Word: motta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Robert De Niro gained 50 Ibs. to play the older Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, then quickly dropped most of it for his next role, in True Confessions...
...seeing Robert de Niro hoist his Oscar for best actor into the air and tell the audience he was especially glad to win the award in the face of "all the bad things in the world." De Niro's Oscar came for an unusually violent role--boxer Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" : but the actor had no idea of the role he would come to have in the previous day's violence. The morning after the Academy Awards, newspapers published the hypothesis of federal investigators that the suspect in the shooting was inspired by a character...
Raging Bull. Robert De Niro and Director Martin Scorsese reveal little of the psychology that drove Boxer Jake La Motta, but much about their own passion and intelligence for making movies. A technical knockout...
...Motta was an animal, a bull in the ring and a pig outside, and Scorsese is true to both Jakes. The boxing sequences (which amount to barely a dozen minutes of the movie's two hours plus) are as violent, controlled, repulsive and exhilarating as anything in the genre. Scorsese layers the sound track with grunts and screams, animal noises that seem to emanate from hell's zoo. The camera muscles into the action, peering from above, from below, from the combatant's point of view, panning 360° as a doomed fighter spins toward the canvas...
...become evident that much of Raging Bull exists because of the possibilities it offers De Niro to display his own explosive art. He trained as a boxer for months, until La Motta, who coached him, believed the actor could be a contender; he gained 50 lbs. in two months to play the aging Jake. As Jake in 1941 or Jake in 1964, as comer or loser, as raging-bull boxer or battering-ram husband, shouting obscenity or whispering apology, De Niro is always absorbing and credible, even when his character isn't. When the film is moving on automatic...