The movie Quentin Tarantino called the second coming of ‘Taxi Driver’: “That’s fucking Travis Bickle”
Quentin Tarantino has always had a lot of opinions. It’s part of the reason he has been able to make such successful movies, because with his strong opinions on cinema comes a decisive approach to filmmaking. Everything has to be done exactly how he wants it – no compromises.
Whether you like Tarantino’s movies or not, you can’t argue with the fact that the director knows a thing or two about cinema. “When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, ‘No, I went to films,’” he once said. He has studied cinema with a detailed eye, and one film he has always come back to is Taxi Driver.
Despite having seen loads of movies during his time, from epic blockbusters to cheap indie movies, he calls Martin Scorsese’s Palme d’Or winner the “greatest first-person character study ever committed to film… I mean, I really actually can’t even think of a second, or a third or a fourth that can even come into contention with it.”
Adding, “Scorsese, at this time of his career, had a connection to cinema and no matter how dark the material was, there was such an exuberance to filmmaking that I don’t know if anyone will ever quite have the run of films that he had in the 1970s leading into the ’80s.”
He called Taxi Driver “just so magnificent”, and it’s not hard to see its influence over Tarantino, with its gritty depiction of criminality. Interestingly, in 2009, he compared it to a newly-released Seth Rogen comedy – one that certainly isn’t in the same league as Taxi Driver by any stretch of the imagination. Well, not at least according to Tarantino.
Observe and Report, directed by Jody Hill, saw Rogen play a mall cop who takes it upon himself to do something about the flasher plaguing female shoppers, his mental state rather unstable. You can see the vague parallels between Rogen’s character, Ronnie Barnhardt, and Travis Bickle, but while Scorsese made an incredible psychological portrait of a man facing PTSD and a deteriorating mental state against the backdrop of urban decay in New York, Observe and Report doesn’t exactly have that same genius to it.
The film was clearly inspired by the movie, with Hill even citing Scorsese’s other Robert De Niro plays a mentally unstable man movie, The King of Comedy, as an influence. The movie didn’t perform super well, though, with another mall cop movie released that same year, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, finding much greater success with audiences.
Tarantino preferred Observe and Report, though, telling the Village Voice, “One of the best movies this year is Observe and Report. That’s a real movie. Somebody said it’s Seth Rogen’s Punch-Drunk Love. Well, fuck Punch-Drunk Love – it’s Taxi Driver. That’s fucking Travis Bickle. I find it hard to believe there’s going to be another moment as cathartic as him shooting the flasher.”
It seems like Tarantino was in the minority in considering it to be one of the greatest movies of 2009. It was unable to compete with the likes of Fast and Furious and even Hannah Montana: The Movie at the box office, but it’s not like its middling box office gross was compensated by terrific reviews.
It was a purely average comedy that paid a little too much homage to Taxi Driver, although Tarantino loved it.
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