Best Martin Scorsese movie

in re the new york stories segment, this hbo documentary about the artist who inspired it (whose paintings are used in it) is partly interesting and partly pathetic. imagine that nolte character as a real person, 20 years past his market prime, 20 years more of drunk, and just as egomaniacal, and that's pretty much the story.

more of A drunk. altho "more of drunk" is accurate enough.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

goodfellas is his masterpiece and i suspect people who are saying casino is better, saw casino first.

the first hour or so of casino is quite good, but i agree with the conventional take that, by the end, the whole thing seemed pointless and like a goodfellas redux with diminishing returns

Not enough support for "Life Lessons."

taxi driver is really the only thing on the list that i could honestly call a masterpiece. the soundtrack is outstanding and i can't imagine the movie without it.

all the stuff about how king of comedy is somehow a superior take on the same material makes no sense to me -- apart from the fact that they're both about two rather unpleasant people, the two films have nothing at all in common. if anything, KoC seems like a 'safer' film to me -- you're not at all asked to identify with rupert pupkin the way you are with travis bickle, and the film holds you at arm's length all the way through. not that it's not a good film, but yeesh, enough already.

Never been able to stomach KOC, and it's not for lack of trying. It's just a grind to watch. De Niro isn't convincing as a schlub (yet).

man i used to love his movies as much as anyone, read bios, interviews, etc but increasingly more and more my estimation of him and his films goes further and further down and increasingly raging bull stands out more and more as the one raw nerve, the one time he poked his head out the movie theater. i'm sure i'd still love and enjoy most of the movies i loved and enjoyed then but there's almost none of them i NEED to see, need to revisit, i don't think most of them would shake me in any sense beyond the visceral/sensational. this isn't a slam, unlike his progeny - the andersons, tarantino, insert a million other names here - he actually bases his shots, cuts, choices on elements in the story he's trying to tell as opposed to 'this is something neat i saw someone do in another movie once' (though obv that element's there in spades as well), he's not illiterate, he's not an idiot, his interest in cinema goes beyond 'the shit i grew up with'. so i'm voting raging bull, w/ 'life lessons' and the age of innocence - the only flicks he's made in the past twenty years that haven't felt like treading water or flailing against his limitations (kundun over last temptation here btw) AND both also manage to convey how desperate manic agonizing and powerful love/desire can be as opposed to telling you 'man i loved this girl so much but she drives me crazy wtf but i love her what are you gonna do right? *cue 'love is drug', slow motion shot of sharon stone*'). my superfun rollercoaster willyagetaloadofthat scorsese pic is afterhours over goodfellas.

i might take koc over taxi driver if only cuz one has sandra bernhard and one has cybil shepard (looking like 'mussolini in drag' in john simon's words).

raging bull i have such mixed feelings about. i don't think there's anything wrong with it exactly, it's probably his best-composed, most thought-out movie. but i think he tries to invest something in the story that i just don't buy as being there. jake isn't sympathetic, ok sure, he's not supposed to be. he's not totally unsympathetic either. he's more pathetic than anything. he's also not very interesting, but that's ok too. i think my problem is theological. jake is this very fundamentally catholic figure, his redemption and his suffering are all bound up with each other and he can't have one without the other. (and actual redemption never really comes, the hallmark of the lapsed catholic.) i respect scorsese's theological complexity, i think he's one of the great catholic directors. but i don't share his struggles, so all the angst and pain are a little foreign to me. in mean streets and taxi driver the martyr figures don't require identification, just interest. but raging bull pulls in so close that if you don't on some level identify with jake's inarticulate existential torment -- and i don't -- then it becomes sort of a lot of distant moral pageantry. the passion of jake lamotta.

goodfellas is his masterpiece

I dunno. scorsese demonstrates masterful control over his materials which makes for some breathtaking setpieces, and it comes on strong during a first viewing, but goodfellas doesn't hold together completely and subsequent viewings aren't quite as satisfying. whereas taxi driver, raging bull, and king of comedy open up the more you watch them.

I'm was surprised by the lack of raging bull love on this thread. the scene in the jail cell is so wrenching.

what's interesting about raging bull is how it transcends its own martyrdom fixation - lamotta's a failed martyr, a cipher, an impenetrable lug, beyond or outside redemption, like a barnyard animal. other scorsese "heroes" experience some purgative/tranformative violent release but lamotta, he just fades away.

yeah. it just leaves me with kind of a shrug. i don't really feel that movie.

(t/s: raging bull vs. au hasard balthazar. there are moments in both that make me roll my eyes, but i care about the pain in bresson more.)

lamotta's like a bizarro willy loman - he's pathetic but he's not everyman. he possesses greatness but that can't save him, nothing can. he's too thick to be delivered, unworthy even of martydom.

but yeah, the feel thing is important. if raging bull doesn't grab you emotionally I'm not sure how far the aesthetics will take you.

I dunno if Goodfellas is Scorcese's best movie, but it might be his most entertaining.

Voted for Taxi Driver.

It's only appropriate to mention Manny Farber's very ambivalent review of Taxi Driver.

I did standup comedy (halfheartedly) for about 3 years, and naturalism be damned, I knew several comics VERY much like Rupert Pupkin.

Tho Raging Bull is brilliantly made, I sure can't identify w/ LaMotta. He is a fuckin' animal.

also, I find tKoC Kubrickian in that I don't think it matters if you can't identify w/ DeNiro or Lewis beyond the "have-not" and "have" level. It's primarily a cultural critique / anthropological study.

re: manny farber on taxi driver... it's actually a farber/patterson colloboration, and it's a great review, they really dig deep into the film. but the review misses a crucial point about bickle - farber/patterson take him at face value, which is an error when you're measuring up an antihero. for instance, farber/patterson on the "are you talkin to me?" scene:

The sneering monologue refurbishes two or three cliches, it sneers at anyone who isn't a gunsel or muscle boy, and puts a glamorous sanction, a good gunman seal of approval, on the movie's future holocausts.

glamorous, wait waht? the black humor of the scene is derived from the disconnect between bickle's self-image (I'm a cool tough guy, like in the movies) and the reality of his situation (he's a pathetic, desperate loner). but the chuckle gets shoved down your throat when the gun comes out - bickle truly is psychopathically dangerous. if you think the movie approves of his actions, you're buying into an unrealiable narrator's fantasies. if bickle successfully acted out his tough guy schtick during his violent rampage, and the film thereby endorsed his self-image, their criticism would hold water. but he doesn't and the film doesn't. the final rampage *isn't* like the movies, it's an ugly, chaotic confrontation stripped of cool bravado.

I guess de niro's starpower is the double-edged sword here; without it the movie loses the audience, but with it comes the possibility that people mistakenly see it as mythologizing or idolizing bickle. I have the same reaction to farber/patterson on taxi driver as I do to kael on a clockwork orange. it's as though they can't step outside these movies' fealty to their twisted main characters' world views, so they take them as endorsements of the characters' bad behavior. but that's like saying doestoevsky was on his character's side in notes from underground. taxi driver is very much like notes from underground; a loner rails majestically in his room, but his entry into the world demonstrates his complete disconnect from reality, exposes the depths of his self-denial.

this loops back into the raging bull discussion - raging bull goes that extra mile, it takes whatever charm and likability de niro had in taxi driver and grinds it into dust. it's a less romantic, more observational film, putting a final nail in the coffin of the 70s antihero. but while it "solves" the starpower problem of taxi driver it apparently alienates viewers right out of the movie.

but the review misses a crucial point about bickle - farber/patterson take him at face value

Well, in Faber's defense, he took EVERY film at face value.

if that's a defense.

farber/patterson also touch on something I marvel at whenever I watch taxi driver - how schrader & scorsese went into bad taste overdrive without losing the studio, the audience, or the movie's weird austerity; the store owner brutalizing the body of the dead stickup kid, sport's detailed description of what a potential client can do to iris, scorsese's foul + vengeful passenger. there's jarring violence in plenty of scorsese's films, but taxi driver practically drips with seediness. maybe I'm not jaded enough but 30 years on and it's still pretty bracing stuff.

and it was a box office hit.

I dunno if Goodfellas is Scorcese's best movie, but it might be his most entertaining.

OTM

tho a case could be made for after hours

yeah alfred that's what I was trying to imply by "not losing the audience"

to have a hit like that you can't just pull in people on the coasts, but maybe middle america was like lol nyc I knew it

I think a certain segment of the Taxi Driver audience couldn't distinguish it from Death Wish.

85%

would that make taxi driver the most successful prank ever pulled on a general audience?

see Edward, I was trying to avoid the "elitist" tag...

I think a certain segment of the Taxi Driver audience couldn't distinguish it from Death Wish.

-- Dr Morbius

Anyway, voted for Taxi Driver.

I guess de niro's starpower is the double-edged sword here; without it the movie loses the audience, but with it comes the possibility that people mistakenly see it as mythologizing or idolizing bickle.

So given this double-edged sword does it really matter then that "the movie (doesn't) approves of his actions" (no matter which entity we use to stand in for "the movie": Scorsese, Schrader, the apparatus, maybe DeNiro, whatever)? Or better still, if you wanted truly to critique or just merely disapprove of cool tough guyism or pathetic, desperate, psychopathically dangerous lonerism, then could you even use a star in the first place, esp. a star like DeNiro? And could you show scenes of carnage? These are some of the questions Resnais wrestled with long before with Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog. But I doubt Scorsese et al. were even asking them.

Also: the final rampage *isn't* like the movies, it's an ugly, chaotic confrontation stripped of cool bravado.

But that bravado is reinscribed in the way Scorsese shoots the final rampage. Which is one of many things that leads me to believe that Scorsese, at least, is more in thrall to Bickle than distanced from him.

the whole final arc of the movie is kind of a crazy joke

yeah i doubt that idiot martin scorsese had any idea that he was trying to play both sides by casting an incredibly charismatic actor as a desperate and pathetic loner

in fact he probably didnt even know how to use the camera!!!

In fact, to add to the questions above, could it even be a narrative (which, however loose, Taxi Driver is)? That's another question Hiroshima Mon Amour tries to answer.

the real question is obviously "was taxi driver as good as 'the happening'?"

see Edward, I was trying to avoid the "elitist" tag...

Given how the "Are you talking to me?" speech has been imitated and made a marker less of pathetic delusion and more of stone-cold badassery, I think you're probably more on the right track.

I really must watch it again, but I agree with some of Farber's reservations, especially about Bickle's relationship with Cybill Shepherd. Maybe it's part of Scorsese's craft that audience sympathy for Bickle gets jangled at key moments. I didn't know how to react, for example, to the scene with Shepherd in the theater. I mean, is Bickle so damaged that he couldn't realize his date wasn't the kind of nice girl you don't take to a porno? Wouldn't a woman of Shepherd's poise have noticed something funny about Bickle? Her last scene in the cab is pure cynicism: she's not allowed any dignity. Now that he's a hero, she no longer thinks he's a creep?

*wasn't the kind of nice girl you TAKE to a porno

LAST SCENE IS A FANTASY how many times do I have to say it

x-post

...if you wanted truly to critique or just merely disapprove of cool tough guyism or pathetic, desperate, psychopathically dangerous lonerism, then could you even use a star in the first place, esp. a star like DeNiro? ...Scorsese, at least, is more in thrall to Bickle than distanced from him.

(for EC, compare this defense with my critique of unnamed Batman flick)

like I said upthread, the conclusions of both KoC and TD are so ludicrously unrealistic and so different from what has come before in their respective narratives, I do not understand how a serious viewer could come away thinking those events actually occurred/that the characters actually behaved that way rather than being clear depictions of the main characters wish-fulfillment fantasies.

One is that slow pan (is that the right word?) over the crime scene at the end, and the other is the final scene in the cab, which (I'd think) would be super uncomfortable, and by some contrivance isn't (I don't quite buy that he'd be taken as a hero).

morbs' observation about the death wish zeitgeist indicates how bickle's hero status would be plausible for an audience at the time. if death wish and dirty harry reflected the country's general feeling about urban crime, bickle-as-vigilante-hero is a logical outcome.

LAST SCENE IS A FANTASY how many times do I have to say it

interpreting the finale as reality is appropriate, I think. it turns the final scenes into 1) a cynical comment on how mass media distorts reality, 2) an indictment of the audience's own desire for vigilante revenge.

I'm thinking of the final scene in the cab, that moment with the weird discordant sound - if the whole scene is travis bickle's private fantasy then okay, it's just a random weird moment. but if it's reality, then it's a signal that although this guy is now a hero and therefore will get free passes all over the place, guess what HE STILL GOT THE CRAZY-CRAZY. a much scarier ending.

yeah not to mention the whole notion that if bickle has been a little craftier a few hours before the final shootout the dude would have been arthur bremer and not a vigilante hero saving a little girl.

see Edward, I was trying to avoid the "elitist" tag...

haha luckily contenderizer picked up yr slack there

I do not understand how a serious viewer could come away thinking those events actually occurred

-- Shakey

The movie's ambivalence and lack of clear moral didacticism are virtues.

That may be so. But that's not what Edward III is saying. He's saying that the movie flat-out does not endorse Bickle's self image. And that's what I was responding to.