Taxi Driver Blow Out

On the heels of being lucky enough to see a new print of Taxi Driver on the big screen in my favorite theatre (Willard Straight, home to Cornell Cinema), I went and rinsed that satisfied aftertaste out of my mouth and replaced it with the bitter, shallow flavor of Blow Out. Okay, DePalma has done some things of note (Scarface, Carrie, and Mission: Impossible, specifically), but what ever possessed him to try to combine Coppola's The Conversation with Antonioni's Blow-Up is totally beyond me.

Seeing Scorsese's street lights and street walkers in the frame of the windshield and the lens of a cleansing rain made me afraid to blink for fear of missing something. Seeing DePalma's roughly-hewn characters in both close-up and long-shot made me miss the real thing; I wanted David Hemmings's tortured, soulful eyes searching for clues in grainy stills and Gene Hackman's tightly-shut eyes as he strains his ears to catch every inflection in a conversation. Instead, I got Travolta - still riding out the Grease character in both look and tone - getting worked up over some dame with the worst approximation of a New York accent this side of Hollywood. There was nothing graceful in the recollection of the two source films (Conversation, Blow-Up), and it became increasingly difficult to hide my frustration. Luckily, I was watching it at home and yelling and gesturing at the screen - verboten in the theatre, but sacred in the home - and my annoyance was duly noted with calming pats on the back and another beer. This behavior would not have gone over well in a public setting. But, in all fairness, neither would Blow Out.

In conclusion, here is a totally unfair pairing of images: