在学校上电影课看了“愤怒的公牛”后，自己写的原创影评，暂时还没翻译过来，主题是“毁灭后再重生”。希望大家喜欢，如果想借鉴，请reference我的网名吧，谢谢。
Raging Bull
"I wanted to push all the way to thevery very end and see if I could die. Embracing a way of life to its limit."
Martin Scorsese
During the making of New York, New York (1977),which turned out to be a box-office failure, the Roman Catholic director,Martin Scorsese, sank into a spiraling abyss of drug addiction. While he was“embracing a way of life to its limit”, he almost got himself killed after havingsome “bad coke” that caused a massive internal bleeding. Thanks to this wake-upcall, he finally kicked off his cocaine addiction with the help of the actorand his close friend, Robert De Niro, with whom he collaborated on all his mostnotable works. Believing that he would never make another film, Scorsese pouredall his energy into making the next film, RagingBull (1980), which received spectacular success and was voted the greatestfilm of the 1980s by Britain's Sight& Sound magazine.
Raging Bull is a biographic drama film about an emotionally self-destructive boxer fueled by paranoid jealousy andrage, which lead him to the top of the ring while destroy his life outside ofit. The film is not only a redemption, which saved Scorsese from hisself-destruction but also a landmark where his film style reached its peak: the expressionistic depict of psychological points of view. In his previous hits, Mean Street (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese rendered the protagonists’ psychotic perspectives using high contrasts and aggressiveuse of bold colors. Raging Bull, shotin high contrast black-and-white, vividly carried out the raging, masochisticand insecure mind state of Jake La Motta through the perfect combination of visualand audio effects. From La Motta’s point of view, his wife, Vickie is always inslow motion when she is close to other men. Through the exaggerated depictionof an innocent event, La Motta’s jealousy is visually represented. During themost riveting boxing scenes, Scorsese utilizes not only the punching sounds butalso the bull roars, flashbulbs, water-running, and even squelching watermelon sound effects to externalize the bubbling rage deep within La Motta.
Brutal andintense as the movie is, it has a poetic and contemplative opening of La Motta shadowboxing alone in the ring. The background music “Intermezzo” from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana orchestrates a tragedy that is about to unfold,while La Motta’s movements are full of freedom and even transcendence. Interestingly,the movie also ends with La Motta, now an old, fat and failed comedian,shadowboxing in the dressing room before his show. Perhaps Scorsese is tryingto suggest that throughout La Motta’s whole life, boxing is the physical way inwhich this self-destructive soul seeks for spiritual absolution. Perhaps the cinematic classic, Raging Bull, is not only about rage and violence, but more about self-redemption.
Raging Bull
"I wanted to push all the way to thevery very end and see if I could die. Embracing a way of life to its limit."
Martin Scorsese
During the making of New York, New York (1977),which turned out to be a box-office failure, the Roman Catholic director,Martin Scorsese, sank into a spiraling abyss of drug addiction. While he was“embracing a way of life to its limit”, he almost got himself killed after havingsome “bad coke” that caused a massive internal bleeding. Thanks to this wake-upcall, he finally kicked off his cocaine addiction with the help of the actorand his close friend, Robert De Niro, with whom he collaborated on all his mostnotable works. Believing that he would never make another film, Scorsese pouredall his energy into making the next film, RagingBull (1980), which received spectacular success and was voted the greatestfilm of the 1980s by Britain's Sight& Sound magazine.
Raging Bull is a biographic drama film about an emotionally self-destructive boxer fueled by paranoid jealousy andrage, which lead him to the top of the ring while destroy his life outside ofit. The film is not only a redemption, which saved Scorsese from hisself-destruction but also a landmark where his film style reached its peak: the expressionistic depict of psychological points of view. In his previous hits, Mean Street (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese rendered the protagonists’ psychotic perspectives using high contrasts and aggressiveuse of bold colors. Raging Bull, shotin high contrast black-and-white, vividly carried out the raging, masochisticand insecure mind state of Jake La Motta through the perfect combination of visualand audio effects. From La Motta’s point of view, his wife, Vickie is always inslow motion when she is close to other men. Through the exaggerated depictionof an innocent event, La Motta’s jealousy is visually represented. During themost riveting boxing scenes, Scorsese utilizes not only the punching sounds butalso the bull roars, flashbulbs, water-running, and even squelching watermelon sound effects to externalize the bubbling rage deep within La Motta.
Brutal andintense as the movie is, it has a poetic and contemplative opening of La Motta shadowboxing alone in the ring. The background music “Intermezzo” from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana orchestrates a tragedy that is about to unfold,while La Motta’s movements are full of freedom and even transcendence. Interestingly,the movie also ends with La Motta, now an old, fat and failed comedian,shadowboxing in the dressing room before his show. Perhaps Scorsese is tryingto suggest that throughout La Motta’s whole life, boxing is the physical way inwhich this self-destructive soul seeks for spiritual absolution. Perhaps the cinematic classic, Raging Bull, is not only about rage and violence, but more about self-redemption.
