Cheap Raging Bull (Single Disc Edition) (DVD) (Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci) Price

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Customer Reviews of Raging Bull (Single Disc Edition)

Doing Religious Penance In The Ring
After making the classic and thoroughly joyous rock-jam film The Last Waltz with marvelous `guest' performances from Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Neil Young backing up The Band & good friend Robbie Robertson, Martin Scorsese took a two-year break from moviemaking, during which he was wed and divorced to actress Isabella Rossellini. Their falling out left him in a state of deep depression, from which 1980's Raging Bull emerged. Like Travis Bickle's gruesome homicidal explosion at the end of Scorsese's modern-urban-Dostoyevskian masterpiece Taxi Driver (1976), making Raging Bull was Scorsese's personal catharsis, which he apparently used to empty every negative and self-destructive aspect of himself onto celluloid. <
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>Shot in stark, merciless black-and-white to reproduce the urban grittiness of Little Italy circa 1940, Scorsese's film pays tribute to champion boxer Jake La Motta's primitiveness. Much like British director Mike Leigh's movie Naked (1993), Scorsese presents a reprehensible, brutal main character sympathetically, as if his paranoid, cruel and violent behavior is utterly beyond his control - as if it's the corrupt society in which the character lives which deserves the blame for this abhorrent behavior, but certainly not the character (or the simple-minded storytellers). It's the old `absolute product of the environment' dramatic scheme which argues against the existence of characters' having any access whatsoever to personal choice; Jake La Motta is Scorsese's embodiment of the human being as total animal, nothing more, who behaves solely as `nature' dictates. <
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>Stylistically, Scorsese's self-described "kamikaze" style of filmmaking, of throwing himself at the material, here bears both the exhilarating highs and wretched lows of free-writing. The boxing sequences are the greatest ever put on film: Scorsese's camera pinwheels, pirouettes, dollies in and counter-dollies, and he has Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker provide ample freeze frames, slowdowns and speed-ups of the footage; all to create a searingly Expressionist depiction of La Motta's destroy-or-be-destroyed P.O.V. in the ring. (Frank Warner's sound design in particular helps to lend the sequences an added bit of surrealism: for example, when La Motta bears down on Sugar Ray Robinson, the shrieks of a condor closing in on its prey can be heard in the background.) <
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>Yet in the dramatic sections, the film is bland, stale, stagnant. Scenes drag on endlessly, like dialogues in a later Kubrick film; only Scorsese uses improvisation, and gets repetition and anticlimax. (That anticlimax is all too literal when De Niro pours a pitcher of ice water (!) down his boxer shorts right after fooling around with girlfriend Vicki (the stellar Cathy Moriarty) - La Motta's got a fight coming up, and he wants the additional tension of sexual frustration to use as fuel in the ring.) Self-pity suffuses Raging Bull, and is actually its unstated (and very likely unconscious) central theme. Scorsese's and star Robert De Niro's concept of Jake's character is a strictly one-note affair: Robert De Niro's monotonous, quasi-autistic performance as La Motta says over and over again, "I'm dumb, I don't know any better, therefore I deserve your sorrow." This `new' form of non-acting was awarded with the Best Actor Oscar of 1980 (an honor that De Niro deserved infinitely more for his extraordinary performance as the haunted Travis Bickle five years earlier, which still stands next to Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, etc., as perhaps one of the twenty greatest performances in movie history). <
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>While Joe Pesci as Jake's brother Joey is individually funny, charismatic and winning, his scenes with De Niro go nowhere; he says something, then De Niro asks him to repeat what he just said. Also, the movie's ending is beyond ponderous: after Vicky, then his wife, finally comes to her senses and ditches him (looooong after we've started rooting for her to do so), La Motta winds up in a lousy nightclub, telling lousy jokes. (It wasn't enough for us to see his lousy behavior, so we've got to be witness to his lousy sense of humor too?) Whether or not these scenes are genuinely biographical is irrelevant; they aren't dramatic, because there's no conflict, no sense of going anywhere...which very unfortunately might be Scorsese's ultimate, self-indulgently depressive point. We have here a movie where mundanity itself is the subject, a movie which prefers to childishly implore for the audience's sympathies in regards to its self-defeatism, rather than intelligently deal with its issues. Jake doesn't want inner health, he hasn't the vaguest notion of what that means - he wants power and control, and when he doesn't have it he cries like a baby and pounds his head against a wall. Scorsese's lingering on him screaming "I'm not an animal!" again and again isn't visually psychologically fascinating, it's the definition of cinematically banal (and maybe the most overwrought temper tantrum in movie history). It's the visual equivalent of Scorsese the movie-director-who-also-wanted-to-be-a-priest grisly administering himself lashings as penance, with us the audience as his spectators. (If you happen to be a secular movie viewer, as I am, the sight of all this gratuitous, almost medieval self-flagellation and punishment can be an especially head-scratching and unpleasant experience.) <
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>Raging Bull has been acclaimed one of the twenty greatest movies in history by most of the major critics' and directors' polls (Sight and Sound, etc.), and it's proven to have been deeply influential to future generations of moviemakers. Whether or not that influence has produced movies of quality is open to debate; personally, I think Raging Bull's unique and very unfortunate aesthetic combination of chaotic-urban-emptiness-as-divine-holiness has inspired as many terrible and amateurish takes on this theme (think the majority of Abel Ferrara's movie career) as Tarantino's profoundly more entertaining Pulp Fiction later did for the ironically-wisecracking-hitman genre. Some moviegoers may indeed pray at screenings of Raging Bull, but I think they're bowing their heads to a false idol. To me, Raging Bull is nowhere near as thematically imaginative or psychologically complex - or directorially and cinematically ingenious - as Scorsese's Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, The Aviator, or his brilliant short `Life Lessons' from the New York Stories movie anthology. It's these works, plus his masterful documentaries The Last Waltz, My Personal Journey Through American Movies, My Voyage To Italy and the recent No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, that stand as the very finest examples of Scorsese's most vital, creative, passionate and rewarding work in the movies.

Have a beer, tough guy
What makes a movie great? What are you looking for in a movie? The answers to those questions will determine your reaction to this movie. <
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>There's a lot of realism here, though not in the boxing scenes. I haven't yet seen a realistic boxing scene in a movie. I've watched maybe hundreds of boxing matches, but I've never seen boxing done accurately in a movie, and it is nowhere near accurate here. It is laughable here, as usual. Overly dramatic, the punches way too noisy, the reactions of the fighters way too stupid and unrealistic, like LaMotta standing along the ropes with one hand on the ropes, neither hand even trying to protect his head, while Robinson pummels him. Yeah, right, whatever. No effing way. And that moment with Robinson raising one fist slowly. Spare me. That was just stupid, boxing for non-fans in a dream world. Maybe you think this bit of unrealism is artistic, but if you are a boxing fan you see it for what it is, overdramatic nonsense that doesn't look anywhere near real. <
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>If you enjoy that scene because it shows how the hero ignored his own safety and opened himself up to pain, and you like identifying with that macho behavior, well go have a beer and picture yourself as this character. To me, it's just baloney. It's like that silly Rocky nonsense, completely unreal, a macho fantasy, a little kid thing. <
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>But the rest of this movie, pseudo-boxing scenes aside, is too real. It is about a guy who makes a mess of his life. There's a lot of agita in this movie as the lead character behaves like a jealous and paranoid violent dictatorial jerk. That's not easy to watch and it's not enjoyable to watch either. <
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>There was a Bogart film noir film like this one. Bogart played a jealous and violent guy who messes everything up. I didn't like that movie either. It was like cod liver oil. You watch it, you realize that the main character has a lot wrong with him that is painful to watch, you applaud it for being realistic because some people are that way, and when the movie is over you are glad it's over and you don't have to go through it anymore. <
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>It's hard, as a reviewer, to realize that other people have other things they are looking for in a movie. Look at this site. So many people are calling Raging Bull one of the greatest movies ever made. I don't get it. Why? What are they looking for in a movie? To me, this was just a lot of agita with no payoff. This didn't deliver what I'm looking for in a movie. It just basically annoyed me from start to finish. <
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>I didn't get the female character at all. I don't know what her game was. It wasn't fleshed out. She was a cardboard wife, pretty much. I didn't see a real person there. I think one weakness of Scorsese as a director is that he doesn't understand women on screen. They don't really matter either. They are just props. This isn't about them. They are just there to be the lover, the cheater, fill one role or other in the lives of the men. <
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>So it seems to me that all the rave reviews on this site are kidding themselves. This movie really isn't Great with a capital G. No, it isn't. And since I didn't enjoy following this crazy man's messed up life, since I was happy when they started showing the credits and I could be free of this annoying and messed up man's problems, I can't even give it three stars.