#52 - Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese is an absolute genius. This gritty, unrelenting portrayal of one man's innermost strength and insanity has got to be one of the most impressing movies ever (not impressing in the conventional sense of the word, but rather the movie that leaves the longest-lasting impression on anyone who watches it).

We start feeling a special brand of pity for the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro in one of his best roles. We see him go to the pornographic theater, we see him watching a beautiful girl from afar, we see him doing whatever it takes to get his attention. But what we end up feeling for Bickle is far from pity. Or is it?

The other notable performance is from Jodie Foster. Playing a 12-year-old prostitute, the 13-year-old Foster had to go through psychological testing by the California Board of Labor to see if she could stand up to the emotional trauma of portraying her role.

The final shoot-out is an opera of blood, profanity, and madness. To keep the movie at an R-rating, Scorsese had to actually desaturate the color of the blood in the last ten minutes to make it less bright and less noticeable. I can only imagine how gory and disturbing the original scene must have been, given the "tamer" version.

Most famous for its quote that starts with Bickle talking to the mirror, saying, "You talkin' to me?" the film has become a classic and a must-see for any film buff.

There is a quiet, pathetic humor to the situation when Bickle takes his date Betsy (played with a brilliant innocence by Cybill Shepherd) to the pornographic theater for one of their first dates. When she leaves in a huff and he doesn't understand what the big deal is, the audience just wants to shake him to wake him up -- the audience has the similar desire near the end of the film as well.

There is much debate about the movie's last five minutes -- after the big shoot-out. What seems on the surface to just be a continuation of Bickle's life, many view the scene as either his dying thoughts or a pure fantasy. What is seen in the last five minutes is simply him living his life as normal -- he has become a bit of a local hero for shooting a ton of corrupt and contemptible figures in the neighborhood, and he has returned to his job as a New York cabbie. Whether this is reality, Scorsese decides to leave to the viewer's opinion. This openness to interpretation is brilliant, confounding, and irresistible -- much like the movie itself.