OTB#5: Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese. 1976. ⚅

OK, let me just tell you where I’m coming from: I don’t like Martin Scorsese’s movies. All the ones I can recall seeing are about uninteresting morons that do uninteresting and stupid things. They’re usually competently shot, with a cast of actors that make watching the movies not sheer torture, but

And I loved the way Hollywood collectively stuck up their middle fingers at The Irishman this year by nominating the film in every possible category, and then not giving it a single award. That’s savage!

OK?

But I haven’t seen this film since the 80s. Perhaps it’s the Scorsese movie that’s actually any good?

[fifty minutes pass]

This movie is really good! It’s possible that I’ve never seen it before, because none of it is familiar to me, and these shots are so iconic that I think I’d have remembered? Anyway; as usual with Scorsese, it’s about some moron, but this time he’s actually insane! Psychotic! It’s like he could kill Cybill Shepherd any moment! I’m not sure whether that’s what Scorsese is going for here, or whether he imagined that we would sympathise with this deranged person (probably?), but I’m here just going “EEEP!” and enjoying myself.

I’ve never seen De Niro better than he’s here — he’s completely believable (within the context of this pretty unrealistic framework). The cinematography is so engaging — all the saturated nighttime colours. Love it.

[the end]

OK, there’s nothing as shocking as seeing Harvey Keitel with long hair and muscles. NOTHING!

Anyway, this was really good. At first I didn’t quite know where they were going with the Jodie Foster sub-plot. Was this going to be the usual “Nazi (or whatever) killer protagonist — but he’s kind to dogs, so it’s all deep and stuff: See, it’s so deep!” thing? And… It kinda is? But it kinda isn’t. I know, that’s very erudite.

And, just let me say: Foster, at thirteen, doing those scenes: Eep. But it sounds like it wasn’t as creepy as it’s in the movie:

But what you did in that movie is so incredible and you had to do scenes with De Niro. Were you nervous? Were you scared?

Well, I made a lot of movies before then. So I had probably made way more movies than Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese at that point. I’d probably made, I don’t know, 10 or 11 movies. So I wasn’t nervous. I think I was too young to be nervous. But, um, Robert de Niro decided to sort of take me under his wing and he would continually take me out to coffee shops and run the lines with me, sort of in character, and then do improvs, which I didn’t 100 percent understand, but by the time we really started shooting, I really understood what he had done.

It does have some of the same problems that Apocalypse Now has: It depicts somebody that the filmmakers are critical of (Kilgore, Travis), but inevitably makes them seem really cool. I’m guessing that a significant portion of men have modelled themselves explicitly on this scene:

He is, of course, a schizophrenic guy rehearsing killing a random politician… but doesn’t he look cool doing it?

And… I now understand why Scorsese is a thing: He made this one good movie, and people are fantasising that his other movies are good. You can see the same syndrome with, say, Kenneth Branagh and even actors like Nicolas Cage, where they made some really strong stuff early on, and then everybody… overrates… their later work, even if they haven’t made anything worthwhile in decades.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#6: Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola. 1979. ⚃

I’ve seen this a couple of times before? But back in the 80s. I remember being quite taken with most of Coppola’s movies at the time — I even liked One from the Heart and Rumble Fish (well, sort of).

Sitting down to watch this, though, I have some misgivings: It’s a film so mythologised that I’m thinking that it can’t possibly be any good.

We’ll see.

[rolls movie]

[half an hour passes]

It’s a pretty entertaining movie. It’s obviously made by a bunch of hippies that want to ridicule the military, but I think they kind of end up glamorising it instead? Sure, Kilgore (so on the nose) is insane, but isn’t he… kind of cool? Don’t you want to be him? There’s a commitment to masculine excess that trumps the impulse towards satire…

Oh the irony.

[forty minutes pass]

Aha! This is the scene JJ Abrams saw and then decided to start making movies.

[another hour passes]

I have to admit that my attention started wandering. It’s now reached the outskirts of Paris. I mean, er… Obviously, Coppola is going for an audience identification thing, so we spend a lot of time with these goofy, stoned guys in (and out) of uniform. I think it’s probably quite successful? But I don’t feel it. I’m mostly just annoyed by their antics. But that’s on me! The stoned goofy performances are good; they seem like fun guys to hang out with. Except for the killing. But I was bored by a most of these character building scenes.

And the stuff like having Clean killed while the tape from the mom was running is more than a bit obviously pandering. But, fine. I think melodrama is fine. It’s not annoying, and I like the cinematography.

[the end]

There are virtually no negative reviews of this movie, but here’s one:

He compares the movie with this scene from Blazing Saddles:

I … don’t quite get it? Hm… the rest of the review is actually pretty cogent: The movie is idiotic, but it looks pretty cool (I’m paraphrasing ever-so-slightly).

I wouldn’t go quite that far… there’s a bunch of powerful scenes… but… it never makes clear why I should be interested. I mean, beyond the cool premise and the cool napalm shots.

This is, scarily enough, just the same thing I wrote up there after having seen half an hour of this film:

Coppola, a typically feckless Hollywood liberal, probably took on the project thinking of himself as an anti-war moralist and a stern foe of American imperialism. But the film owes most of its vitality to the fundamental pictorial excitement of combat scenes and reflects Milius’ reactionary ideology with peculiar clarity.

(I’m assuming “liberal” is used as the antonym of “leftist” here.)

I’ve read Heart of Darkness, and it’s a better book than this movie is er a movie.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#7: Vertigo

Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958. ⚅

This movie is #1 on the critics’ poll.

I have seen this before, of course, but… it’s probably a while ago? Is this the one with the Dali sequences? Hm… No, that was Spellbound! Which I have to see again.

Oh right, this is the one with Kim Novak… Which reminds me of this song by Phranc:

[twenty minutes pass]

This is just perfect. But the restoration is odd. Most of the time, the image is crisp with deep blacks, but sometimes it turns into this:

And some of the scenes are so dark it’s hard to tell what’s going on:

I wonder what happened. I watched the restoration docu for another Hitch movie, and on that movie it turned out that the original negative had been used for ~40 separate prints (which was unusual), so it was basically just scratches now. So they cobbled together the restored version from sources from everywhere… and it looked great.

I wonder whether the same thing is the case here… but that they only had some blown-out footage for some of the scenes to work with.

[forty minutes pass]

I love this movie. I can see why I had it confused with Spellbound — there’s a whole bunch of psychobabble that somehow manages to be fascinating. But while the plot is really good (and more complex than I first thought), the real pleasure is just how delightfully composed each scene is. All the long, long drives through San Francisco streets; the beaches; and the contrast to the wonderfully cluttered, homey and cosy home base. It’s a wonder.

[the end]

Wow. That final twist (in the last scene) was… wow.

The scenes where James Stewart remakes Kim Novak are deeply, deeply creepy. I’m not sure whether they were supposed to be that way, or whether they’re supposed to be… obsessive but charming? Stewart is finally able to have sex with her (I first wrote “able to get it up”, but this is a family oriented blog and I’m never that crude OOPS) after remaking her, and it’s presented with such pathos that… well… I’m not sure what Hitchcock was getting at, as he was a pretty creepy guy himself. It feels like a meta-commentary on Hitch’s own sexual harassment history, but probably isn’t.

Anyway! It’s an amazing movie. I love all the colours. The sets are perfect. The performances (especially from Nokak) are astounding. There are a couple of scenes that are perhaps a bit indulgent, but it’s a delight to watch.

I’m watching the restoration documentary now, and Paramount spent $1M and two years on the restoration of this movie, which makes my comments up there about the uneven quality seem a bit churlish, right?

Right.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#7: The Godfather

The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola. 1972. ⚄

I watched the second episode in this series a couple of months ago, and it was (to my great surprise) quite fun.

So I’m guessing this is gonna suck.

[five minutes pass]

I can’t stop staring at the huge wads of cotton they’ve stuffed into Brando’s face:

He can barely talk! There’s so much cotton in those cheeks!

Anyway! I mean, I’ve just seen a Scorsese movie, and Coppola’s interests here intersect with Scorsese’s single obsession, so it’s interesting to contrast these two. Coppola has made a huge variety of films, many of them really interesting. Scorsese has made a gazillion mafia/hard guy movies? Is that accurate? I’m just typing from memory without doing any research; whaddayawant. Getouttahere. Anyway, everything here is just like better than Scorsese, from the interesting editing, to the very unrealistic set design, to the Altmanesque dialogues.

OK, perhaps I should watch more than five minutes before I declare this movie a winner? Right?

[an hour passes]

This is a really fun movie. Sure, it’s pure escapist fantasy — the mobsters are really smart and cool and come up with really inventive ways to get what they want (e.g. the horsie) — but it makes for a really entertaining film. It’s like a 50s western in many ways. Cool showdowns.

The performances are spotty, but the framing makes it work.

[nine more hours pass]

I’m still entertained, but it does feel like they could have cut some stuff here. That is: There’s more than a few scenes in here that are less than compelling.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.