A Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro collaboration is always, ALWAYS worth seeing! And it really does look like Robert DeNiro sunk into his character and created a some movie!
Taxi Driver is an absolutely fantastic psychological thriller with outstanding performances from Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel and Albert Brooks. Robert De Niro portrays Travis Bickle so well because he is a sort of tortured soul who turns into a complete murderous psychopath. He is so vile and cold which makes Robert De Niro perfect for this character. He plays a lot of villains and never fails to give a disappointing performance. Travis starts off as a poor man who is looking for a long hour job. When he starts his job as a New York City taxi driver he starts meeting different people and starts to hang over people who are in danger particularly when a young 12 year old child prostitute Iris steps into his taxi while trying to escape her pimp. She is portrayed by two time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster. She was only 14 in this film. Iris is a character who likes having sex with any man she meets. It is like an obsession but it is disgusting for a 12 year old girl. Her prostitute name is Easy. Pretty much all of Martin Scorseses films are rated 18 or 15 but I think this one is the most graphic out of all of his films that I have seen. This film and Mean Streets are both films that started to make Martin Scorsese one of the greatest directors of all time. This is a film noir which is what most of Scorseses films actually are. I really really enjoyed this film but I preferred films like The Departed, Raging Bull and Cape Fear. This film should have won Best Picture instead of Rocky and Robert De Niro should have had Best Actor 1976. Jodie Foster deserved her Oscar nomination aswell.
I wouldn't watch this again, even if it is heralded as one of the great films ever made. I could watch Jodie as the unfortunate child prostitute but the scenes with Robert de Niro (who looks his best here, and who is undeniably excellent for the role) is too disturbing.
Superb psychological paranoia film that digs deep into the psyche of Robert DeNiro's character. Excellent acting and direction, this film is a bit odd and quirky, but definitely a classic.
amazing film. i thought that robert de niro played a really interesting character and i enjoyed the way that the story kind of evolves between the characters. i also enjoyed harvey kietels part in this films as well very well made film i enjoyed every minute of the film..n 1 of the most classic cinema lines is said/spoken in this movie which is "u talkin to me"
This movie is just intense! Martin Scorsese's best outing of 1976 thanks to DeNiro and Foster and an awesome cast. DeNiro plays a former marine cab driver who wanders through a paranoid landscape of building tension, and comes to befriend an underage hooker, Foster in a young and shocking role, and then all Hell breaks loose. This flick is just brilliant. This is what Tarantino is shooting for in his flicks a generation later. This movie makes Reservoir Dogs look like a film school flick. Not for the timid, the squeemish, or the easily offended, and especially not for kids. Could be NC-17 today, easily.
Powerful performance from Robert De Niro, another classic piece of cinema from his pairing with Martin Scorsese. Controversial at the time,not least for a teenage Jodie Foster's strong performance as a young prostitute
ANOTHER great film. It was slightly different than what I was expecting, but that's a good thing. A lot of the plot mentioned in the synopsis doesn't come until much later in the film, but if you like films where the character develops slowly (which I do) then you'll love it. The film carries an eery tone most of the time even when going at a slower pace.
Robert De Niro gives an amazing performance as Travis Bickle, an ex-marine who is mentally unstable taxi driver who is an insomniac, is lonely, lacks social skills and hates the world he lives in. That world happens to be the underbelly of New York City in the 1970s, full of pimps, drug pushers, killers and other scum. This is the story of a man that finally just snaps. Includes a great performance also by a very young Jodie Foster as a teenage prostitute. A classic from director Martin Scorsese. Highly recommended.
Martin Scorsese scores big with this awesome and creepy character study of urban decay and Robert De Niro as a taxi driver driven to madness... "You talking to me? Well there's no one else around, so you MUST be talking to me!"
I hear amazing things about this movie all the time. People- a LOT of people- seem to consider this the be-all, end-all of cinema, like they think that DeNiro and Scorsese crafted the celluloid Holy Grail with this flick. I've been hearing this kind of stuff since I was in high school, and it just seemed to grow more pronounced as I got older; over time, my estimation of the film had risen preemptively, and even though I never saw it myself, I knew I would appreciate it when I did- after all, with so many people vouching for it, it had to be something I could dig into, right? Well, that made it all the more surprising when I found I had an extremely hard time just getting through the thing. It's set in a world that's a cesspool of corruption and vice, featuring a main character, Travis Bickle, who is quite literally insane (or possibly just greatly maladjusted)- who can't seem to function on either side of society's social scale, and ultimately goes down a self-destructive path of violence and carnage out of sheer nihilism. Frankly, from start to finish, the movie just... bothered me. It's an intensely uncomfortable viewing experience, even when nothing much is really happening, because the film builds up this powerful feeling of repressed aggression and paranoid anxiety that is never given any sort of release. It has racial and sexual overtones that are dealt with in a frank and polarizing way, and the world that Scorsese created just absolutely filled me with loathing. And then, as always seems to happen these days, I finally got the bigger picture AFTER the movie ended. We can sympathize with Bickle, despite his actions and his obvious psychosis, because the world he lives in is so horrible; when Bickle says that he just wants to do something about all the terrible things going on around him, we can see where he's coming from, even if we can't make heads or tails of the man himself. It makes the viewer wonder if Bickle is nuts because he was born that way or because he's a product of the nightmarish city that he lives in (which, apparently, is what New York was really like back in those days. Thank God for Rudi Gulianni). Bickle, of course, is played by Robert DeNiro, and as always, DeNiro knocks it out of the park in pulling off the character (though it's weird to see him so young and fresh-faced- I'm used to the older, weather-beaten DeNiro of, say, Goodfellas). In every conversation, you can see Bickle struggling, either avoiding eye contact or holding it for far too long and holding up uncomfortable silences, and it's clear that the man has the interpersonal skills of a chunk of dirt. Completely bereft of a sense of propriety (asking the counter girl at the porn theater concession stand for her name? Big no-no) and completely lacking in knowledge of the world beyond his own experience (he doesn't follow movies, music, politics...), Bickle is completely baffled when a girl he likes is offended by his choice of movies for their first date: namely, the porn he watches because he can't sleep (which he himself has no reaction to). His dark feelings about the people he sees on the streets rings powerfully of film noir; the narrative device of the disjointed Bickle recording his irrational, anti-social thoughts in a notebook has been ripped off quite a bit by some pretty prestigious writers (comic god Alan Moore uses the tactic in his masterpiece, Watchman, and Frank Miller riffs on the obsessive voice-over device for, well, everything he does). His final resolution to arbitrarily choose a meaning for his life- ANY meaning- first leads him to try a political assassination during a rally, and then, failing that, to save an underage prostitute from her pimps... violently. The prostitute, Iris (played by a young, post-Freaky Friday/pre-Clarice Jodie Foster), is an incredibly disturbing, complex, intriguing character who, needless to say, has issues, the surface of which are just barely scratched by the film; Foster plays her well, brushing off the severity of her problems with an adolescent indifference that makes them all the more impacting. Her pseudo-Electra-complex relationship with her scumbag pimp (a young, well-muscled Harvey Keitel) is infuriating to watch, and we do root for Travis to do something to help her... but in the end, his rescue ends up causing her more trauma than ever before, and her ambiguous resolution leaves you wondering if things are truly better for her. Also in the film is Cybill Shepard as Betsy, a political campaign worker whom Bickle idolizes in his mind as a symbol of purity. The character isn't really too well elaborated on, beyond the disclosure that she is just a normal, average person through her at-work banter with friend Tom (Albert Brooks, sporting a hell of an afro for a white guy), and though she does seem to have a deeper personal connection with Bickle than you would think, she can't understand him any more than the audience can, and her rejection of him at the porn theater sparks his initial drive to murder the candidate she is working for. Oh, and Scorsese himself has a part as a homicidal passenger in Travis's cab- and damn, the guy can actually act. The cinematography is gritty and urban, using mainly real lights to illuminate the scenes. The shot compositions are indefinably fascinating- mostly straightforward and realistic, but with the occasional bit of ostentation (such as the overhead shots just following the climax, which have a feeling of newspaper photography or crime scene pictures). The score, though, is kind of annoyingly repetitive, going over the same saxophone piece over and over again. Still, at least the piece is good, setting the mood effectively, and while sometimes the score jumps into melodrama (once again, the moments after the climax), it fits the film like a glove (Bernard Hermann's last work, and you can hear his stamp on the whole movie). The film spirals towards a destructive conclusion that somehow, despite the seeming impossibility of the situation, turns out all right for Travis and Iris, and Bickle goes on with his life unassumingly, his impotent rage and mounting anxiety having been purged... for the moment. After the movie was over, I took a step back from it, trying to see things from a different perspective (what was the director trying to do here? Did he do it? How did it affect you?), and I came to a pretty simple conclusion: yeah, Taxi Driver really is as fantastic a film as they say. It's a movie designed to disturb, to get to you where other movies don't, can't, or won't, and even though I wouldn't want to feel this way too frequently, I have to admit that it succeeds brilliantly. The whole thing feels like a nightmare once it's over, a horrible trip through a harsh and unforgiving land that thankfully dissipates with the breaking dawn. This nightmare was a reality for many, though, and it still is; though the eyes of our imperfect protagonist, we see the most twisted side of the world we live in, and when you realize that this place, this hellhole, makes you sympathize for a psychotic murderer, you have to wonder which is more crazy: the man, or the world he lives in.
"Are you talking to me? Who else are you talking to? Well I'm the only one in here..." A classic timeless tale of isolation and nihilism. Why Scorsese's best stuff hasn'y won an Oscar is beyond me...
Scorcese's intense and dramatic film, Taxi Driver, suceeds on almost every level. To start, Deniro shines as the war veteran who is the title character of the film. Young Jodie Foster does just as well as Deniro. They both, however, could not have been as great as they were without the spectacular plot and script, which are somewhat complex and laced with underlying meanings. It is also thought provoking, which is always a plus for a film. Scorcese's direction is another superb aspect of the film. It is the string that ties everything together. If you haven't seen it yet, run to Blockbuster or add this film to your Netflix queue. Now.
Wow ,another classic I can now cross off the list.I am falling for De Niro just a lot more with every movie I see him in.But this was very deep.Poor guy just really wanted to do the right thing.Its kind of sad he isolated himself away from his family and everyone and was so incredibly lonely.This was extremely good,Very Intense,some funny moments lol and a Jodie Foster so young it was incredible.Really glad I got to see this.
Cool slow burn film...Robert De Niro plays a great role of a deteriorating personality who has no seeming hope and just lives out his days, only finding distraction and comfort from his insomnia by meeting people seemingly just as lonely as him...
I've let this movie sit in my conscious for a long time before writing more thoroughly about it, and I still think it's a very good movie. The big thing about it that doesn't cohere to me is why it's so wildly loved when it is such an angry, hateful movie. Taxi Driver, as I see it, is a film about the futility of fighting establishment, something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. We've all passed through portions of our lives where we considered ourselves "different" from or "outside" society. They are not new or particularly deep thoughts.
The challenge resting on Taxi Driver, then, is putting said thoughts in the hands of someone who is emotionally stunted and maybe a little slow like Robert De Niro's character and making them worth watching. The combination of this person and these ideas turns into a narrative full of anger, violence and impotence; Travis Bickle is a man who does not deserve to be put on a pedestal, and I think Martin Scorsese was well aware of this. De Niro was too, and that's why he succeeds so massively in building this character. He creates a man who's in the same trap as everyone else, struggling to get out for no real reason, just to struggle. That's where the irony of this movie's fanbase lies. I just don't think a lot of them get it.
Not to say that there isn't a lot to love about this movie. De Niro gives the performance of a lifetime and Jodie Foster shines in the role that put her on the map. Scorsese pulls off quite an atmosphere for Taxi Driver, creating a movie about a big city that manages to feel completely stifling. The soundtrack is great and the ending is memorable. But you've gotta keep an eye on what it's all for.
MCT:July 23, 2008
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