I want my 63 minutes back Saturday, February 20, 2010

At 75 minutes long, Shutter Island is a great little homage by Martin Scorsese to one of his heroes, Val Lewton.

Huh? What's that? You say it's actually 138 minutes long? And that it's fleshed out by a bunch of corny dream sequences and hallucinations which are then redundantly recounted by the characters after they've been shown? That it features gratuitously explicit flashbacks to the protagonist's liberation of Dachau in the middle of what is essentially a corny, preposterous movie about soap-opera schizophrenia?

I've been waiting for Scorsese to make a picture like this for a long time--it's too bad he had the clout to make it exactly the way he wanted it. It could have used a little more RKO front-office interference.