Taxi Driver: Classic or dud

The genius of the film is how it’s pitched for maximum dissonance, gorgeous visuals and score, charismatic actors and dialogue, telling a story which is fucked up and psychotic as if it were a beautiful tragedy.

The beauty of the movie is something that is almost astonishing to behold after years of it having been misunderstood and represented in media incorrectly. I think the emptiness of something like Joker which aspires to that supposed scuzzy Taxi Driver-via-King of Comedy Scorsese vibe is that Joker is an ugly film making empty gestures by depicting this washed out dirty setting and Scorsese makes a beautiful poetic kind of film out of it. Joker had a “dorm room poster of Travis holding a .357 magnum in Taxi Driver/I saw the movie once” understanding of its inspirational material.

I was most struck by its visual beauty when I saw what was obviously a restored print some time in the '90s or maybe early '00s. I'd been seeing deteriorating rep-theatre prints for a couple of decades before that.

(I did like the way Joker played off against Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, though.)

I mean there are worse ways that film could have turned out, it wasn’t anything I found really worthwhile but better that than Jared Leto’s joker interpretation being made into a solo vehicle.