patrickwigington Martin Scorsese's last film of the 20th century takes place "back in the early 90's" and it serves as an accurate and engrossing portrayal of what that decade was all about. Scorsese created an eclectic, hyperactive, and pulsating movie that is absolutely mesmerizing to watch.The film stars Nicolas Cage, who gives a phenomenal performance as the alcoholic paramedic Frank who's psychological stability long ago slipped away. He drives an ambulance through the streets of a desperate, gritty New York City practically from dusk till dawn. The entirety of the movie happens over the course of a few nights. Frank drives the ambulance like a maniac, but it seems to be the only way to keep the ghosts of the people that have died in his arms away. Frank's partner is Larry, a middle aged family an who serves as a sort of rock for Frank, keeping his psychosis in check. But Larry is only there the first night, and Frank's descent is fast. He meets a girl who's father has had a heart attack, and he falls for her. But it is not as if she can save him; in fact she is probably worse off than he is.Nicolas Cage is excellent as Frank. His performance is certainly over the top, but that is by no means a bad thing. Cage absorbs himself into the character, creating a man who is visibly on the brink of a nervous break down, and who we can easily identify with and understand. John Goodman plays Larry with a subdued and calming aspect that acts as a nice foil for Cage early on. Patricia Arquette gives a subdued and excellent performance as the wounded girl Frank tries to save.The script was written by Paul Schrader, who wrote several other films for Scorsese, including Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ. Schrader delves deep into the character of Frank, but never reveals too much. We are left with questions that cannot be answered about all of these characters, but we see many of them in their most revealing moments.Scorsese directs this movie with a eccentric fever that he has never replicated. The entire movie is from the point of view of Frank, and so we get a dazed, delirious look at the City and its inhabitants. Scorsese deals with themes of alienation, death, and the crack epidemic all together in one huge lump of insanity, all while maintaining the clearest of storytelling. While a simple description of the plot may make it seem like a subdued and lengthy character study, it is in essence quite different. Scorsese's directing turns the film into a drug induced meditation on life and death.Complete with a soundtrack that includes The Clash, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, Bringing Out the Dead is a forgotten masterpiece of Martin Scorsese. The movie is hypnotic to watch and hard to pull away from once it sucks you into its insane world.thatguythatlikesmovies.blogspot.com/ridingwithdeath

castala I've seen every movie pictures this man had made since "Mean streets", except for two of them: this one, which I've just watched, and "Kundun", the other movie he made just before "Bringing out the dead". After "The age of innocence" and "Casino", this director should have been allowed to make a film every year for the rest of his life. But the 1990's were not a good period for him, because for the exception of "Casino" and "Goodfellas", his films made not enough money. And that's the way this industry is going now. This movie is not nice. It'll give a blow if you accept the challenge: it's a nightmare, an hallucinate journey by a man who's falling in pieces. Paul Schrader screenplay is a tormented one, not easy to hear or watch. Nicolas Cage have made a lot of crappy performances after winning an Oscar for "Leaving Las Vegas" four years before this one, but not here. He's very good, even rather calm in a film where everybody else is overacting. Cliff Curtis, Tom Sizemore, John Goodman, Marc Anthony and Ving Rhames are good also, even if they're playing very strange people who are easier to perform. I've fallen for Patricia Arquette. Scorsese has gotten better during those years to direct beautiful women (Pfeiffer, Stone, Diaz) and getting the best from them.

ollie1939-97-957994 Bringing out the Dead is the most underrated film ever done by Martin Scorsese. It is one of the most well made films I've ever seen and is one of my favorite dramas of all time.The film focuses on a paramedic called Frank played by Nicolas Cage. The film focuses on 48 hours of Frank's life as a paramedic and all the horrific things he has seen. As well as that Frank is also haunted by spirits of people who he couldn't save, befriends a young women called Mary played by Patricia Arquette and a whole range of strange partners.The actors that Scorsese has chosen are a weird bunch as they're not really in Scorsese's other films and they're not really big name actors. As well as Nicolas Cage there's also supporting roles from people like John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Siezmore. Everyone does a fantastic jobs even the actors who have much smaller roles than others.This is much more surreal film than most other Scorsese films as we go into Frank's mind.The reasons why this films succeeds is just that you really care about this characters and while the film dosen't really have much of a story it grips you the whole way through.It also has a great soundtrack which includes artists like Van Morrison, R.E.M and the Who.Overall the film is quite different to what you're usually expecting but it grips who the whole way though and it gets a full 5 star rating form me.

Michael Neumann After a decade of misdirection ('The Age of Innocence', 'Casino', 'Kundun') Martin Scorsese is back where he belongs, beating a welcome retreat to the mean streets of Manhattan for what many aficionados might consider to be an unofficial sequel (although it's more like a matching bookend) to his nightmare 1976 classic 'Taxi Driver'.Such will likely be the prevailing opinion, at any rate. It's hard enough these days for a halfway challenging movie to win an audience on its own merits, without adding the extra burden of unrealistic expectations. But because of its credentials Bringing Out the Dead will have to withstand a lot of inevitable (and unfair) comparisons to the earlier film, with which it shares the same grim setting and similar themes of alienation and redemption.Hardly surprising, since both were written by Paul Schrader, who knows every contour of this ambiguous moral territory like the back of his own hand. Only the presence of Robert DeNiro (or at least Harvey Keitel) would have made the reunion complete, but Scorsese wisely agreed to the casting of Nicholas Cage in the lead role, as a burned-out paramedic working the graveyard shift in that mid-town neighborhood west of Times Square known (for good reason) as Hell's Kitchen.Cage is in a slump: he's working too much, sleeping too little, and hasn't saved a life in months, not a healthy situation for someone who lives and (mostly) dies vicariously through his rescue efforts. Too many unresolved medical emergencies in the lunatic underbelly of Manhattan have brought him to a point where the only hold on his sanity is the paramedic's creed, usually applied to his patients: "keep the body going until the brain and heart recover".It's the pivotal message of the movie (and easy to spot because it's repeated twice), giving Cage's efforts to preserve his own battered psyche an irresistible, sometimes reckless momentum. The episodic storyline, adapted from the debut novel by Joe Connelly (an erstwhile paramedic himself) may not appeal to the average multiplex audience, conditioned to expect a more conventional, plot-driven narrative. But viewers who don't subscribe to the sales pitch ethos at large in modern Hollywood will find much to admire in Cage's not entirely successful struggle over a long, chaotic "weekend of full moons" to navigate the grief and accumulated guilt of too many flatliners.Not an easy task, as it turns out, especially in such a merciless environment. "This city will kill you if you're not strong enough", he's reminded at one point by Patricia Arquette, playing the long-suffering daughter of a brain-dead heart attack victim, and representing a token ray of slightly tarnished sunlight in an otherwise gloomy all-male scenario. It's the second key line of dialogue in the movie: a Nietzschean paraphrase no doubt endorsed by Scorsese himself, who (not for the first time) paints an all too vivid portrait of New York City not likely to be applauded by the local chamber of commerce.An introductory title places the action in the specific time frame of the early 1990s, before the PR mouseketeers of the Walt Disney Company ('Team Rodent', in Carl Hiaasen's memorable words) began their crusade to make the city safe for family tourism. This is the Big Apple before its corporate facelift: a loser's paradise of low-rent sleaze emporiums and wasted lives. Every other scene leaves an indelible (if not entirely accurate) impression of being set at the top of another inner-city tenement building, surrounded by a (mostly) nocturnal landscape littered with human flotsam: junkies, whores, hustlers, alcoholics, homeless bums and other assorted crazies, not least among them the paramedic crews themselves.Over the course of his dreamlike but sleepless 48-hour flight from reality Cage will find himself paired with a series of increasingly eccentric partners, from a jovial John Goodman to Ving Rhames to a truly psychotic Tom Sizemore. You'll find a measure of more or less traditional buddy-film banter while each team is on the streets, but don't expect too many comfortable chuckles. Scorsese has a gift for raising uneasy laughter from even the darkest scenario, and like all his best films the humor in Bringing Out the Dead is colored in shades of midnight gray, suitably morbid but still amusing if approached in the proper twisted spirit.Sharing equal screen time with a trio of certifies scene-stealers must have posed a particular challenge for Cage, normally an unrestrained actor of no small notoriety. He has been known to run amok over weaker material "like a narcoleptic bull in a cheap china shop" (quoting an acerbic review of his jaw-dropping hambone turn in the 1989 film 'Vampire's Kiss'), but it's a credit to Scorsese's skill that he manages to coax his star into a performance of laudable restraint and understatement. There's more than a little evidence of method acting residue at work: it looks as if Cage prepared for his insomniac role by depriving himself of sleep for several weeks, giving his complexion a totally convincing night owl pallor, strikingly highlighted by Robert Richardson's luminous cinematography.In the spirit of the times the film outstays its welcome by a good twenty minutes, a familiar complaint in these days of slack-fingered editing and narrative hypertrophy. But after its headlong rush into the urban maelstrom of inner Manhattan the story manages to resolve itself on a note of unexpected grace. If the aim was simply to recapture the flavor of Taxi Driver, it might have ended in a cathartic bloodbath worthy of Travis Bickle, instead of with the quieter (but no less powerful) epiphany shown here.So maybe it's true, at least for the maverick directors of the 1970s: you can't go home again. And on the evidence presented here, that's something to be thankful for.