Taxi Driver (1976)

My list of Martin Scorsese movies that I've seen so far is composed of the his recent ones: Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) and Shutter Island (2010) (What a shame! I know...) I finally took the first step to see his previous movies and watched Taxi Driver. And, the performance of Robert de Niro blowed my mind. I'm not a Robert de Niro fun tho. But he plays the social outcast, an obsessed taxi driver tremendously good!

Taxi Driver is a character study of a lonely man, Travis (Robert de Niro), who struggles to fit in the society.

Travis is a Vietnam war veteran trying to realign himself back into society and develops a paranoid way of understanding and reacting to the outside world.

The dialogues of the movie are rich. Especially, the parts where Travis writes to his diary telling about what has been happening and how he sees things around him give us an understanding of his perspective.

There is also Jodie Foster in the movie. Her parts 'literally' amazed me. At that time, she was just 13 years old and acting as a 12 year-old prostitude in the movie. Apparently, she's been subjected to psychological tests in order to see if she can carry this role without being traumatized. She is another Natalie Portman issue of film industry, I suppose.

The movie takes us to the back streets of New York with a story of an isolated taxi driver, Travis, who works during night shifts in New York. The camera is stucked with him and makes us to see his 24 hours: we see him driving during the night shifts; we see him writing to his diary when he gets home; we see him crashing into a woman and initiates to ask her out; we see how badly broken he is when things do not go as he expects and turning into a violent, obsessed personality.

If you want to see guns, prostitudes, drug dealers, violence, politics, assassins in one movie and Robert de Niro with a mohawk, Jodie Foster as a prostitude, that should be Taxi Driver.

Travis: The days go on and on... they don't end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.

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