The Classic Movie Taxi Driver
You always hear that Martin Scorsese is the best living filmmaker, and while that's really up to the individual viewer, you have to concede that he at least ranks in the top tier of movie directors of all time, alongside Kubrick, Hitchcock and Coppola. Whether he's doing his own original material as in Mean Streets or remakes like The Departed, he always puts a personal touch on the film. Taxi Driver is one of his best.
There aren't many directors so capable at effortlessly building a world around you. You'll feel as if you're really sitting in that grimy taxi cab, right next to Travis Bickle. It almost has a documentary like feel with the gritty look of the film and the spontaneous nature of the script. It is as close as you can get to the "found footage" feel without gimmicks like hand held cameras.
You could consider the film the second part of a trilogy with Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, and John Ford's The Searchers, which both of the other films are loose remakes of. All three of these films tell a very similar story, and it goes to show that a movie not so much about what it's about, but how it is about it.
The Searchers is an adventure film rotating around the themes of racism and lonesomeness. Paris, Texas takes a similar story and tells it in a sweet way, focusing on issues of lonesomeness and family, and Scorsese focuses on lonesomeness and the use of violence as a means of personal validation. In all three, the heroes serve as escorts, attempting to rescue people and put them where they need to be, reuniting them with their families, but in all three, the heroes must leave once more in the end, forever alone.
Each of these films is its own statement on the nature of loneliness, and it's because of this that the heroes are all so easy to sympathize with. What Travis Bickle does in the film is certainly not something most of us would ever take part in, but you find yourself wanting him to come out okay, nevertheless, simply because we all know that lonesomeness, that need for validation.
At one point or other, everyone has been in Travis Bickle's shoes. Most of us work it out with less extreme measures, but we've all known what it's like to be surrounded by so many people and still feel so isolated. We know exactly where Travis has been and while that doesn't forgive his crimes, we do understand him.
What many people don't talk about in regards to this film really is that there's a part of you that roots for Travis, even as he commits serious acts of violence at the end. We wish that we could cast the film as a simple cowboys and Indians tale of right and wrong. The tragedy is that it's just not that simple.
The film serves as a great companion piece to The Searchers and Paris, Texas, but it also goes hand in hand with Stallone's First Blood, which was similarly about an outsider, a Vietnam veteran, who turns to violence as a way to find personal validation. - 2361
There aren't many directors so capable at effortlessly building a world around you. You'll feel as if you're really sitting in that grimy taxi cab, right next to Travis Bickle. It almost has a documentary like feel with the gritty look of the film and the spontaneous nature of the script. It is as close as you can get to the "found footage" feel without gimmicks like hand held cameras.
You could consider the film the second part of a trilogy with Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, and John Ford's The Searchers, which both of the other films are loose remakes of. All three of these films tell a very similar story, and it goes to show that a movie not so much about what it's about, but how it is about it.
The Searchers is an adventure film rotating around the themes of racism and lonesomeness. Paris, Texas takes a similar story and tells it in a sweet way, focusing on issues of lonesomeness and family, and Scorsese focuses on lonesomeness and the use of violence as a means of personal validation. In all three, the heroes serve as escorts, attempting to rescue people and put them where they need to be, reuniting them with their families, but in all three, the heroes must leave once more in the end, forever alone.
Each of these films is its own statement on the nature of loneliness, and it's because of this that the heroes are all so easy to sympathize with. What Travis Bickle does in the film is certainly not something most of us would ever take part in, but you find yourself wanting him to come out okay, nevertheless, simply because we all know that lonesomeness, that need for validation.
At one point or other, everyone has been in Travis Bickle's shoes. Most of us work it out with less extreme measures, but we've all known what it's like to be surrounded by so many people and still feel so isolated. We know exactly where Travis has been and while that doesn't forgive his crimes, we do understand him.
What many people don't talk about in regards to this film really is that there's a part of you that roots for Travis, even as he commits serious acts of violence at the end. We wish that we could cast the film as a simple cowboys and Indians tale of right and wrong. The tragedy is that it's just not that simple.
The film serves as a great companion piece to The Searchers and Paris, Texas, but it also goes hand in hand with Stallone's First Blood, which was similarly about an outsider, a Vietnam veteran, who turns to violence as a way to find personal validation. - 2361
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