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Just what I expected

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Blistering performances.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Along with After Hours in all possibility the most underrated Martin Scorsese movie. Bringing out the dead is an extremely well-made film by a master filmmaker and ably acted by underrated Nicholas Cage and supported by the likes of Vhing Rames and John Goodman. Taking place in a span of three nights this is a dark comedy which is bound to become a cult classic soon. 9/10 (Go watch for the magic of Martin Scorsese).

Scorsese and Cage go together like pennant butter with jelly, great on their own, together they are magical. This is absolutely my favorite Scorsese film, it is a piercing and unfazed look into the abyss of human behavior. It is a chronicle of how low you can sink and the potential redemption that always seems to be tauntingly in the distance.We open on Nic Cage's eyes, weary, worn. He stared into the pit of the city, and it stares back at him, boasting its Red Death and cardiac arrests. There's no way to escape the pit of hell, the pit of this festering life.

This is a film based off atmosphere. You legitimately feel Frank's stress and how tiring being a NY medic can be. The film slowly tires you in a way not different from having the job. The comedy from the film comes from the other medics played by John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore and their interactions with Cage. A few other comedic scenes include I.B. Banging, worst suicide attempt ever, and "Hold this or I won't kill you!". It really feels more like a David Fincher film than Martin Scorsese. Perhaps it's just the look, but I am serious. Some scenes do well portray the hardship of death to a medic. There is some supernatural element which is strangely enticing. Check it out.

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