Raging Nonsense

Rating: 1/10 (15 August 2005)

As it seems, we live in a society, in which it is important enough to portrait the spiritually rather unimportant live of somebody, whose calling it was to knock down other people in a strange kind of activity, that has less to with sports, but much more with aggression. Since movies always portrait the time and the society in which we live and since the movie, that stands here under discussion, belongs to the 250 best rated movies ever, one must assume, that our society is as primitive as the topic of this movie.
Doubtless, the acting capacity of Robert De Niro and, most of all, Joe Pesci, is admirable. But, if I am allowed here to try a kind of meta-comment: Somebody wrote, that this film "will remain in my heart forever: the splendid black & white, the contrast between the slow moving scenes and the frenetic ones, the choice of the music and the sense of loss which entangles the whole movie". At this point, I can only shake my head, because there are thousands of black and white movies, slow and "frenetic" scenes, the choice of music reached its culmination point in Faßbinder's movies, but not in Scorsese's, and the sense of loss is a very prominent motive since the silent movie time. So, all this compliments have absolutely nothing to do with this special movie.
Complete loss of common sense is reached at the moment, when this somebody writes: "Martin Scorsese is the most poetic director of the last 30 years": What has boxing to do with poetry? Is there nowadays an "aesthetics of boxing", perhaps an "aesthetics of brutality"? And, after all, each movie must have a message, because otherwise, it is neither worth to film a story nor to watch such a movie. The "Raging Bull" is a paradigmatic example of a movie without any recognizable message, hence a "raging nonsense".