For men exclusively

Rating: 10/10 (6 December 2006)

For any man who has ever felt lonely, excluded or unwanted this is the film for you. I have viewed this film repeatedly and would recommend it to anyone with half a brain in their head. I won't bore you with a mindless summary of the film's plot, but rather include some personal observations that I as a white male living in contemporary times feels. I can relate to Travis' racism; his outsider feelings that basically suffocate him from the outside world. So often in films do directors and writers wish to portray blacks as some sort of innocent little lambs that require our pity or as victims of a horrible set of circumstance. Not in this film, instead we see blacks pimping, stealing, ravaging, ranting and basically screwing up in every conceivable way. In one scene specifically Travis is pointing his pistol at a television screen of a black male dancing with a white female on "American Bandstand" and repeatedly thumbing back the hammer to fire. This coincides with a similar scene in which a passenger (Martin Scorsese himself) glows with anticipation of shooting his wife and her black lover with a 44. caliber magnum, and revels in the very fact of his own hatred, desperation, and jealously. I myself have felt a sort of alienation from women of my own race and sometimes wonder if their is a vast, deep-seeded feminine conspiracy as Travis himself states "She is just like all the others, cold and distant."
There isn't any conspiracy, but all the same I get shivers any time I see this film or even think about some of its implications and it's incredibly memorable dialogue. I wish all films were as powerful and as gripping as this film truly is. It remains unseated even in these times of great independent film-making. So rarely does a film captivate it's audience with subtle implications and haunting imagery without spelling out it's message and it's thesis to a spoon-fed Hollywood audience, hell-bent on tagging and labeling every film that comes their way. This is a rare treat, and I dare anyone to watch it and intelligently discuss it from a standpoint of the 1970's and of 2006.