"Are you talking' to me?" —is one such line that will stun you forever!

Rating: 10/10 (31 October 2016)

Some motion pictures produce the uncanny sensation of returning the spectator's gaze. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver—a movie in which the most celebrated line asks the audience, "Are you talking' to me?"—is one such film. It came, it saw, it zapped the body politic right between the eyes.
The 12th top-grossing movie of 1976, Taxi Driver was not just a hit but, like Psycho or Bonnie and Clyde, an event in American popular culture—perhaps even an intervention. Inspired by one failed political assassination (the 1972 shooting of presidential hopeful George Wallace), it inadvertently motivated another (the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan). The movie further established its 33-year- old director as both Hollywood's designated artist and, after Taxi Driver was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes, an international sensation—the decisive influence on neo–New Wave filmmakers as varied as Spike Lee, Wong Kar-wai, and Quentin Tarantino.
Brilliant and yet repellent, at times even hateful, Taxi Driver inspired understandable ambivalence. (At Cannes, the announcement that it had won the Palme d'Or was greeted with boos.) How could reviewers not be wary? Taxi Driver is nakedly opposed even to itself, as well as the culture that produced it. For Travis, all movies are essentially pornographic; had he met his creators, he would surely, his history of Times Square, consider them purveyors of "scum and filth." It's the slow deliberation with which this lunatic kicks over his TV and terminates his connection to social reality that signals his madness—and the filmmaker's.
No nostalgia, though: In other aspects, the world of Taxi Driver is recognisably ours. Libidinal politics, celebrity worship, sexual exploitation, the fetishization of guns and violence, racial stereotyping, the fear of foreigners—not to mention the promise of apocalyptic religion—all remain. Taxi Driver lives.
See it again. And try to have a nice day!