"You Know Who Lives Up There?" Taxi Driver Rolls into Theaters

Cinemablend brings the happy news that Martin Scorsese’s effing masterpiece, Taxi Driver, will be hitting theaters for two days – Saturday March 19, and Tuesday, March 22. ¬†Says Cinemablend:

The only downer is that it’s being shown in digital 4K format, rather than on film. I’m not opposed to films shooting in digital, there’s really no way around it these days, but Taxi Driver is a dirty, grimy film and it should be shown that way. I’ll take a scratched up old 35mm print over a digital version of it any day.

In an astonishing year of cinematic excellence, Taxi Driver was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, famously, in 1976. It was nominated alongside All the President’s Men, Network, Bound for Glory and that year’s scrappy underdog boxing epic, Rocky, which took the top prize, along with Best Director and Editing. ¬†Martin Scorsese was not nominated for Director, however. ¬†Rocky’s Academy Award winning director,¬†John G. Avildsen beat Ingmar Bergman for Face to Face, Sidney Lumet for Network, Alan J. Pakula for All the President’s Men, and Lena Wertmuller for Seven Beauties.

Taxi Driver is, like The Social Network this year, the product of a brilliant collaborative team — Paul Schrader’s screenplay of isolation, desperation and emotional ambiguity, fiercely directed by Martin Scorsese, whose camera WAS a character in the film, and starring Robert De Niro, whose Travis Bickle is, well, nothing short of one of the most memorable characters ever put to screen. ¬†It’s a tough call for Best Picture that year. ¬†Even Rocky wasn’t a bad film. ¬†It was the most publicly appreciated for sure, and was a cultural phenomenon at the time. ¬†As much as it meant to people then, and as much as people appreciate it now, it can’t help but looked faded when standing next to All the President’s Men, Network and Taxi Driver. ¬†The reason being – those three films made their mark and continue to do so. ¬†I could probably get it down to two – Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men, but I’d be hard-pressed to choose between those two.

If you’ve never seen Taxi Driver, you’re in for a treat, albeit it a dark and somewhat depressing one. ¬†You can go to school on great cinema, though, and there is no better place to start than this one.