"Are You Talking To Me?"

Rating: 10/10 (14 July 2005)

In my opinion I think that Taxi Driver is the best film ever made. Really I do, and I think this for many valid reasons.
1) The cast is so well integrated together that the overall effect of the characters is amazing, they have believable feelings and reactions to each other, and they carry the proper responses that real people would be considered to have, such as when DeNiro fantastically slips in professional fillers into his conversations with Betsy (Cybil Sheppard) or Iris (Played brilliantly by 14 year old Jodie Foster) and he seems to act accordingly to what is meant to be spontaneous speech, and the way he does this makes everything seem that more realistic, he also make for convincing viewing as he begins to lose his mind and buy guns and talk to himself. The slow winding down is portrayed to perfection by DeNiro and the more paranoid and more extreme his behaviour becomes, that little by little you know something big will happen but you don't know when, and it is this subtlety that makes it hard to tell when he actually became mad, it is feasible even to say he was mad at the start. It is this outstanding performance that he SHOULD have won the Best Actor Oscar in 1976 for this outstanding performance.
Cybil Sheppard makes a believable love interest, and her interest in music and the finer things is seriously well shown through her sheer displeasure in Travis Bickle (DeNiro) taking her to a porno movie for a date. Jodie Foster is a 12 year old hooker who even though she hides her yearning to get out of the sleaze you can still tell she wants to, heck scratch that, you can tell that she needs to, via her occasional moments of jokiness and solidarity with Travis.
Harvey Kietel and Peter Boyle also make for good support, and even Martin Scorsese is convincingly repulsive as the man who wants to kill his wife and her lover.
2) The story is totally unpredictable and original. The story is just mind-blowing, it is like Paul Schrader pulled it out of a hat or something, or he cut bits of one story, and bits of another and bits of something else and then glued them together to get a story of such brilliance and such suspense. It is this unpredictability that makes it so good. It isn't like an Alien sequel in which you know that half the crew of dick heads will get killed by the creature in some unimaginative way, and somehow one or two will end up killing it, or escaping. Taxi Driver is different in the way in which it is unpredictable and makes for compulsive viewing.
3) The quotes are fantastic. Things like - "Are you talking to me..." and others that are quite astounding such as Betsy saying " You're a walking contradiction."
This is surprisingly true, DeNiro talks about the sleaze and dirt he hates so much but indulges in porn movies. He claims to hate the trash that clutters the streets but his apartment is still pretty dirty. This revelation of identity is quite good to watch.
4) The film has undertones of comedy, drama, suspense thriller and maybe even horror. It is a funny character study and is unlike anything else I have ever seen.
These are the valid reasons and I think that Taxi Driver deserved more awards than it got, and should go down in history as a true cult classic.