Fall 2014 #6: Taxi Driver (1976) - Martin Scorsese

Okay so not only am I behind in finishing my “Fall 2014 Moviecation List” I am behind in writing a few reviews as well. Seeing as I basically have nothing but free time now, I thought I’d give myself something productive to do. The sixth film I saw on my list, which was, granted, a few months ago, was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

Yes. Featuring this line. Which Robert Ebert calls “the truest line in the film…. Travis Bickle’s desperate need to make some kind of contact somehow—to share or mimic the effortless social interaction he sees all around him, but does not participate in.”

Heavy stuff. So Robert De Niro plays an ex-Marine insomniac, Travis Bickle, who takes a job as a taxi driver to give himself something to do during the long nights of meaningless existence. After Bickle plunges himself into the happenings of late night 1970s New York, he is exposed to a world of darkness that quickly begins consuming him.

That’s when he meets a teenage prostitute, played by Jodie Foster, who insanely enough was 14 when the film was released in the US.

Bickle straddles these worlds of night and day, trying desperately to cling to the goodness inside of him by romantically pursuing Betsy, a presidential campaign volunteer. This battle expresses an internal struggle in Bickle, both as a war veteran and as a mentally unstable outsider coming to terms with the darkness in society.

The film was an instant hit, both financially and critically. Many praised the film’s controversial and up-for-interpretation ending, which needed excessive color correction just to lower it down to an R rating. 

Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, with four Oscar nominations (for both Jodie Foster and Robert de Niro) but no wins. It’s an impressive look at the darker side of society, with some disturbing influences, including the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. 

Also important to note that the film directly inspired John Hinckley Jr., who attempted an assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. At the trial, Hinckley stated that his actions were an attempt to impress Jodie Foster, including his mimicking of Bickley’s mohawk.

Crazy. The film is #52 on the AFI Top 100 and #78 on the IMDb Top 250. 

Side note: It also allowed for this to exist.

Day 3: January 5th, 2014: Singin’ In The Rain (1952) - Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen

I quickly realized that this film was the shortest on my winter movie bucket list, at 1 hour 43 minutes, so I jumped at that opportunity. I also knew Singin’ In The Rain was culturally significant, as AFI named it the best movie musical of all time, meaning I was excited to say the least.

The film tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent into talking films (so it’s a color version of The Artist?). It follows Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), a famous movie star who his studio romantically links to Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) even though she is the definition of a Hollywood diva. The worst part is that as the studio tries to transition one of the pair’s newest films into a talkie, they begin to realize that Lina can neither talk (properly) nor act at all. Which brings in Debbie Reynolds' character, Kathy Selden, a showgirl that Don finds himself falling in love with. The studio decides to use her voice to dub over Lina’s, and craziness ensues. Magical musical movie ending, love everywhere, instant classic.

Gene Kelly. I don’t know whether to be more impressed with his dancing, singing, or good looks. He radiates charm and class, and as this was (embarrassingly enough) my first ever Gene Kelly film, I couldn’t take my eyes off him (okay there were other reasons). After the success of Kelly’s 1951 film, An American In Paris, he made his second collaboration with director and choreographer Stanley Donen, Singin’ In The Rain. The MGM musical is a movie musical in the classic 1930s to 1950s sense, where the studios experimented with blurring the lines between diegetic and non-diegetic musical sequences. But while I thought most of the musical numbers would begin like this:

Most of them actually began without any purpose at all. All of the songs are written by MGM producer Arthur Freed and his collaborator Nancy Herb Brown, but they are taken from previous MGM musicals from the 1930s. Which makes sense, because most of them hardly fit into the plot. 

For example, the above gif shows a sequence from the song Moses Supposes (also featured in Silver Linings Playbook), which literally takes place as Kelly’s character is taking a diction lesson, and his friend walks in and they start mocking the voice coach by singing the tongue twisters and dancing. Whereas with modern musicals we aren’t actually expected to believe that Anne Hathaway is singing about her troubles in an abandoned attic room after prostituting herself for the first time, these characters legitimately break into song and dance just because they feel compelled to. But the weirdest part is that most of the songs seem to serve no purpose at all.

The gif above is from one of the last musical numbers, Broadway Melody Ballet, which is an imagined musical number from the film Don Lockwood is trying to convert from a silent film into a talkie musical. That woman in the back, she isn’t even in the actual movie, she appears only in this one number! It’s random as hell and I can’t help but love it.

Debbie Reynolds is also excellent as Kathy Selden, the hard-to-get / I-don’t-fall-for-movie-stars type.

Jean Hagen also makes a great villain as Lina Lamont, Don Lockwood’s crazy costar. She ended up being the only actor in the film nominated for an Oscar, but it also got nominated for Best Original Music Score. 

Only a 1950s musical could have a musical number as random as “Good Morning.” The characters realize they stayed up until 1AM so instead of saying goodnight, they say good morning… and then they sing it. But it’s frivolous and fun and as Gene Kelly embodies in the following gif, haters gonna hate.

I’d like close by pointing out that Gene Kelly’s wikipedia page says that his last ever project before dying in 1996 was doing the choreography for the 1997 animated masterpiece, Cats Don’t Dance.

The Lucky One (2012) - Scott Hicks

After several painful minutes of perusing Netflix, wondering why they don’t have better search features (there’s no full length list of movies in each genre, just a collection of the ones they think you’ll like?), I gave up and switched to HBOGo, realizing that I had a date with the one and only perfect human specimen that is Zac Efron. 

Cue swooning. Disclaimer, this was my FIRST EVER NICHOLAS SPARKS MOVIE. Yeah, I never bought into it, because The Notebook is overhyped and the others are just re-creations of the same clichés. If I were to describe my pre-viewing perception of Nicholas Sparks romances in one word, it would be heavy-handed. It’s emotional whipping, perfectly set up by a foolproof formula that Nicholas Sparks uses for different character tropes like a Mad Lib. I mean, Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth would never fall in love in real life, am I right? But then again I would watch Zac Efron in a Lifetime movie about a DMV worker named Tobias who just loves his job and wants nothing to change (call me Lifetime if you have any thoughts).

The movie is melodramatic even by my standards (I will support the claim that Les Misérables and Titanic use melodrama appropriately, so I have a very high “Oh brother” threshold). Nicholas Sparks just seems to think that our soulmate is just around the corner, and with a little hackneyed language and declarations about the meaning of life, we can find true love with anyone. See example below.

So my boo Zac plays this U.S. Marine, Logan, who, one morning after a night raid, finds a glossy photograph glimmering amongst the rubble. He walks over to pick it up, and just as he stares into the eyes of the mysterious woman in the picture, a bomb lands on the exact place where he had just been sitting. Eight months later, while looking at the picture again, driving a Humvee, and talking with his best friend about how the woman in the picture is his guardian angel, an explosion kills his best friend and presumably some other people (this whole scene is like 30 seconds I didn’t understand it). Logan finishes his third tour and comes home to live with his sister’s family. After his two nephews try to play a prank on him by waking him up and he almost accidentally chokes the younger one to death, Logan makes a cute little vlog telling his sister that he must leave her home and find peace with himself. With some savvy Google techniques, Logan uses the lighthouse in the back of his guardian angel picture to track down his savior, which means walking from Colorado to Louisiana? Everything leading up to this moment has taken 10 minutes, and the opening credits roll as Logan and his faithful German Shepard, Zeus, walk across the country. It’s over the top and you know what…

Zefron finds his guardian angel lady, named Beth, but is overwhelmed by his emotions and instead accepts a job working as a helping hand in her dog kennel business… They fall in love THE END. Another odd thing I noticed about the movie is that it skips over all of the happy parts through montage, but drags the miserable parts out like slow peeling Band-Aids. When Logan gets the hang of his dog-washing/walking gig, he and Beth finally start to see eye to eye. We later find out that Beth’s brother was a marine and died a year ago, which makes her slow growing love for Logan, whom she often compares to her brother, even more awkward. Beth lives with her son, her grandmother, and occasionally gets into fights with her ex-husband, who is the son of the only judge in town and therefore he feels the need to remind Beth how blessed she is that she won the custody battle for her son, but can at any time lose him to her psychotic cop ex-husband. Hence this dazzling one-liner.

But when Logan and Beth’s son start bonding - montage. When Logan and Beth bond and wash dogs together - montage. I guess you can’t really do sad moments through montage, but I’m not sure if they felt they were pressed for time, since the film is 1 hour 40 minutes, or they just didn’t want you being too happy for too long. Anyway, enough about the boring aspects of this movie, because there is actually a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and yes it obviously has to do with a shirtless Zac Efron.

For decades, the film industry has been male run and operated. That means, male characters are written by men, and female characters are written through the eyes of men. In cinematography as well, shots are done through what is referred to in feminist theory as “the male gaze,” meaning that they are shot through a male’s perspective. This forces both male and female audiences to see through a male’s perspective. Think of films like Piranha 3D, how often are there gratuitous boob shots, and where are the shots of shirtless guys partying it up? Think of Titanic, where the Kate Winslet’s boob just sits on the screen for an insane amount of time, or Shakespeare in Love, where Gwyneth Paltrow majestically spins as the cloth holding her boobs pressed against her chest comes off. This Mad Men gif simplifies what the male gaze looks like in cinema.

But sometimes, male actors come along that are so physically alluring, that directors can’t help but shoot them as sexual objects for the viewing pleasure of “the female gaze.” The term isn’t actually used, but in the past few years, cinema has accommodated for such a thing. Cue Magic Mike gif.

Magic Mike is the pinnacle of a “female gaze” film. It exists solely as an erotic display of the male form (I’m pretending the non-stripping scenes didn’t exist because they are pitifully boring and static). The camera operates as a lens through which a woman or gay man would watch the object on display. The term that used to be used was “homoerotic gaze” because there didn’t even used to be female directors, so it had to be assumed that the cinematography was done for a gay audience. The iconic figure in the homoerotic gaze is the French actor, Alain Delon. Delon starred in dozens of films from the 1960s to the 1980s, and each time he is put on display to be gawked at. Audiences described him as so radiantly erotic that films catered to his physical objectification in ways that would make his characters seem superficial, if it weren’t for his talented acting skills.

Even John Travolta had been subject to this, in films like Grease and Saturday Night Fever, where camera angles seek to display his body as a male specimen to be watched. But recently, the female gaze has become so insanely overt, in films like Magic Mike, any movie with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Teen Wolf, and that deleted scene with Ryan Gosling undressing in Place Beyond The Pines that everyone is talking about. The Lucky One is definitely high up on the list, because as I noticed, every romantic scene is focused on Zac. And for good reason obviously.

In fact, all of the lovemaking scenes contain so little of Beth, played by Taylor Schilling, and focus almost exclusively on Zac’s physique. 

So, in essence, the film is a voyeuristic look at the one and only Zac Efron, with a boring and overdramatic storyline that is meant to be completely ignored. It got a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, but made $100 million on a $25 million budget. After viewing the film in its entirety (and then some parts again), I had to double check that Nicholas Sparks was still married to a woman, as well as the director Scott Hicks. To me, the camera’s gaze of Zac seemed so obviously intentional, but I guess that’s what you have to do when your target audience is a million percent female. But then can someone explain the intention of this shot?

GOD BLESS THIS DAY.