Tag: Taxi Driver

Roxy (Roxy)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The eponymous Roxy is a fight dog who has so far killed 12, no… 14, dogs. For no good reason, he bites a pedestrian’s hand, causing his walker to hand a wad of banknotes to seemingly unflappable, hired taxi driver Thomas Brenner (Devid Streisow) to straighten the situation out. Then his new fare has put Roxy on the back seat, his panting head inches away from Thomas’ face. “You have to buy a muzzle for this dog,” Thomas calmly explains to his fare. “It’s the law in Germany.”

Thomas, whose working life consists of picking up a fare from the railway station, taking them where they want to go, and then returning to the station to pick up the next fare, loves routine and order. In his intermittent voice-over running through the film, we learn that his grandfather was in the Wehrmacht and his father the Stasi, the latter eventually committing suicide in 1990. He has learned from his late mother to never look people in the eyes, a survival mechanism, a way of remaining invisible.

In his flat, his inherited collection of die-cast model cars and motor vehicles sits in lovingly sorted, pre-arranged positions on wall-mounted ornament shelves. His set of dice sit in ordered rows on his pristine tray except when he rolls them for his own amusement, always replacing them in exactly the same place. The tray is covered in tiny images of iconic, naked women, occurring at regular, spatial intervals. He often visits the local bar for a quiet drink, where conversations with latent nymphomaniac barmaid Sara (Valliamma Zwigart) inevitably end in sex.

His latest fare, though, is set to turn his highly ordered life routines upside down. Levan (Vakho Chachanidze) and his friends are criminals or gangsters or some such, we never find out exactly what, but clearly not to be messed with. Levan is impressed with Thomas’ ability to stay cool under pressure, pays well and offers more work. A ride or two later, he’s joined by his pretty, young wife Lisa (Camilla Borghesani) and young son Vova, eight (Raphael Zhambakiyev). Vova asks a question: which is stronger – lion or tiger? It’s a question that sets Thomas thinking.

And then one night, they’re in a restaurant and someone attempts to shoot them. Whatever their history is, these people are on the run and their pursuers are close behind. At this point, Thomas might try to extricate himself from the situation, but he doesn’t. Levan is impressed that Thomas never asks about his background but simply does whatever needs to be done. Above all, Levan is concerned not for himself but for his wife and son. Thomas finds the group a safe house. And Levan offers Thomas a piece of advice about dealing with animals which flies in direct contradiction to his mother’s: always look them in the eyes.

In the scenes that follow, Thomas is asked by Levon to help them obtain fake passports. Surely there must be someone he knows who knows someone who knows someone. Thomas starts asking around to see what he can do. Then he is contacted by people claiming to be agents of a foreign power in pursuit of these men, who want him to help them. They, too, pay well. The only way he is going to survive is by playing one side off against the other, which could prove quite lucrative. What’s more, Thomas gets on really well with Vevo, and Lisa is a very attractive woman…

Also in the picture are Levan’s underlings Andrej (Ivan Shvedoff), Niko (Nicolos Tsintsadze) and the none too intelligent Sasha (Sandro Kekelidze) not to mention a troupe of avant-garde theatre actors who do a nice sideline in fake passports – among them a woman in a blue bodysuit with a fake penis and a truly fearsome, blonde-bewigged man (Waléra Kanischtscheff) sporting a turquoise pantomime dress.

Not only is this one of the most cleverly plotted and executed thrillers in years, which never misses a trick, it’s also about some very interesting ideas. What exactly is power, and how is one person able to wield it over another? When is the time to do as you’re told, and when is the time to strike out and take decisive action? Which is stronger – lion or tiger? We follow Thomas’ journey as he moves from invisible everything-in-its-right-place man towards something far more dangerous, brilliantly expressed in Streisow’s superb performance.

The film is a masterclass in casting, with a superb clutch of performances from the various supporting cast members, including the small boy and, for that matter, the dog. It’s also flawlessly structured, shot and edited. And consistently inventive to boot.

Moreover, it’s a welcome addition to that small, select subgenre of the taxi driver movie which includes such seminal outings as Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996), Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) and A Taxi Driver / Taeksi Woonjunsa (Jang Hoon, 2017). Collateral, in which a mysterious stranger arrives into town and hires a taxi driver to drive him around, probably the closest to it. The film is a real winner and distributors should be falling over themselves to acquire it in territories round the world. An utterly enthralling, stunner of a thriller which deserves to be a massive, worldwide hit. Don’t miss.

Roxy plays in Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the trailer below:

The Deer Hunter

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Russian roulette. You put a bullet in the chamber of a revolver. You spin the chamber. You put the barrel to your head and pull the trigger. The chance is one in six you shoot yourself. Theoretically, the chamber containing the bullet is the heaviest, so that sinks to the bottom and you’re emptying an already empty chamber. But that’s not always the case. Also, if the spin is arbitrarily stopped, your chance is definitely one in six.

Russian roulette is about as dirty a pastime as you can imagine. Especially if players are not taking part of their own free will and if spectators are gambling money on the game. Games in which the participants are gambling their very lives.

Games of Russian roulette take centre stage in The Deer Hunter and function as its central metaphor. It’s a series of snapshots from the lives of a group of Pennsylvania steelworkers who enlist in the Vietnam War.

In the first hour, Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage) leave their factory workplace and, prior to shipping out to ‘nam, they attend Steven’s wedding and party then go on a deer hunting trip.

Surprisingly, the wedding party seems to take up the best part of the first hour. It’s unclear how much is scripted and how much improvised but Cimino is clearly fascinated by setting up such scenes for the camera and letting them play out with actors. These scenes feel at once well prepared and open to anything that happens on camera, lending them a convincing realism.

If both wedding party and deer hunt showcase a degree of male horseplay, the hunt also hones an aspect of Michael/De Niro who by the end of the film has emerged as its main protagonist. As far as the hunt goes, Michael takes only one of his friends seriously: Nick. Certainly not Stan (John Cazale) who wants to borrow Michael’s spare pair of boots having forgotten to bring his own.

Even so, Michael goes off on his own to hunt and shoot a deer, determined to do so with a single shot. And he succeeds. The single shot anticipates the subsequent Russian roulette where a single shot decides a participant’s fate.

About an hour and 10 minutes in, just when you’re wondering why anyone should refer to this as a war film aside from its young men about to go to war theme, an edit abruptly cuts to the Vietnam War. Michael is lying hidden in the dirt as an enemy soldier opens a trap door hiding terrified villagers and tosses in a grenade. At once shrewd and possessed of a righteous indignation, Michael is soon wielding a flamethrower against the enemy. After which the rest of his unit, including Nick and Steven, show up.

Another cut and the three are held prisoner waist deep in water below a bamboo hut on stilts above a river. Steven is not coping well. In the hut above, other prisoners play Russian roulette at gunpoint for their captors’ amusement and gambling bets. Keeping his head, Michael devises a plan to get three bullets put into the revolver for the game as the trios only possible hope of escape.

In line with De Niro’s physicality and commanding presence – he’d already played three of his great Scorsese roles Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and New York, New York (1977) plus Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974) – he does indeed break the trio out in a tense escape sequence.

In the 1970s, a new De Niro film was a cultural event. He articulated the emotional arc of a generation and you had to see it, at least if you were male. This ceased to be the case somewhere in the 1980s. It’s hard to think of an actor (male or female) since for whom this is true to the same degree.

Michael/De Niro takes centre stage in further sequences in Saigon and Pittsburg. Nick disappears into Saigon’s dangerous and shady Russian roulette gambling netherworld under the patronage of a mysterious, enigmatic French promoter (real life Bangkok restaurateur Pierre Segui) while Steven has been reduced to life in a wheelchair in a military nursing home. Peter Zinner’s groundbreaking editing means that Nick/Walken’s slow personality disintegration is fed to us in devastatingly effective bursts.

A Pittsburgh subplot also develops Nick’s girlfriend who becomes involved with Michael when he returns but Nick does not. She’s brilliantly played by Meryl Streep who turns a minor bit part into something very special indeed.

Russian roulette not only causes Steven’s trauma and Nick’s disappearance but also affects Michael’s attitude to the world around him. Back in Pittsburgh, he avoids a ‘welcome home’ party. He goes hunting again but can’t bring himself to shoot a deer. He’s clearly not the “man” he once was. Whether this is good or bad is open to debate – perhaps that’s part of what makes this such a great film.

The lethal game provides a wider metaphor too. The war kills and damages people at random. But perhaps life as a steel mill worker isn’t so good either, otherwise why would enlisting in a war seem such a good idea? Michael talks about shooting the deer with “only one shot”, but in the Russian roulette scenes “only one shot” keeps coming again and again until it kills someone. War is about lots of “only one shot”s one after another. It’s also the case in a wider sense, outside the war context, that you only get one shot at life but life can take as many shots as it wants at you and any one of them could prove fatal.

It may be 40 years old and ostensibly about the Vietnam War, but The Deer Hunter actually tackles deeper issues – not only how the horror of war changes people but also how people deal with their lot in life generally. Made in 1978, it looks as fresh today as it did on its original release. A beautifully judged, dirty masterpiece.

The Deer Hunter is back out in the UK in a 4K restoration on Wednesday, July 4th. Watch the film trailer below:

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

Taxi Driver

Posted on by mjbstaging

In the mid-1970s New York was a very dark and dangerous city and tourists were avoiding it. In 1975, a year before Taxi Driver was launched, violence was so widespread that here were posters around Manhattan that said “stay off the streets after 6pm” and “do not walk alone”. Urban people were suffering with unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption, with many experiencing loneliness and anxieties. Screenwriter Paul Schrader didn’t have to look far in order to find inspiration for Taxi Driver.

As you probably know, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works as a taxi driver in New York City. He complains about how dirty New York is and talks about how he does not discriminate against his passengers. He drives around everywhere on a typical day. When he gets off work in the morning after driving for hours and hours, he begins drinking and goes to a local porn cinema, where he spends the mornings on his own. Travis confesses his inability to sleep and talks about wanting to become more normal. Deep inside he wishes he could find a different place to go and to fit in with other people. Travis Bickle is a Vietnam War marine veteran. But he also has a much darker, dangerous and murderous side.

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay while he was divorcing from his wife. He had no home. He slept in his car and was obsessed with guns and pornography. His experiences are reflected on Travis. What’s more, the car suddenly impersonated his feelings of loneliness and maladjustment, which Martin Scorsese deftly transposed to the screen. More than the cab driver, the taxi is a character. It is the car that sees underground New York. It is the car that chases the scum of the earth: the pimps and hookers. From inside the taxi, there is a perspective of New York that must be eliminated. The marginalised inhabitants of New York don’t fit in Travis’s reactionary idea of a “clean city”.

If Travis was around today, he would be on a lorry similar to the white lorry whose driver delivered an expletive-laden attack outside a mosque in Florida last year. Instead of searching for half-naked, blonde and young hookers, such as Iris (Jodie Foster’s cinema first role), Travis would exterminate burka-clad and Muslism women in general. His hate-fuelled mind would be intoxicated with racist Trumpian vitriol.

In fact, on the first script, Travis was much more racist than in the film. All of his shooting victims were African-Americans. Taxi Driver is such a cult movie that offers different readings as time goes by. In the film, there is a plethora of hidden figures that reveal the psychotic side of the seemingly ordimary citizen..

What makes Scorsese’s feature so vivid is its authenticity. Robert De Niro worked as a taxi driver in order to prepare for the role (his taxi driver’s licence is pictured above). Harvey Keitel, who plays the pimp Sport, did improv for weeks with a pimp. Jodie Foster was only 12 years old. Her role was considered so bawdy that she had to have a social worker on the set with her. She also had to spend several hours with a therapist in order to prevent psychological damage. They all got deep into the roles. Such authenticity elicited a quick reaction from the audience. On the day the film came out in New York, the queues were huge, and there were many taxi drivers lining up.

The film associates pornography with romance. Travis falls in love with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a secretary for a politician running for mayor. She is clearly out of his league but Travis insists on a date. On their first date, Travis takes her to see to a porn cinema.

Taxi Driver shows ugliness for what it is. There is no glamour and nothing is picturesque. Quite the contrary: it is menacing and dirty. The film is out again in cinemas on Friday, February 10th.

In time: A year after Taxi Driver was launched, William S. Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Department of Commerce and Dr. Mark Donnelly, Art Director for New York State, hired advertising agency to develop a marketing campaign for New York State. The logo has become a pop-culture meme used everywhere around the globe. “I ❤ NY” was conceived in a taxi over to a meeting for the campaign. Watch below the song for the radio ad: