#51: RAGING BULL (1980)

THRILL SCALE 1-10

6.5

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes, once, around 2009

BEST SEQUENCE

When Jake's jealousy and paranoia completely consume him, more than we've ever seen before, and he takes it out on his wife and his brother in violent fashion. Harrowing to watch, but intensely gripping

BEST LINE

I don't typically shy away from swearing in these reviews, especially when quoting a movie, but I'd rather let Waiting for Guffman speak for me:

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

92%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Arguably Martin Scorsese's and Robert De Niro's finest film, Raging Bull is often painful to watch, but it's a searing, powerful work about an unsympathetic hero."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"The life of boxer Jake LaMotta, whose violence and temper that led him to the top in the ring destroyed his life outside of it."

DIRECTOR

Martin Scorsese

MAIN CAST

Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty

THOUGHTS

• Through no one's fault but my own it's been a long time since I posted my Rocky review, but I watched Rocky and Raging Bull fairly close together (with Creed in the middle) and it's a pretty interesting contrast. Rocky Balboa and Adonis Creed are true heroes in their movies, upstanding and honourable men who just happen to be quite talented in the violent and bloody sport of boxing. Jake LaMotta, on the other hand, is, frankly, a real piece of shit. He's not just brutally vicious inside of the ring but also outside of it in his personal life, and he's a jealous, cruel, selfish and spiteful man. This is made even more interesting by the fact that LaMotta was a real person and Rocky Balboa wasn't. Raging Bull was even based on LaMotta's own memoir, which must have been harshly honest about the type of man he was. A positive depiction, it is not
• There is a fair amount of boxing depicted in this movie, effectively shot with beautiful black and white cinematography. The rings look huge, and the stadiums look cavernous and black. But, again, the boxing isn't really the most important part. The boxing is more shown as something that LaMotta is naturally good at because of the type of person he is
• Raging Bull won De Niro his second Oscar after The Godfather Part II and, as of now, his last Oscar. It was also his fourth movie with Scorsese out of an eventual ten feature films. He really is very good in this, he fully inhabits the character, and it's one of the prime examples of De Niro physically inhabiting his characters as well. Not only did he train intensely to depict LaMotta at his prime, even fighting (and winning) several genuine boxing matches in Brooklyn, he also then put on roughly 60 pounds to depict LaMotta in his later, heavier years
• As good as De Niro is, though, the real soul of the movie is Pesci as LaMotta's brother Joey. Only his second movie, he goes toe-to-toe with De Niro in every scene (as an actor, anyway; his character receives a lot of abuse from LaMotta). Same with Cathy Moriarty as LaMotta's second wife Vikki, and both actors were deservedly nominated in the supporting Oscar categories
• Finally, this isn't the first time we've talked about Scorsese and De Niro working together (Cape Fear from 1991), and it won't be the last (Taxi Driver is the 22nd most thrilling movie on the AFI list). However, we still haven't touched on my favourite Scorsese/De Niro movie, and as a bonus we'll get to reunite them with Joe Pesci (and it's not The Irishman, even though I liked that movie a lot as well)

Up Next: I've been meaning to shoehorn this in at some point, and now seems like a pretty good time to do so while we're enjoying the Scorsese/De Niro/Pesci vibes. It's Goodfellas from 1990. But that's not all, we're also going to talk about the next movie the three of them collaborated on, Casino from 1995 (possibly in a separate review, but I'm probably just going to talk about both movies at the same time)