Taxi Driver

This is only the second time I've ever seen this film. The first time I saw it was when I was 18, and I didn't like it at the time. I think I was expecting something else the first time. It was good to see the movie again, years later, with an entirely different perspective on filmmaking and on life in general.

I felt more connected to the characters with this viewing. I understood where Travis Bickle was coming from, maybe just from being older and having lived more life. Scorcese did an incredible job bringing the audience into this spiral of disgust and insanity. I also feel that the score added so much to the film, and I definitely felt Hitchcock's influence all over the film, which I wouldn't have been able to appreciate at 18.

Interesting thing about this movie: As I mentioned, I had seen it once before and I basically remembered what happened in it, but only up to a point. In my memory, the last frame of the film was Harvey Keitel's dead body. I had completely forgotten that Travis had gotten away with his killing spree. I found this strange because it's a fairly significant aspect of the story. After the screening, I had a conversation with a classmate and he had the same memory (or lack thereof) that I did. He had also forgotten the way the film ultimately ends. I have to wonder if this was planned on Scorcese's part....were we not supposed to remember that?

JAWS

What can I say about Jaws? I'll start by admitting that the main reason I enrolled in the 70's class was because I couldn't pas up an opportunity to see Jaws in the screening room. This film makes the list of my favorite three films of all time. It is always a pleasure to watch, and I notice something new with every viewing.

First of all, I feel that this film is about homage. I feel that the story owes a lot to Hitchcock's The Birds. From the island setting, to the enemy being a force of nature, there are many parallels in these two films. The scene when Hooper goes into the water to examine the abandoned boat he and Brody come across brings to mind a similar scene in The Birds with Jessica Tandy. In Hitchcock's film, Jessica Tandy goes upstairs into the home of a local farmer and finds him dead, his eyes having been plucked out by the birds. When Hooper inspects the boat of a local fisherman, he finds the fisherman dead, one eye hanging from its socket. Jaws is also a film that inspires homage. There is a scene in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy in which the characters are sitting in a booth much like the one in the Orca, comparing scars like Hooper and Quinn do in Jaws.

This film also reminds me of my personal history. I can remember many nights as a child watching Jaws with my mother. Every time we watched it, she would tell me the stories of she and her friends refusing to even get into a swimming pool after seeing the movie in the theaters. She would also tell me the differences between the movie and the original novel. I listened to her tell me about how Hooper had died in the book every time, although I had heard the stories before. For that reason, Jaws will always remind me of my mother.

Jaws is truly a classic film. It single-handedly changed 70s cinema. Every element of the film is amazing, from the acting, to the soundtrack, to the special effects. There is nothing superfluous about this movie, with every scene being absolutely necessary by moving the story along. I might just claim that Jaws is the perfect film.

The Conversation

This was a great film. It was good enough that I found myself on Friday night trying to explain the movie to my intoxicated, uninterested friends. It fully embodies the paranoia of technology that was such influence in 70s culture.

One can't help but relate this movie to the Watergate scandal. It wasn't just that Watergate made the American public, especially the younger generation, doubt their government. Watergate also pointed out just how far surveillance technology had come. If government officials could have their phone conversations recorded and be unaware, then what chance did the general public have? It seemed that if anyone could be recorded at anytime. This film certainly didn't put any paranoid fears to sleep.

I also enjoyed the film's theme of obsession. We watched this man's spiral into a debilitating fixation about this girl and her situation. Everything he did was for her. It was interesting character development and I found it fitting that the film ended with him sitting amidst the result of his obsessive personality.

The Parallax View

Some thoughts on the opening and ending sequences:

The opening parade scene in very communist looking. The colors are primary red and the marchers seem to be primarily Asian, both images that would symbolize Communism to American audiences. This scene immediately precedes the first assassination.

The closing parade scene is very patriotic. The tables are red, white, and blue. The marching band is dressed in blue and they are primarily white in ethnicity. These images, completed by the enormous pictures of the Presidents create a very American scene. This scene is followed by the second assassination.

This seems to tell the viewer that the conspiracy is everywhere...

Charlie Company Readings

I chose to read the piece, "Lloyd Collins: Death of a Heart." This man's story reminded me of tales my mother would tell me of friends of hers returning from the war. She said some of them were not only unrecognizable by their personalities, but even by their physical appearance. It almost seems as if it would have been worse to have no outwardly obvious wounds from the war, because then everyone assumes nothing is wrong. If a man comes back in a wheel chair, everyone knows something is wrong, and he is given more room to heal, mentally and physically. When there is nothing wrong on the outside, the inside pain just builds up with no outlet. This reading was a nice supplement to the film Coming Home.

Coming Home

Coming Home was an anti-war movie--I understand that. It was loosely based on the true story of a man who came home from Vietnam having lost everything, including his legs and the will to live. His story mirrored the stories of many young men coming home from the war who had done no more to deserve their fate than having been born in the 1940s. It's the story of many soldiers from many wars, in our country and elsewhere, in our generation and in times we don't remember. In the end, it effectively points out the horrors and futility of war. The old, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity" ideology.

However, the female romantic in me also saw this movie as a sweet and touching love story. As much as it was his story, it was also hers. It was the story of a woman who wasn't satisfied with her life, but didn't even realize it until she met a man who turned her on to new things and a new way of life. A new man that can teach us something about ourselves is a romantic thought, and I throughly enjoyed the love story in Coming Home. It reminded me of Antonio's line in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: "I hold the world, but as the world, Gratiano, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one." Luke and Sally taught each other that people can outgrow the parts they play, and that's a thought that I hold dear. I hope I didn't miss the point of the movie completely...

The Long Goodbye

This was definitely an entertaining film. It had action, mystery, an enigmatic and unaffected leading man--all the things that a film noir story should have. What made The Long Goodbye different, though, was it contained all of these elements, but in a whole new way. It's definitely genre revisionism at its finest and at its birth.

The truly unintelligent thought I have about this film is that it was hard not to notice how sexy Elliot Gould was back in the day. He was like a 70s Anthony Bourdain. He managed to be cool and self-effacing at once, and it was his performance and demeanor that carried the film. My best friend fancies Anthony Bourdain and Jewish men, and I strongly recommended that she Netflix (that is a verb now, right?) this movie because I know she'd fall in love with Gould, and at the same time expand her film history knowledge. I hope she takes my advice.