On DVD: Taxi Driver

I am taking a screenwriting class where we chose to read Paul Schrader's screenplay for Taxi Driver. It is a magnificent script that reads like a novel. I loved it even better than the movie because it is much more evocative, and although Scorsese created a great work of art with the material, the movie seems rushed and blunt in comparison.
When I first saw Taxi Driver I was in my mid-teens. I didn't like it. The music seemed horrifying, everything was terribly sordid and gruesomely violent and scary and dark and relentlessly ugly. I had seen movies about tough topics but I had never seen such an ugly, ugly film. Robert De Niro scared the shit out of me. The sight of Jodie Foster, who was about my age, as a prostitute, was too much for me to bear. I had a very visceral reaction to the film, as if I had been exposed to ugliness and moral squalor I did not expect nor welcome. I felt sullied by the film and I didn't understand why it was considered a great movie.
I saw the movie yesterday again for the first time in about 30 years. It's good to grow up.
For starters, I was shocked at how less shocking Taxi Driver seems today. Granted, this was the film that opened the door for very graphic and explicit violence in movies (more than Bonnie and Clyde which was cartoonish). It was the film that inspired generations of filmmakers to glorify the aesthetics of squalid violence and to let blood gush aplenty. Today Taxi Driver is not only a prescient film about crazy loner killers, (they really seemed to come out of the woodwork after it came out) but a thing of terrible beauty. The visual panache that became Scorsese's trademark is there. The cinematography by Michael Chapman is amazing. It really is devised to make you see what the immortal Travis Bickle sees and feels through his windshield. They actually shot inside the car and drove around, without a camera car. That is why it feels so real.
Robert De Niro's performance is so scary, so true, so quiet, that it may be one of the aspects of the movie that will still send shivers down your spine long after you find the violence almost quaint (it isn't, but it has become commonplace). All the parodies that were made of De Niro's channeling of Travis' crazy self-regard are monstrously exaggerated when compared to the seething calm De Niro exudes in the film. His violence is so deep into his body and his soul that he is scary without even yet lighting a fuse. It is not a show-off performance. He is stealthy, quiet, almost mousy, but you can feel the hatred and the confusion in him roil up inside his taut, rangy body.  If you must know, the famous "You talkin' to me?" scene is not in the original script. It was De Niro's choice. He was so brutally handsome, sad pathetic, dangerous, and coiled within himself I cannot take it. He kills me.
Yesterday I understood Bernard Herrmann's crazy, adventurous score. One part of it is just brutal, nasty, scary, but then there is this weirdly jazzy sax melody that weaves in between and points to Travis' sick obession with porn, his loneliness and the side of him that is redeemable. It is really a very bold choice as musical scores go.
In the script, as in De Niro's performance, what I find most disturbing is the tender side of Travis Bickle. He is some sort of warped innocent, almost an autistic person, who barely understands the rules of social interaction, a loner truly trying to belong and connect.
The DVD includes a lengthy documentary interviewing everybody for the remastered version of of the film. De Niro, in his usually reticent mode, Harvey Keitel, who was supposed to play the Albert Brooks part, but asked Scorsese to play the pimp, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, Jodie Foster, Brooks, Schrader, Scorsese, and Chapman. Very cool stuff.

For Your Halloween Consideration

Don't want to dress up as Michelle Bachmann or an OWS camper this Halloween? Watch a movie instead!

Here's a list of spooky movies for your viewing pleasures. And some new additions below.  I'm in the camp that humans are far scarier than zombies, ghosts, vampires or ghouls, so much of what you will find below qualifies as horror in my book. 

Now Playing:

Martha Marcy May Marlene. I think this is a horror film. Period. And a good one too.

On DVD:

Requiem. A German movie about an exorcism, based on a real story. No turning heads or day-glo vomit, but creepy and disturbing nonetheless.

Eyes Without a Face. A beautiful French horror classic. Almodóvar's new film borrows liberally from this one. And this one is much better.

La Ceremonie. Evil unleashed in the form of a maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her nasty girlfriend (Isabelle Huppert). Pretty much anything with Isabelle Huppert will make your blood curdle, so consider watching The Piano Teacher as well. 

The Butcher. Another disturbing little film from Claude Chabrol, a master of social horror. 

The White Ribbon. The budding seeds of Nazism in a small, creepy German town. Gorgeous and frightening.

Dogtooth. This Greek movie will weird you out. I promise.

Black Swan. Relive the anorexic nightmare. I actually saw it a second time on a plane, and it held up. 

Taxi Driver. Saw it again recently. Pretty horrible in the best way possible.

The Room should be required viewing every Halloween. You get to see the mind of a deranged person who thinks he has made a movie. Really scary.

Wonderful Town

If you are in New York right now and you love the movies, run, don't walk, to Grand Central Station and check out the exhibition "Celluloid Skyline" in Vanderbilt Hall. It is a wonderful exploration of New York in the movies, with very serious information, wonderful stills, amazing establishing shots of New York, ancient films of life in the city and most magnificently, 4 astounding scenic backdrops of New York landscapes, including one of the U.N. commissioned by Alfred Hitchcock and another one of the original Penn station (how could they have torn it down?). If I had money and space to burn, I'd buy them paintings and put them up in my huge mansion. There are also fascinating pictures of the New York that was recreated painstakingly in the Hollywood backlots and a reminder that before anybody moved to Hollywood, movie history started right here in NY.
These are two of the things I love most, New York and the movies, so for me this show was like nirvana. And the fact that it is at the marvel that is Grand Central Station makes it even better. For as you leave the show, you realize you live in the city that is the stuff of movies and it feels fabulous.
The show reiminds us that this is the most cinematic city ever (followed closely by San Francisco). Because of the nature of our landscape and our energy, New York is as much a star in the movies that take place in it, than the actors themselves. And here is a small list of gems where this town shines onscreen:
Sweet Smell of Success
French Connection
Dog Day Afternoon
Taxi Driver
Midnight Cowboy
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Manhattan
Annie Hall
Rosemary's Baby
West Side Story
The Apartment
Panic in Needle Park
...and so many other beauties...

Review of a Movie I Ain't Gonna See

The Brave One, with Jodie Foster, sounds like exactly the kind of movie nobody needs. Now that NY is the safest city on Earth, at least when it comes to crime, do we need a revenge fantasy movie a la Charles Bronson? I don't think so.
Horrible things happen to Jodie Foster in our beautiful town full of rodents and then she seeks revenge. Why would I want to see that?
My idea of a more realistic avenging movie in NYC goes like this:
Jodie Foster, playing me, is horribly annoyed by a number of things. Anytime those things cross her path, she blows them up.
• She vanquishes the entire rat population of NY singlehandedly by blowing up the infrastructure of the city, kinda like Con Edison. When the roaches see this, they decide to decamp by themselves.
• Every time a homeless person overturns a garbage can, Jodie makes sure, firepower in hand, that said homeless puts everything back and in the order in which they found it.
• As she walks into Bloomingdale's in Soho, she finishes off all the brain dead nubile idiots who love Juicy Couture, leaving bloodied, obscenely expensive schmattes in her wake.
• No taxi driver dares honk his horn any more, for fear of Jodie. Nobody honks and nobody blares his stupid music out his car windows. Jodie only allows blasters to live if they blast Mahler.
• Jodie has rounded up every SUV in town and dumped them all in the East River, drivers inside.
• Because she is a model citizen, she is helping Mayor Mike to get the congestion tax approved, by way of threatening a clean shot to the head to anyone that objects.
• She blows up Magnolia Bakery at the height of the inexplicable queue, just because. Next in her line of fire is the Meatpacking District (Only Bodum will be spared).
• New condos that promise wine cellars and pilates studios and screening rooms and zen gardens and a private fridge for your special gin, BAM!
• People who talk even during the previews at the movies are silenced -- with a silencer.
In fact, so many things annoy Jodie, that several sequels are in the works.

I have a theory about Jodie Foster. It goes like this. Since we all know she is gay, and since every attempt to cast her as the object of someone's affections has been historically disastrous (Nell. Sommersby. Maverick. Anna and the King: need I say more?), and since she does radiate intelligence and is a blonde and Hollywood does not quite know what to do when both converge, she is now a specialist in playing the tough, steely broad, alone against the world. Considering she is also in her mid-forties, it is a testament to her staying power that she is still working. Yet, like a Super Nun, no sex for her: Silence of the Lambs, Flightplan, Contact, Panic Room, Inside Man. You could pretty much take any male action star and substitute him for her and the movies would still work (except for Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs; Hannibal Lecter has a crush on her). She is, in the movies, like a man with breasts. Perhaps this is Hollywood's subconscious punishment for her gayness. Or perhaps I have too much time on my hands.