, Inception, insanity, jason coyle, jay coyle, kurt north, Leonardo diCaprio, madness, mark ruffalo, martin scorsese, Movie, nightmare, nostalgia, reality, Shutter Island, the holocaust | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Folie à Deux (Review)

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

Folie à Deux is the last stand-alone episode of the fifth season, and the last stand-alone episode to be produced in Vancouver. It is also a pretty essential episode before The X-Files: Fight the Future, reinforcing just how essential Mulder and Scully are to one another shortly before the movie threatens to break them up for good.

Folie à Deux is also one of Vince Gilligan’s most underrated scripts from the show’s entire run, a thoughtful examination of the relationship between Mulder and Scully that provides a clever counterpoint to his script of Bad Blood. If Bad Blood was essentially a story about how Mulder and Scully see the universe differently, then Folie à Deux represents an attempt to heal that rift, perhaps suggesting that Mulder and Scully have come to share their own unique form of madness.

Bugging Skinner…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: contagious insanity, fight the future, folie a deux, going postal, insanity, kim manners, madness, office shootings, the x-files, the x-files: fight the future, vince gilligan, x-files, x-files: fight the future | 2 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) – The Silent Blade (Review)

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

The Silent Blade is filler – one of those short stories that Topps produced as promotional material for wider consumption. In this case, as with The Pit, The Silent Blade was written as a short story to feature in the summer issue of The X-Files Magazine.

Writing a short story is tough. In some respects, writing a nine-page comic strip with a clear beginning, middle and end is harder than plotting a full-length issue or an entire arc. There is only so much space available, particularly when dealing with an exposition-heavy franchise like The X-Files. It can be tough to fit all the necessary ingredients in, let alone to put a novel twist on them. The temptation is to try to do too much with so little.

He won’t be drawn on the matter…

Writer Stefan Petrucha and artist Charles Adlard had generally done well by their short stories, treating them as light and throwaway. They were not the strongest stories of the run, but they were aware of the limitations of the format and the expectations of the target audience. They were functional pieces of writing, aware of the limitations of the form. John Rozum’s first (and only) abridged X-Files story strains against those limitations.

After all, Rozum’s script for Thin Air had tried to fit too much into a full-length issue, so it makes sense that The Silent Blade is also a little too busy for its own good. This would be the last feature that Topps would produce for The X-Files Magazine, and the last of these sorts of short stories.