Pongpeng

8/10

Mostly loved this. Not that this breaks away from traditional director doc format or anything, but unlike recent ones like _Spielberg_ or _De Palma_, which tend to treat director's lives as extension from the focus on their films, Rebecca Miller slightly reverses the structure to have Scorsese's life be the main throughline with his films as its reflection instead. So unlike those docs, when some films gets short-shrift (_Bringing Out the Dead_) or omitted altogether (_Hugo_), it doesn't feel as egregious (although, and it's been more than a week so I forget the details, I find _Hugo_ fit his mood/changes that the doc chronicles at the time, so I feel they should/could have squeezed that in). And what abundance of great anecdotes. The film _Duel in the Sun_ giving his first sexual feeling! Interview with his childhood friends/acquaintances that inform some indelible characters in his films! And I liked recurring bits/structure too, such as Spike Lee's brief soundbites dropping once per episode memorably (like his delivery of "Thank God for asthma!" or comparing Scorsese's treatment of violence favorably to another director that he said pointedly he's not gonna name, but you know it's Tarantino), and having the entrances of both De Niro then DiCaprio be an episode's ending to signal the major change into next phase of his filmmaking career from their collaborations.