| | |  | Childrens & Family | Home » » Taxi Driver (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | At 26, Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is slipping slowly into isolation and violence on the streets of New York City. Trying to solve his insomnia by driving a yellow cab on the night shift, he grows increasingly disgusted by the people who hang out at night: "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets." His touching attempts to woo Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a Senator's campaign worker, turn sour when he takes her to a porn movie on their first date. He even fails in his attempt to persuade child prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) to desert her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) and return to her parents and school. Driven to the edge by powerlessness, he buys four handguns and sets out to assassinate the Senator, heading for the infamy of a `lone crazed gunman'. DVD BONUS FEATURES INCLUDE: "Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver" Featurette "Producing Taxi Driver" Featurette "Influence and Appreciation" Documentary Robert De Niro, Oliver Stone, Roger Corman and others pay tribute to Scorsese and the film "God’s Lonely Man" Documentary "Travis’ New York Locations" Featurette Storyboard to Film Comparisons with Martin Scorsese Introduction New Feature-length Commentary by Writer Paul Schrader New Feature-length Commentary by Professor Robert Kolker "Taxi Driver Stories" Featurette "Making Taxi Driver" Documentary Animated Photo Galleries "Including Scorsese at Work" Photo Montage Original Screenplay Read Along | | | Product Details: | | | Actors:
| Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd | | Format:
| AC-3, Closed-captioned, Collector's Edition, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Limited Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC | | Language:
| English | | Subtitle:
| English, Spanish, French | | Number of Discs:
| 2 | | Studio:
| Sony Pictures | | Run Time:
| 113 minutes | | DVD Release Date:
| August 14, 2007 | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 400 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 Scorsese at his absolute best.Sep 01, 2010
Taxi Driver is what I believe to be Scorsese's masterpiece and his most artistic and emotional film. This movie is just a culmination of Scorsese, Schrader and DeNiro beautifully portraying material that they all identify with on a personal level. The direction is flawless, the script is fantastic and Robert DeNiro's performance as Travis Bickle may be his finest ever, and definetely deserved the Best Actor oscar for that year. This is filmmaking at it's absolute best, and even though it came out of an era with countless classics, Scorsese's Taxi Driver still stands out as one of the most breathtaking peices of cinema ever created.
GreatSep 01, 2010
Is there an American film more wrongly and regularly misinterpreted than Martin Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece, Taxi Driver? Not even 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, nor Apocalypse Now, by Francis Ford Coppola, have been intellectually, politically, and critically twisted and turned away from what they really are- and this all aside and apart from the silly debates over art influencing real world violence after John W. Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in 1981, due to his own obsession with actress Jodie Foster. The film has been deconstructed and reconstructed (see references to Death Wish and The Searchers) according to prevailing political and artistic whims more than several times, and matters have been further complicated by the many claims of the film's protagonists, from screenwriter Paul Schrader (is there a better example of a filmic one hit wonder?), to director Scorsese, to star Robert De Niro, the claims and counterclaims about the film have devolved into legendry.
Taxi Driver was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, but lost out to the formulaic boxer flick, Rocky, penned by Sylvester Stallone It did, however, win the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is not only a great motion picture, but it is one of the best portraits of a character ever filmed, and Travis Bickle is one of the scariest characters in film history. Probably only Martin Landau's character, Judah Rosenthal, in Woody Allen's Crimes And Misdemeanors, is more truly horrifying (and certainly far more evil). But Bickle is every bit as scary, for he is far more unpredictable to those about him. Yes, he is not a cold blooded murderer, like Rosenthal, but he is certainly violent, and a racist- not of the KKK White Supremacist sort, but of the passive, scared little white boy sort; and much mileage has been gotten from the fact that the film's final shootout victims were all white, when in the original screenplay they had been all black (Scorsese and Schrader bowed to studio pressure to change that fact, because by not making a change, the beancounters claimed, the film might incite race riots, and lead to financial culpability). These elements are what make Bickle scary, and why he is so realistically portrayed. Yet, there is also the niggling truth even the film seems loath to admit, that Travis Bickle really and truly IS a hero, and not merely a crazed lunatic. Note that I wrote `not merely,' for this is an important point: because most critics resort to binary thought in such matters, that does not change the fact that Bickle is a dangerous and paranoid man and a hero; and these are not mutually opposing claims. And by `hero,' I mean it in the absolutely most sober sense of the word. Heroes are not perfect men, but they are real men (and women, of course). And heroes are not necessarily even ethically `good' men (imagine that!). But they are brave, they are determined, and they are relentless, in the pursuit of the goals, things, and people, they deem as good. But, most of all they are `real,' not like the fictive heroes that populate books and films, comic books and video games. And rarely has there ever been a more chillingly realistic portrayal of a hero in film than Travis Bickle. Now, do me the favor of not misinterpreting that, ok?
 What's all the hype?Aug 30, 2010
I decided I had to get this movie based on all of the hype of an Oscar winner and a De Niro defining roll after hearing that my new boss was named Hinkley. A co-worker asked if that was the same name as the man who attempted to assisinate Reagan. After looking up the Reagan assissination attempt and finding out it was Hinckley, rather than Hinkley, I also re-learned about his obsession with Jody Foster in this movie and how it led to the assassination attempt. She won (I was going to say earned, but not so much) an Oscar for her role in this movie and it has become a "modern classic".
Overall, the story was nothing more than okay - a loner who is torn between his disgust of the seedier side of New York City and his inability to not be consumed by it. His "relationships" with Cybil Shepard (very young and demure here) and Foster are at best superficial and barely explored. The movie relies on a warped soundtrack that I was tempted to mute and go to subtitles because it was so annoying and the unusual city scape of New York to propel it forward. there was virtual no useful dialog and none of the characters seemed to have any idea what they wanted or why they were where they were.
How Foster was even noticed by the Academy is a shock - she couldn't have been on screen for more than 6 minutes. She was convincing enough as a young prostitute, but not at all compelling or memeroble in my opinion. De Niro did a fine job as a near-lunatic ex-marine and he looked the part with a chisled body, but his head-long no-holds barred pursuit of Shepard in her office was completely out of character and not believable. even more unbelievable was that he would simply not be interested in her later in the movie, given where he was at that particular point in his life.
For her part, Shepard was not much more than eye-candy. She was a necessary plot link between the streets of new York and the good Senator, but in the end served no greater purpose than that.
The climactic shoot-out was the only highlight in the movie and that's only if you can stomach some rather brutal imagery that makes you feel like you were there. During the shootout, I wasn't really sure what I wanted the outcome to be.
While I haven't seen all of the "special" features what I have seen so far was pretty plain vanilla fair with little to no great insight. "It was a movie that we had to make." "We didn't think anyone would watch it." "We really didn't talk much about what it meant, we all just knew." It sounded as if they were just going through the motions.
Bottom line, I'm glad I watched it just to know what it was and to see the original "You talkin' to me?" scene, but definately not a top-notch movie in my opinion.
the final choice defines this taxi driverAug 25, 2010
I'm not capable to say, as many people says, if Travis, this taxi driver, is a madman or is more sane than the majority. But for me, one thing is clear: he will kill more times. Why this conclusion?
Well, Travis finds in his lonely life only a beautiful woman, the really superb Cybill Sepherd, which for me represents life or Eros. But after the sordid incident of the X rated cinema and the killings, Travis carries another more time this woman in his taxi until her home: I think a clear invitation, really difficult to resist for any man.
But Travis although polite, rejects these opportunity of love and life, and the film ends in following with his taxi in search I think, of more problems, Thanatos or the death.
1 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 OVERRATED By Old PeopleAug 07, 2010
As usual, I do not write my reviews to get agreement since 95% or more of the population does NOT know what is good from bad, pearl to a swine.
You know how you watch old movies and now, even when you watch them again, you still tend to rate them high due to memories of watching them when you were younger and feeling the obligation to remain faithful to how you felt?
That's how this movie is. It's an oldie with good acting and whatnot, but I did not enjoy it very much because of the following reasons:
SPOILER ALERT!!!
INTENDED MAINLY FOR PEOPLE THAT HAVE WATCHED THE MOVIE OR PEOPLE THAT DON'T GIVE A BLANK.
In no specific order:
1. The guy gets ready and does all this training to, in the end, kill 3 or 4 low life losers, some of which were not armed and even tried not to provoke him? The basically provoked them and acted like some sort of tough guy. The whole movie sets you up, making you sort of think that he was going after big game aka the possible presidential candidate when the whole time, after all the training he's done....he took out 3 low-life's, which by the way sucks and made the ending really disappointing. It's like the whole plot revolves around the end where he kills those guys.
2. He goes and kills those guys and he's declared a hero without going to jail? Was that how it is back then? You go out and you kill bad guys and you not only DON'T go to jail....but treated as a hero? Doesn't make much sense to me, either that or times sure have changed. What he did was basically premeditated murder or mass murder.
3. The movie doesn't really make clear who the main character plans to take out and the main character never seems to do much research or investigation into his mastermind scheme....which I really felt to be completely coincidental due to that fact. So basically that part of the plot goes like this: He talks about how he dislikes the scums and low-life's of the city aka drug dealers, prostitution, etc etc. Then he trains with a few guns that he bought, then one day he just decides okay it's time to do it. Then he goes and kills three criminals. Again I bring up that he does not do any research into these guys or the movie never shows him do enough research to justify his final scenes. You're left confused till the very end and it's not a clever setup either.
4. There was a lot of useless scenes that did not assist with the ending scene. Scenes like:
a) He fell in love with this blond, which dumped him.
b) His hatred for the geek that keeps following the blond.
c) The scenes with the other cab drivers, never really builds a relationship with them much and they do nothing to the story except make it longer.
d) Scenes of him training, did he REALLLLLLY need to train to kill 3 guys???? Thought he was going to take out an army or something, totally anti-climatic.
e) Most of the cab scenes, read the following below.
5. The movie, I felt, did not efficiently utilize and implicate his role as a taxi driver. Why do I feel this way? Because whatever he did and whatever he felt and whatever he knew, could have been done, felt, or known even without being a Taxi Driver. Let's go deeper. He drives around and notices all this crap in the street which makes him dislike the city more and wants to do something about it. You don't need to be in a taxi to feel this way or find out about this. A better way to implicate his role as a taxi driver to further help the plot of the story would be him spying on bad guys or getting important information as a taxi driver, using his taxi driving identity to somehow sneak into certain places and acting as a spy, etc.
Thinking back on that movie, the only spying he really did was probably with the presidential candidate that coincidentally got into his cab and talking to him, but even that I felt was useless. And this scene alone confuses the plot, not help clarifies anything. He knows nothing of the guy, how can he be a supporter?
So what? He feels sorry for one prostitute and helps her get free and he's a hero? What the heck? What about those other hundreds or thousands of other prostitutes? It's like if I went out and adopted a single cat at the pound and ran around calling myself a savior. CRAP!!
The acting was good, but the movie, IMO, is not that great. It was probably a good oldie, but a present day analysis makes the movie not so good at all.
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