Taxi Driver is a movie that has been praised, referenced and parodied a lot during the years. I knew about 'Are you talkin' to me' before I had even heard of Martin Scorsese. Well all that praise is certainly deserved. But what can one say about this movie, that has not been said a thousand times before? I don't have the slightest impression that I'll add to much to the conversation by saying that this movie is great and that De Niro gives one of the best performances of all time. But, well it is and I am going to write about it anyway.
Travis Bickle is a Vietnam veteran who starts working as a taxi driver at night, because he has trouble sleeping. He is not the worlds most adjusted person, but at the beginning of the movie we get the feeling that, with a little help, he should be able to lead a fairly normal life. He does have deep contempt for most New Yorkers and hopes 'some day a rain will come that will wash all the scum away from the streets.' But at least he tries to make the best of his life. He tries to chat with his colleagues and tries to impress a girl he finds very beautiful. The girl is at first rather intrigued by Travis. There are after all not many people who just enter your office, say they like you very much in the first conversation they have with you and ask you out on a date. After their first date, she even agrees for a second date. Travis invites her to go to the movies. Unfortunately he doesn't know much about movies and brings her to a hard-core porn movie. That are, after all, the movies he watches. She realizes then that Travis is not a really great fella and doesn't want to see him again. He stalks her for some time with phone calls which she doesn't return. When he arrives at her office one day to ask for clarification, he is violently thrown out. In voice-over he says that he now realizes that she is just like the other New York scum and now his descent to madness really begins. All these previous scenes are a very important part of the movie. We see him trying to lead a good normal life and unfortunately failing at it. His descent into madness becomes more tragic, because we realize that this has not been a complete psycho. This was a person with some problems, which he might have been able to solve under different circumstances. Travis even realizes and knows that his biggest problem is his loneliness. That is already more then many other troubled people know.
So, now Travis is dumped by his girlfriend he plans to kill the politician she worked for. He also wants to make a 12-year old prostitute,played by a very young Jodie Foster, find another job. A big part of the movie now exists of Travis Bickle preparing himself to kill the politician. He buys a whole set of guns and trains to use them. During this section of the movie the 'are you talking to me' scene takes place. It's a great scene indeed. First of all, we now realize that Travis has gone very insane and that talking to himself is the closest he'll come to having a normal conservation. Secondly he acts before the mirror like any of us sometimes have acted before mirrors, mostly in our childhood. A lot of little kids have sometimes stood before a mirror acting though and pretending to shoot someone with a gun. Does the movie say here that there could be a Travis Bickle in all of us?
Travis eventually does nut succeed in killing the politician. The police finds him suspicious and doesn't give him even a chance to shoot. He does succeed in 'saving' the prostitute. In a bloody climax he shoots her pimp and everybody else in the whorehouse where she works. In a great final ironic twist, Travis is now a hero, because the parents of the prostitute have written a letter of gratitude to him and the papers prize him. He even gets a final chat with the girls he loves. But we realize that all is not well. De Niro acts so good in this final scenes that he makes it obvious to us that, even though now all may be well, it won't last for long. We see that he again notices something he thinks is wrong and probably will do insane things again trying to fix it even if it doesn't need fixing, just like the situation with the prostitute. She was quite happy with her work and had a pretty good, even loving relationship with her pimp.
It's worth mentioning that this movie has a surprising amount of humor, especially in two scenes. The first one is with Martin Scorsese, the director, who is a incredibly nervous taxi-passenger that wants to kill his wife. The second one is the first scene between Harvey Keitel, as the pimp and Robert De Niro. Both actors fall a bit out of their roles during this scene, but that doesn't really matter. The scene is great and it's very obvious that they are enjoying themselves.
I haven't been a big fan of Scorsese. I liked Gangs of New York a lot, but found Goodfellas to be a bitt dull, just as The Departed. I have only seen half of Raging Bull, because my DVD broke down unfortunately while I was watching it. But I didn't see what all the fuss about it was even though De Niro again acted great. Well, I am probably gonnna give it another chance now.
woensdag 31 maart 2010
vrijdag 19 maart 2010
The Informant!
The Informant! is Steven Soderbergh's newest movie. I've found Soderbergh's movies pretty entertaining, but nothing really spectacular. The Informant!, though is an underrated masterpiece and Soderbergh's best movie yet.
The movie starts off as a comedy and gradually grows darker. The main protagonist, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) works for a big and powerful company which produces corn. At the beginning of the film we hear Mark's voice-over talking about how important corn is and what his company does. That last part is pretty complicated, but, as Mark says, the important thing to remember is that corn comes in one end and profit comes out of the other. Mark is very devoted to his company. In a very funny scene we see Mark and his family having dinner. Besides their normal dinner, in every plate there is a giant piece of corn which is completely out of place. Mark starts to get calls from a Japanese guy who claims he has a spy in the company and knows all their secrets. This prompts Mark's bosses to call the FBI. Now the movie changes direction. Mark says to the FBI that his company is fixing prizes and that he is willing to provide evidence for it to the FBI. The movie now follows Mark and the FBI trying to frame the company. Mark often narrates to us, but he is an unreliable narrator. Often he suddenly starts to talk about polar bears and the composure of sweaters. During the investigation he also climbs the ranks of his company, so he gets second thoughts about his cooperation with the FBI. Unfortunately for him, the FBI now knows too much and they will go on investigating anyway. If Mark stops his cooperation with them he'll have to go down with his company. Mark then naturally goes on cooperating and one day they finally get the needed evidence. But the movie doesn't end here and has a surprising and great third act up its sleeve. Turns out, during the investigation Mark has embezzled money from his company and acts as if that is no big deal. We now slowly begin to realize that Mark may not be completely sane. He gets a lawyer that tries to help him, but with every meeting with his lawyer Mark admits to more wrongdoings, even though he always finishes the previous one by telling that now he has really told him everything. It's not entirely Mark's fault. He has bipolar disorder and he is a compulsive liar. We learn that he lied about being adopted and that his parents are dead. They are alive and well. In a masterful scene near the end of the movie, Mark has forged a letter from his doctor, claiming that Mark should not be punished for his crimes because of his bipolar disorder. When the FBI confronts him on this, he tries to lie himself out of the situation. This is done very well. First we hear in a voice-over what Mark thinks he has to say. He sure thinks fast and he has a retort for everything the agent says. But while he sounds confident in his thoughts, when he says it all loud he doesn't sound all that confident and he never says exactly what he wants to say. He is, of course, caught and goes to jail. At the end I was very surprised to learn that this was based on a true story.
This movie is a great example that style is very important in movies. There are quite a lot of movies with this content, but none of them are this good. There are some important aspects that make this movie very good. First of all, there is the voice-over. In most movies the voice-over is used to explain or narrate the story to us. The person that narrates the voice-over always seems to know that he or she narrates it to someone. That is not the case here. The voice-over has no function to the story at all and consists mostly of Mark's random thoughts about random things. We could say that he is a unreliable narrator, but at the end we realize that Mark is not even a narrator. We just explicitly hear his thoughts and he has no idea of it.
Then there is Matt Damon's performance. It's his best yet. Damon has made a career of playing troubled geniuses, smart crooks and spies. His role as Mark Whitacre is a combination of all of them. If Will Hunting never met his shrink, he might have had ended up as Mark.
In the end it's worth noting, something about the score of this movie. The score is a very important and big part of what makes this movie so good. But I can't comment much about this, since I hardly know anything about composing music. Anyway, the composer is Marvin Hamlisch, a composer from the 1970's. I've read that he composed the movie like a 70's crime movie and it actually feels that way. The score is at the beginning incredibly goofy and grows darker, just like the movie does.
The movie starts off as a comedy and gradually grows darker. The main protagonist, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) works for a big and powerful company which produces corn. At the beginning of the film we hear Mark's voice-over talking about how important corn is and what his company does. That last part is pretty complicated, but, as Mark says, the important thing to remember is that corn comes in one end and profit comes out of the other. Mark is very devoted to his company. In a very funny scene we see Mark and his family having dinner. Besides their normal dinner, in every plate there is a giant piece of corn which is completely out of place. Mark starts to get calls from a Japanese guy who claims he has a spy in the company and knows all their secrets. This prompts Mark's bosses to call the FBI. Now the movie changes direction. Mark says to the FBI that his company is fixing prizes and that he is willing to provide evidence for it to the FBI. The movie now follows Mark and the FBI trying to frame the company. Mark often narrates to us, but he is an unreliable narrator. Often he suddenly starts to talk about polar bears and the composure of sweaters. During the investigation he also climbs the ranks of his company, so he gets second thoughts about his cooperation with the FBI. Unfortunately for him, the FBI now knows too much and they will go on investigating anyway. If Mark stops his cooperation with them he'll have to go down with his company. Mark then naturally goes on cooperating and one day they finally get the needed evidence. But the movie doesn't end here and has a surprising and great third act up its sleeve. Turns out, during the investigation Mark has embezzled money from his company and acts as if that is no big deal. We now slowly begin to realize that Mark may not be completely sane. He gets a lawyer that tries to help him, but with every meeting with his lawyer Mark admits to more wrongdoings, even though he always finishes the previous one by telling that now he has really told him everything. It's not entirely Mark's fault. He has bipolar disorder and he is a compulsive liar. We learn that he lied about being adopted and that his parents are dead. They are alive and well. In a masterful scene near the end of the movie, Mark has forged a letter from his doctor, claiming that Mark should not be punished for his crimes because of his bipolar disorder. When the FBI confronts him on this, he tries to lie himself out of the situation. This is done very well. First we hear in a voice-over what Mark thinks he has to say. He sure thinks fast and he has a retort for everything the agent says. But while he sounds confident in his thoughts, when he says it all loud he doesn't sound all that confident and he never says exactly what he wants to say. He is, of course, caught and goes to jail. At the end I was very surprised to learn that this was based on a true story.
This movie is a great example that style is very important in movies. There are quite a lot of movies with this content, but none of them are this good. There are some important aspects that make this movie very good. First of all, there is the voice-over. In most movies the voice-over is used to explain or narrate the story to us. The person that narrates the voice-over always seems to know that he or she narrates it to someone. That is not the case here. The voice-over has no function to the story at all and consists mostly of Mark's random thoughts about random things. We could say that he is a unreliable narrator, but at the end we realize that Mark is not even a narrator. We just explicitly hear his thoughts and he has no idea of it.
Then there is Matt Damon's performance. It's his best yet. Damon has made a career of playing troubled geniuses, smart crooks and spies. His role as Mark Whitacre is a combination of all of them. If Will Hunting never met his shrink, he might have had ended up as Mark.
In the end it's worth noting, something about the score of this movie. The score is a very important and big part of what makes this movie so good. But I can't comment much about this, since I hardly know anything about composing music. Anyway, the composer is Marvin Hamlisch, a composer from the 1970's. I've read that he composed the movie like a 70's crime movie and it actually feels that way. The score is at the beginning incredibly goofy and grows darker, just like the movie does.
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