Wonderful character development!

The Age of Commercialism

Really Surprised!

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Bringing Out The Dead is almost a flawless film. The film takes place in New York City in the early 90's; and follows the life of Paramedic Frank Pierce( Nicholas Cage). He is frustrated, and burnt out due to the stress of his job. He hasn't saved any patients lately, and it's taken a toll. One of his partners Larry( John Goodman), is an enthusiastic paramedic who loves his job. The others are Marcus( Ving Rhames) and Tom Wolls( Tom Sizemore). Marcus is the smooth one who is always trying to woo dispatcher Love( Queen Latifah). Tom Wolls is the psycho nobody wants to work with. All Tom wants is to scare the patients; and get back at Noel( Marc Anthony). This film spans several days in Franks life as a 3RD shift paramedic in Hell's Kitchen. The story begins when Frank and Larry respond to a cardiac. There he meets Mary Burke( Patricia Arquette), the daughter of the victim. They work on him finally reviving him; and transport him to the craziest hospital. Our Lady of Mercy, is a overrun hospital with a doctor that is stressed and somewhat crazy Dr. Hazmat( Nestor Serrano). Once there a friendship begins to form with Mary Burke, an ex-junkie who opens up to Frank. Ignoring the advice from Marcus not to get involved with patients or their relatives. While waiting word about her father Mary opens up Frank. She tells him her past, the relationship with her father; and her frustrations. As the friendship grows he becomes more like a brother than anything. He always looks out for her, especially when she arrives at Cy's( Cliff Curtis) place. A crash pad for those who are overworked/ stressed out. Cy is the kind of guy who is a charmer, and a small time drug dealer.While his relationship grows with Mary. Frank is still haunted by his past. He still sees the ghosts of those he failed to save. He struggles to keep his composure, and with a new street drug out he finds it hard to keep it together. All Frank wants is to make amends with those he tried to save, look out for Mary; and return to being a top paramedic. This is one great movie with a top cast, with voice cameos by Queen Latifah and Martian Scorsese.I am glad a movie about paramedics came out; yes some of the scenes were exaggerated. The Noel and Tom scene was a WTF moment; but hey Frank saves the day. As a former Fire Explorer; and one who wanted to be an E.M.T..; being a paramedic is great when things go right. When you get overworked or things go wrong it is very stressful. I couldn't imagine having the job in a big city, especially New York. The stress level has to be ten times as bad. If anyone tells you that a career in Law Enforcement, Fire or Rescue isn't stressful they are full of S**T. I can only think of one job that can top the stress level, that of an Air Traffic Controller. In conclusion, this movie is another great Scorsese Masterpiece.

Cinema GOD Martin Scorsese delivers Another Masterpiece in 'Bringing Out the Dead'. A Haunting, Depressing & Stunning Motion-Picture, that can even be described as a Triumph. And Nic Cage Roars in the lead role! An Excellent Performance! 'Bringing Out the Dead' Synopsis: A Manhattan ambulance paramedic, overworked and haunted by visions of his failures, fights to keep a tenuous grip on his clarity.'Bringing Out the Dead' is about Angels & Demons. Its about the Good & the Devil. Scorsese's Flawless Story-Telling along-with a Stunning & Haunting Screenplay Written by Paul Schrader, make this highly under-rated film simply unforgettable. Cinematography is fantastic. Editing is just perfect.Performance-Wise: Nic Cage delivers one of his greatest performances in here. He plays the mentally & psychically troubled protagonist with rare patience & devastation. An Excellent Performance! John Goodman is ever-terrific. Patricia Arquette is good, while Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore & Marc Anthony are believable. On the whole, 'Bringing Out the Dead' is a Masterpiece.

This could have been something special, one of the great metaphors in cinema. A vehicle for us to hurl through the night of suffering, where life is transient and we learn to let go of our clinging.The movie is halfway this anyway. We ride the ambulance through the electric night of New York, ferrying back and forth from the outskirts of life broken humans who plead to us with their miseries. There are some inspired visions of this itinerant life, of the homeless sleeping where they may and haggard-looking individuals walking the pavements automaton-like, but they are too glossy for me to really register. Mere studio recreations that fail to give the impression of a life caught unawares.It's a great touch that the depressed paramedic who is our guide through this must learn to be detached from the suffering he remedies, ready to offer his helping hand but not be dismayed when that hand is refused by death. How instead of jumping in the quicksand of suffering to save others, we must learn to draw them to our safe ground.But the film is unawares of what transpires in it, and halfway through becomes a deranged comedy, played to the pounding grooves of Motown. Having missed the opportunity to create a spiritual work that matters, after this initial disappointment, it's to the movie's credit then that it does not become a mere banal lesson in humanity. As our protagonist loses it, the movie revels in the opportunity for insanity.That we get all this by the hand of Scorsese, a filmmaker with a vested interest in cinematography, only makes me think of how this could be done better, longer and more cinematic. For ostensibly bleak material, this is strangely watchable however.

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.