I could never buy the denouement of Taxi Driver, and I never will. Travis Bickle, suspected by Treasury agents as a nutjob assassin who almost killed Sen. Charles Palatine, is portrayed as a hero by the media for shooting a corrupt cop and two pimps in an East Side tenement building? And this shooting in some way helps the parents of Jodie Foster to find her and bring her back home to Indiana? And then the dreamily erotic Cybil Shepard is giving Travis a come-hither look in the rear-view mirror when he gives her a ride in his cab? It’s all Travis’s death fantasy… the stuff he wishes would happen as he sits on that tenement couch, bleeding profusely and eyeballing the cops in the doorway as he pretends to shoot himself in the head. The very last shot in Taxi Driver is of a seemingly startled Travis looking into his cab’s rearview mirror, and then whoosh…he’s gone. No reflection. Because Travis isn’t really there.

In her 3.31 New York Times piece, Caryn James mentioned a slate of recent films or plays (the Ashton Kutcher-Bernice Mac comedy Guess Who?, Neil LaBute’s This Is How It Is, etc.) that have dealt in some front-and-center way with racism. She mentioned a pair of indie films that grapple with it also (Face, A Wake in Providence) and yet, oddly, she didn’t mention Paul Haggis’ Crash (Lions Gate, 5.6), the most ambitious and stylstically assertive movie about racism to come down the pike in a long while. This Los Angeles-based ensemble drama, which I’m showing at my UCLA Sneak Preview class on Monday, is about little besides racism. It costars Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, Jennifer Esposito,Ryan Phillipe (delivering his best acting yet) and Thandie Newton.

If you’re going to see Sin City, see it digitally projected.
Robert Rodriguez’s shimmering silvery black-and-white photography is heaven on the eyes, and digital makes it look that much better. The photography (and a sincere congrats to Rodriguez for getting this aspect right) is all this movie has. Sin City is geek noir, or noir for T-shirt wearing, beer-bellied guys who rarely get laid and didn’t graduate from college. Hard guys talking tough and fatalistic and cryptic, constantly shooting or slugging bad guys or getting shot or slugged themselves…sucking cigarette smoke and worhsipping women for their goodness while smacking their lips at their carnal allure….and I am telling you it’s all crap. And the odd thing, it doesn’t read like crap when you read one of Frank Miller’s graphic novels.

There’s no way James Reston Jr., author of “Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade,” is going to prove that Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox used historical material taken from his book in the making of Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (Fox, 5.6)…no way in hell. The basic story was in yesterday’s
New York Times. Did Scott and/or his screenwriter, William Monahan, browse through Reston’s book at some point and take a few notes? I would be astounded if they didn’t, but the supposed “smoking gun” incident — producer Mike Medavoy having sent the book to Scott in December ’01 with a letter suggesting that they collaborate — probably won’t be enough to make the case, especially since Scott had an assistant call Medavoy right back and decline. “What was said at the time was, [Scott] had a Crusade project of his own,” Medavoy told Times reporter Sharon Waxman.

Few things in life are quite as downerish as a formulaic Sandra Bullock movie. Almost as gloomy is looking at the poster for such a film two or three weeks before it’s about to open, or hearing from a woman friend who doesn’t go out to films much and has never seen an Antonioni film (and almost certainly never will) that she’s really looking forward to it.

The announcement of Warner Home Video’s July 5th DVD release of John Boorman’s Point Blank is…great news! The only cool-sounding extra is the commentary track featuring Boorman and Steven Soderbergh. (Soderbergh’s interview commentary with Mike Nichols on Paramount Home Video’s Catch 22 DVD was highly absorbing.) It’s a low-cost effort, all right — no docs, no deleted scenes and a couple of crappy “vintage” featurettes. Let’s hope the transfer isn’t as pinkish and bleachy looking as the MGM/UA laser disc was.

I am so deeply bored or at least underwhelmed with all the crappy or so-so new films out there…even with all the fairly good indie films noew playing like Sergio Castellito’s Don’t Move, which has a truly amazing performance from Penelope Cruz and a first-rate one from Castellito…I am bored with even the half-good films like this one…so bored I could plotz. So bored I can barely make myself write these Wired items, but I know if I literally slap myself in the face and make myself do them the feeling will come back and I’ll be rolling again. I know what this is — I’ve been here before.

A friend said he was going to a surprise 50th birthday last Saturday night for some lawyer, and that the super-secret arrangements were being handled by the guy’s wife. This struck me right away as something only a wife would do. There’s no way a guy turning 50 is on Cloud Nine about this. He may be spiritually or philosophically at peace with reaching the half-century mark, but on a gut emotional level he’s definitely not delighted with it. At the very best he has mixed feelings. I’ve known guys who were bummed when they hit 30 and a lot of people are freaked when they hit 40, so don’t talk about the big five-oh. But this lawyer guy’s wife wants to celebrate it. People who throw surprise birthday parties are always presumed to be coming from a place of love for the significant others, but if you ask me this is the wife proclaiming to their circle of friends and acquaintances that her husband is passing the official threshold into life’s older phase, and, unless he’s a workout freak, he’ll gradually be taking more in naps and staying home and reading non-fiction and being a bit less of a hot dog in the professional playing field or, if the shoe fits, less of a hound. (I mean, if he had such tendencies when younger.) And that her 50-plus husband is now more likely to be loyal…in a vaguely sleepy, domestic, I’d-rather-watch-TV sense. Wives love to subtly advertise that their husbands are less available for whatever. This is why some of them feed their husbands so much food…to make them look slightly pudgy, so they’ll be less attractive to other women.

There’s a film series that just finished at the L.A. County Museum about the paranoid movies of the 1970s (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, etc.). This reminded me of a famous definition of paranoia — “knowing all the facts.” But who coined it? I was told a long time ago it was William S. Burroughs. I found an online source claiming that Woody Allen said it.

Every time I agree to hold on a story, someone else runs its first. I was told about Ben Affleck’s plan to direct Gone, Baby, Gone, a Boston-based drama about a hunt for a four year-old kidnapped girl, a couple of weeks ago, but I was asked to wait so as to not screw up negotiations. I did this, and then Daily Variety broke it. Affleck has also written the screenplay, which is adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”). Shooting is supposed to happen in the fall.

The hiring of Gail Berman — the Fox Broadcasting chief — to pull strings/run things/work right under Brad Grey at Paramount Pictures and have something to do with movies but mainly help synergize the operation, is another Hollywood media circle-jerk story, and of marginal importance to the people on the street. That said, she’s said to be a extremely shrewd, take-charge, go-getter type, blah-blah…but stories about the Gail Bermans of the world are, at most (and no offense intended), bubbly fizz on the surface of a freshly-poured glass of Alka Seltzer.

The deep-down, ground-level sentiment on the part of righties who want Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube put back in? Anything, even life as a vegetable, is better than death. Human dignity and quality of life is never, it appears, a big concern of the Christian hardcore. The thing that gets their goat in this case is the importance of not sending a helpless, vegetative woman into the void, the black tunnel, the great howling nothingness of death…nothing is more terrible than this. The irony, of course, is that righties are always saying how sold they are on the concept of God and Jesus waiting at the end of that tunnel, waiting to greet the dear and departed, etc.