The Departed Box Office Take Over 77 Million and Counting..

I was in Boston the only time anyone ever called me a nigger to my face. A bunch of us college interns were pumping gas, and a cherry-red pick up containing a couple of white boys sped by and screamed the word.

Our group stopped and stared. Things moved in slow motion. We were stunned into silence.

This memory emerged this weekend, when my husband took me to see The Departed, Martin Scorsese's ultra-violent pseudo remake of Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s 2002 Hong Kong action film, Infernal Affairs.

Set in the gritty side of Boston, away from the cobble-stoned niceness of Newbury Street, The Departed opens with Jack Nicholson using the slur.

I sat there in the packed theater and tried to play it off like most blacks do in that sort of situation, pretending it didn’t really matter, and went ahead and absorbed myself into the crime drama, experiencing it as sort of a black fly on a rough white underworld wall of the Irish Mob.

Besides, Scorsese has a predilection for the N-word, I remembered, as he displayed so honestly in that Taxi Driver scene where he watched his wife's silhouette in the window of a black man from the vantage point of the back of Deniro's cab.

"You know who lives there?" a young Scorsese asked nutso Deniro. "A nigger lives there." It was so no-holds-bar that I can write the lines from memory.

I think that's where Quentin Tarantino got his fondness for it too. From watching the greats. But I digress…

The Departed is loaded with so many stars -  Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Martis Sheen, Anthony Anderson, and the soon-to-be megastar Vera Farmiga -  I kept expecting Ben Affleck to pop up and show off his raw and dirty Southie accent, which I love to hear on Matt and Marky Mark.

The writing is superb, the acting is amazing, but it is so dark and violent and the body count so high, I hid behind my fingers and stretched my thumbs to plug my ears for a good one seventh of the bang-in-your-face, or smash-your-already-broken-forearm-with-a-boot scenes.