Word: jaking
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...Jake La Motta in his autobiography...
...What Jake saw in a nostalgic nightmare, Martin Scorsese has put on the screen. The Bronx Bull butted his way to the middleweight championship of boxing in 1949. He "fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times I got diabetes." He played rope-a-dope with the Mob. He ballooned to 210 lbs. (from 160) within a year of retiring, was convicted on a morals charge involving a 14-year-old prostitute, and made a comeback of sorts as a road-show Rocky Graziano. Now 59, this sacred monster is canonized and cauterized in Scorsese's searing black and white...
...ring is where Scorsese's art is most alive, because it is where Jake (Robert De Niro) lives, where he can do battle on equal terms, playing by hard men's rules. It is where Jake's life finally achieves meaning when he wins the title and is embraced by his idol, Joe Louis -and where the paradigmatic club fighter loses the bout, the title and several quarts of blood in his 1951 match with the stylish Robinson. Indeed, Jake has lost everything but the pride that propels him over to the new champ's corner...
...famous as Jake was for being able to take it in the ring, he was even more notorious for dishing it out at home. Half brutal patriarch, half petulant child, he played the suspicious sadist to his wife Vickie, his brother Joey, his best friend Pete Petrella. Pete stood up to Jake's insults, and stood by as his hard-luck friend; later, under the name Peter Savage, he helped Jake write his autobiography and served as consulting producer to the Raging Bull company. In the film, Pete's history is subsumed into the character of Joey...
...Jake is not so much in love with Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) as he is obsessed by her. To him she represents unattainable class: Lana Turner, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, to his John Garfield. Vickie is the silently smoldering platinum blond in a Bronxful of greasy brawlers and dark-haired tarts. He sees her gliding in slow motion through his jerky life, smiling mysteriously, bestowing a Queen Mother nod on some old friend. But what old friend? Why did she smile at him? Can it be she's fooling around with one of them Mafia bums? Or even...