Category: Blog

“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design Systems as Living Languages

Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn’t be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file “exception” requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system’s essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

When Perfect Consistency Fails

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb’s pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn’t ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris () was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an “Oh, Ship!” moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

The Birth of a Dialect

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris’s core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Constraint	Fluent Move	Rationale
Glare & low light	Dark surfaces + light text	Reduce glare on low-DPI screens
Gloves & haste	90px tap targets (~2cm)	Accommodate thick gloves
Multilingual	Single-task screens, plain language	Reduce cognitive load

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn’t customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris’s core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn’t failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

The Flexibility Framework

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

Tier	Action	Ownership
Consistent	Adopt unchanged	Platform locks design + code
Opinionated	Adapt within bounds	Platform provides smart defaults, products customize
Flexible	Extend freely	Platform defines behavior, products own presentation

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

The Decision Ladder

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: “Which option lets users succeed fastest?”

Rules are tools, not relics.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

Governance Without Gates

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation – e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns – when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context – retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Start Small: Your First Dialect

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don’t address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren’t “”breaking the system””—they’re serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re not managing design systems anymore—we’re cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn’t care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

The pitfalls of feature-first development

When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.

The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The importance of bedrock

So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.

But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?

1. Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
5. Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

The bedrock paradox

There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves will teach you.

In 1788, Prussia introduced the Abitur, a standardized national examination required for entry into universities and the civil service. To pass it, students needed to demonstrate measurable, gradable knowledge. The system needed to teach language to large classrooms, produce consistent outcomes, and do it with one teacher and thirty students. The educators responsible for designing this system reached for the only teaching template they had, one that had been used in European schools for two centuries: the method developed to teach Latin.

Latin, by 1788, was a dead language. Nobody needed to speak it. The scholars who studied it were reading Cicero and Virgil, not conducting conversations. The method built around it, memorizing grammar rules, constructing translations, analyzing written texts, reflected that reality exactly. Oral skills were irrelevant. Comprehension of written form was everything. The method was not designed to produce speakers. It was designed to produce readers of texts in a language nobody spoke.

When Prussia applied this template to French and German, living languages spoken by living people, the premise did not change. Johann Valentin Meidinger’s textbook Praktische Französische Grammatik, published in 1804, ran to 37 editions across Europe by 1857. Karl Plotz formalized the approach into what became the dominant model for teaching modern languages across Europe and eventually the United States, where it became known simply as the Prussian Method [1]. Each institution that adopted it trained teachers in it, who trained students who became teachers. The constraint that created the method, how do you grade language at scale with limited resources, became invisible inside the method itself. What remained was the assumption: language is a body of rules to be learned consciously and measured. It was a design decision dressed up, over time, as a pedagogical truth.

The observation that should have ended it

There are people in the world who cannot read or write a language and speak it fluently. There are children who hold full conversations years before they can read a single word. There are immigrants who arrive in a country knowing nothing of its language and come out, years later, speaking it naturally, not because they studied it, but because they lived inside it. Literacy and fluency are separate things produced by entirely separate mechanisms. The Grammar-Translation method, as it became known, assumed they were the same thing. That assumption was inherited from a method designed for a language nobody needed to speak, and it was wrong the moment it was applied to a language people actually used.

The evidence against it accumulated slowly. In the mid to late nineteenth century, reformers including François Gouin in France and Maximilian Berlitz in the United States argued independently that language should be taught the way it is actually acquired, through immersive exposure to real communication in the target language, not through analysis of its rules. Berlitz built an entire school network around this principle. The reformers were correct. They were also largely ignored by mainstream education systems, because the Grammar-Translation method had one decisive advantage that direct immersion did not: it could be graded.

In 1982, the linguist Stephen Krashen gave the argument its most formal articulation in what he called the Monitor Model of second language acquisition. His distinction was precise: language acquisition, the unconscious process through which children absorb their native language and through which adults succeed in immersive environments, is categorically different from language learning, the conscious study of grammar rules and vocabulary that classrooms deliver [2]. Acquisition produces fluency. Learning, at best, produces the ability to pass a test. The evidence supporting this distinction, and the observation that immersive exposure to real native-speaker communication is the mechanism that produces genuine fluency, has only grown since.

I went to Brazil without a word of Portuguese and came out speaking it. I studied French in a classroom for years and cannot hold a conversation in French today. This is not an unusual experience. It is the expected outcome, and it has been the expected outcome for as long as we have had formal language education.

The same decision, made again in a different medium

Prussian educators faced the question: How do you deliver language learning at scale, measure progress, and retain users over time? The answer it arrived at was structurally identical to the one arrived at in 1788. Duolingo gamified the grammar drill into a streak. Anki formalized the translation exercise into a spaced-repetition flashcard. Babbel organized grammar lessons into structured modules. The interfaces were new. The underlying assumption, that language is a thing you study rather than an environment you inhabit, was not.

This was not a failure of design skill. The products that emerged from these decisions are, in many respects, genuinely well-crafted. Duolingo’s retention mechanics are sophisticated. Anki’s spaced repetition is grounded in real cognitive science. They are excellent at what they actually do. The problem is what they actually do: produce measurable engagement with a proxy for language rather than the conditions that produce language itself. A streak is measurable. A vocabulary score is measurable. The moment a user walks out of an app and holds a real conversation in another language, that happens in the world, outside the product, and cannot be instrumented.

When the outcome a user needs is difficult to measure directly, the design process tends to reach for something that can be measured. The proxy becomes the goal. The interface optimizes for it. The gap between what the product delivers and what the user actually needed grows. This is not a pattern unique to language learning. It is a pattern that repeats across product categories whenever a design constraint—the need to measure, the need to scale, the need to produce a grade—gets built into a system so deeply that it stops being visible as a constraint and starts being mistaken for a truth about the problem itself.

What happens when the constraint changes

The constraint that made the Grammar-Translation method necessary in 1788 was real and rational. One teacher. Thirty students. A standardized exam. You cannot grade a conversation at scale. You can grade a translation exercise. The method was not chosen because it produced fluency. It was chosen because it produced a score.

That constraint no longer exists in the same form. Technology has made it possible to deliver immersive, real-time conversation practice to anyone with a smartphone, at a cost that continues to fall. The design problem is no longer how to make language learning gradable at scale. It is how to make the conditions of genuine language acquisition accessible to people who cannot move to another country or afford a native-speaker tutor.

The products that are now closest to solving the actual problem are not the ones that invented a new pedagogy. They are the ones that removed the access barrier to an old one. Praktika builds AI conversation partners with distinct personalities, regional dialects, and cultural context, replicating the specificity of a real native speaker rather than a generic language-learning voice. Langua clones native speaker voices so that the interaction feels like a real conversation rather than a lesson. Rosetta Stone’s foundational methodology, image association in the target language with no translation, was built on the same insight Berlitz arrived at in the nineteenth century: language is acquired through immersive exposure, not through analysis of its rules [3]. A 2025 meta-analysis of 31 studies found that AI conversation tools produced a statistically significant improvement in language learning outcomes, a result that no amount of flashcard optimization has consistently matched [4].

None of these products invented a new theory of language acquisition. They translated an existing one into something more people could reach.

The design question this leaves

The Grammar-Translation method persisted not because educators were wrong about design, but because a design decision made under a specific constraint became, over two centuries, indistinguishable from the thing itself. The constraint, how do you grade language at scale, was forgotten. The method it produced was inherited as if it were a description of how language works, passed from Prussia to Europe to America to the App Store, from the grammar drill to the streak.

Every time a design team optimizes for a metric because the actual outcome is hard to measure, they are making a version of the same decision. It is often the right decision given real constraints. The question worth asking is whether the constraint that made it necessary still exists, or whether it has simply become invisible inside the system it originally produced.

Before reaching for what can be measured, it is worth asking what the user actually needs to do, and what stopped them from doing it before. Sometimes the answer is a new solution. More often it is an old one that was always out of reach.

Fame rarely arrives in a neat, predictable way. For some celebrities, the first taste of public attention came through an awkward audition, a bizarre coincidence, a childhood appearance, or a job they never expected to turn into a career. A few were discovered in places that had nothing to do with entertainment, while others suddenly found themselves recognized for something they had done almost by accident. Those early moments can feel especially strange when you know what these people eventually became. Before the awards, blockbuster movies, sold out concerts, and enormous fan bases, there was usually one unusual moment when everything started changing. Here are fifteen celebrities whose first encounters with fame happened in surprisingly unexpected ways.

The post 15 Celebrities Who Had Strange First Encounters With Fame appeared first on Den of Geek.

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

The post The Best Martin Scorsese Movies Not About Gangsters appeared first on Den of Geek.

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 7. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has gleefully played around in lots of different genres and movements. This season alone it’s tackled film noir, horror, and whatever you call it when the bulk of the main cast turns into puppets. (Do The […]

The post Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 7 Review — Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass appeared first on Den of Geek.

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

The post The Best Martin Scorsese Movies Not About Gangsters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Comedy is full of people who never become household names despite being incredibly funny. Some built loyal audiences through stand up, podcasts, sketch shows, or small movie roles, while others became favorites in comedy circles without ever reaching the level of the biggest stars. That can make discovering them feel like finding a secret everyone else somehow missed. They may not have the biggest credits or millions of followers, but their timing, delivery, observations, and completely strange sense of humor can make them impossible to stop watching once you find them. Here are fifteen comedians who deserve far more attention, especially if you are tired of hearing about the same famous comedy stars.

The post 15 Comedians You May Have Never Heard of, But We Can’t Stop Laughing At appeared first on Den of Geek.

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

The post The Best Martin Scorsese Movies Not About Gangsters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Movies can feel completely different once you know what was happening behind the scenes. A harmless looking scene may have been created under bizarre circumstances, a familiar performance may have a surprisingly uncomfortable story behind it, or a tiny production decision may completely change the way you interpret what appears on screen. Some facts are simply strange, while others make familiar movies feel almost eerie when you revisit them. The best ones are not obscure trivia for the sake of it. They give you a reason to look at a movie differently the next time you watch it. Here are fifteen uncanny movie facts that might make some very familiar films feel surprisingly different.

The post Uncanny Movie Facts That Might Change Your Perspective appeared first on Den of Geek.

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

The post The Best Martin Scorsese Movies Not About Gangsters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Television has always had moments when a network executive looked at an episode and wondered what on earth the writers were thinking. Sometimes the problem was the subject matter, while other episodes pushed animation, storytelling, violence, surreal humor, or social commentary far beyond what audiences expected from the show. A few were delayed, edited, pulled from schedules, or only aired after serious arguments behind the scenes. Others technically made it to television but left viewers wondering how anyone managed to get them approved. These fifteen episodes earned unusual reputations for being too strange, uncomfortable, controversial, or simply bizarre for their time, proving that television has occasionally gone much further than anyone expected.

The post 15 TV Episodes That Were Considered Too Weird to Air appeared first on Den of Geek.

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

The post The Best Martin Scorsese Movies Not About Gangsters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Historical movies have never been required to behave like history textbooks, but some take that freedom to impressive extremes. A real person can become an entirely different character, major events can happen years apart, and fictional stories can be dropped into moments that barely resemble what actually happened. Sometimes filmmakers simplify complicated events for dramatic reasons, while other movies seem to treat historical accuracy as an optional extra. The result can be entertaining, memorable, and occasionally completely ridiculous. These fifteen films all borrowed real people, places, or events and then took some serious creative liberties with the facts. If you are watching them for history lessons, you may want to keep a textbook nearby.

The post 14 Movies That Decided History Was Just a Suggestion appeared first on Den of Geek.

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

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