Word: taxi
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...directors and maybe the best of them, would end up making a movie about boxing. All of the American rituals of machismo apply a fortiori to Italian-Americans; the pathetic pulp idiocy of Rocky virtually created Raging Bull. It is the story of Jake LaMotta only as much as Taxi Driver was the story of Travis Bickle, for Scorsese's new film has the same epic thrust of the earlier one. But where Taxi Driver was about America after Vietnam, Raging Bull is really about Martin Scorsese; only this essential decadence keeps it from greatness...
...more than the close attention to visual detail, what distinguishes Raging Bull is the way Scorsese has captured the flatness and banal perversity of these lives. Much of the credit for this belongs to Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver and was called in to assist Mardik Martin with Raging. Schrader writes highly stylized dialogue, the way short story writers write it. Often there's a total lack of communication...
...trampled in the crowd riot) to the church social hall (where drunks are thrown out by bouncers) to the Copacabana (site of a huge brawl) to the kitchen and dinner table. Cathy Moriarty, stunning in her debut as LaMotta's wife Vicki, is as beautiful, in her way, as Taxi Driver's Cybill Shepard; but for the pristine campaign worker, Scorsese has substituted a passive, pliable coital robot. And it all ends with LaMotta, less than glorious in his heydey, the Raging Whale, even painful to look at, unable to get around his titanic belly to hug his brother. Everything...
...other. Now, it's perfectly all right to believe that we are nothing but animals; but if you really believe it, go live in a barn--don't make movies about it. The implication of Scorsese's movie is that we live like animals, he lives like a director. Taxi Driver was nihilistic, but the view was Travis's; and if we suspected all along that it was Scorsese's as well, that was incidental. Raging Bull, unmediated by any narrator, reveals only the diseased, morbid horror of Scorsese's mind. It is a paranoid vision of America...
...reports Management Centre Europe, a Brussels-based consulting firm. Every six months, M.C.E. measures living costs in 16 European cities in comparison with New York, using as a yardstick the dollar value of a basket of 101 common items, among them food, clothing and bus and taxi rides. In its latest survey, M.C.E. found that all of its European cities were more expensive than the Big Apple, by total amounts that ranged from 16% for Lisbon to 67% for Stockholm, the costliest city. The Swedish capital has wrested that dubious distinction from Geneva, which...