Looking again

This piece by Glenn Kenny on Taxi Driver does what any good criticism should do; it makes me want to revisit the film under discussion, a film I watched once and at the time was glad to have gotten out of the way. I also found the Manny Farber/Patricia Patterson piece that Kenny mentioned, and it's a well-argued if conflicted read. On a personal note, I'm also very glad to now have a Blu-Ray player.....

One of the many nice things about the new Blu-ray disc of the restoration of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is that the supplements restore to us the very first audio commentary on the film, featuring the film's screenwriter Paul Schrader as well as its director. Recorded in 1986 for the Criterion Collection laser disc of the film, it's a commentary in the Criterion style—serious, frank, in-depth, not the sort of self-congratulatory "I love this shot" stuff that audio commentaries became associated with in the height of the DVD boom. In any event, when Criterion's license on the film went out, Sony began overseeing the DVD editions, and the exemplary laser disc commentary went by the wayside; somebody at Sony was on the ball enough to acquire the material from Criterion and include it here. It's still a bracing listen.