Bringing Out the Dead
Most of my reviews are really about how much I know; or, if I don’t know anything, how unusually refined my emotional responses are. It is like shouting out the answers in class, the motive of information-sharing much less anterior than that of plain and simply 
showing off. But there are movies to which there are no answers; all one can hope to do is stand staring and stammering a little louder than the rest.
I think I have hit upon the distinction between prose and poetry. Prose is allowed its little throwaways, its clichés, its bland linking paragraphs. Prose is shored up everywhere by the base foundation of the everyday, so that even when it falls apart we can see the scaffold beneath it and guess what the writer was trying oh-so-unsuccessfully to do. Poetry, on the other hand, has no such safety net. Nothing in poetry can be familar or commonplace, every single word must be load-bearing, nothing must go to waste. Poetry, far from being flowery or lavish, is the ultimate in artistic economy.
And so it only occurs to me now that Scorsese’s films are actual poems, stripped of all life’s fat and gristle, lean and hungry as middleweights. Look at Bringing Out the Dead. Is there a single shot in this movie you’ve ever seen before, or even one obligatory scene? No. Instead, there are moments of such dark, diabolical comedy that their very perfection moves us to tears, and every camera movement is like a word of obscure beauty we had never heard before.