Posted on 05/06/2016 1:56:29 PM PDT by Borges
“Every day, for 40 f%^&% years, one of you has stopped me on the street and said, ‘You talkin’ to me?’” groused Robert De Niro at a recent Q&A at the Tribeca Film festival reuniting the makers of “Taxi Driver”. Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepherd and screenwriter Paul Schrader all swapped anecdotes, and De Niro led the audience in one last rendition of his most famous line, in an effort to expunge the ghost. He’s not the only one haunted by the role, which remains the template for every young Hollywood actor eager to put the lucre of blockbuster dollars behind them with a walk on the indie wild side: Christian Bale in “The Machinist”, Ryan Gosling in “Drive”, Sam Rockwell in “Seven Psychopaths”, in which he plays an actor who believes himself to be the illegitimate son of Travis Bickle. They all believe that. “‘Taxi Driver’ is the ultimate independent-movie performance,” Leonardo DiCaprio has said. “Playing a character like Travis Bickle is every young actor’s wet dream.”
(Excerpt) Read more at 1843magazine.com ...
It’s a character study for grownups,
Wow! I guess you told me! Never realized that I am uneducated. Woe is me.
Hey you were the one bragging about how much you don’t know about American culture.
I said no such thing. American culture worthy of my time usually includes art, music, and literature. The movie industry has produced mostly trash during the last 40 years or so.
There are also no comedy or “drama” series on television that I follow. I wonder which insults this particular admission elicit from you.
I haven’t insulted you at all...just following up on what you said. Art, music, and literature is also ‘mostly trash’. The good stuff is always a minority and always will be. This film being in the latter category.
It's a character study for people who enjoy wallowing in nihilism, and then congratulate themselves on how sophisticated they are.
In other words, the quintessential NYC film.
It’s one of the most sophisticated films to become popular in the 70s. But it became popular for the wrong reasons. It was misunderstood enough to be perceived as a Thinking Man’s Death Wish. It has its roots in Distievsky and Bresson.
You: It’s one of the most sophisticated films to become popular in the 70s. ... It has its roots in Distievsky (Dostoevsky?)
QED
Typo
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