Taxi driver /
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| Edition: | Collector's ed. |
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| Imprint: | Culver City, Calif. : Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, [2007] |
| Description: | 2 videodiscs (circa 114 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. |
| Language: | English French |
| Subject: | |
| Format: | DVD Video |
| URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/6628471 |
| Summary: | "All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind? Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi DeNiro is Travis Bickle, a New York City cab driver whose rage builds in a lonely, dark world, until his attempt to befriend and free Foster's 12-year-old prostitute from her pimp culminates in a violent shoot-out. You talkin' to me? |
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| Item Description: | Edition from container. Originally released as a motion picture in 1976. Recorded in Dolby digital 5.1. "1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen"--Container. Special features: New commentary by writer Paul Schrader; new commentary by Professor Robert Kolker; Martin Scorsese on Taxi driver; producing Taxi driver; God's lonely man: writer Paul Schrader and Prof. Robert Kolker discuss the loneliness themes as seen in the film; influence and appreciation: Robert De Niro, Oliver Stone, Roger Corman and others pay tribute to Scorsese and the film; Taxi driver stories; making of documentary; Travis' New York; Travis' New York locations; storyboard to film comparisons with Martin Scorsese introduction; animated photo galleries; original screenplay. "Special features are not rated and may not be subtitled or closed captioned"--Container. |
| Physical Description: | 2 videodiscs (circa 114 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. |
| Format: | DVD, region 1. |
| Audience: | MPAA rating: R. |
| Awards: | Four Academy Award Nominations, including Best Picture. |
| Production Credits: | Director of photography, Michael Chapman ; editors, Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro ; music, Bernard Herrmann. |
| ISBN: | 1424840619 9781424840618 |
