I do have a certain sympathy for Joe's assertion that Goodfellas has become the most over-rated (though perhaps "over-cited" is a better phrase from my perspective) film in Scorsese's career. It doesn't have the penetrating character analysis and emotional demands of his greatest works. But it is a social portrait of enormous cinematic dexterity, a hilarious black comedy, and is also the most stylistically original and influential film of the '90s, there's no getting away from it. Not chopped liver.

But the amount of respect the relatively tawdry, tinny, Hollywood-with-a-thin-coat-of-New-Wave-artistry Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is getting here is positively perverted.

I think I said something similar to this, albeit, naturally, without quite the emphatic precision. To paraphrase, I said that although Goodfellas was a 'marvellous' film within its own terms of reference, it did not ask questions of the audience the same way that some of his earlier works did, notably Taxi Driver.

I'm not really sure what the point of this post is, other than to highlight my ongoing struggle with English.

...I'm not really sure what the point of this post is, other than to highlight my ongoing struggle with English.

I think I said something similar to this, albeit, naturally, without quite the emphatic precision. To paraphrase, I said that although Goodfellas was a 'marvellous' film within its own terms of reference, it did not ask questions of the audience the same way that some of his earlier works did, notably Taxi Driver.

Yes, I've seen King of Comedy (many times), a creepy, effective comedy, and The Last Temptation of Christ (once, during its initial release), which I found rather bland at the time.

I've only seen parts of Raging Bull. I haven't seen Mean Streets . But clearly these two belong to his most important period and have had a huge impact on subsequent filmmakers. Whether I like them or not would be beside the point.

Good point bocce.

The end of Taxi Driver is obviously a fantasy of Travis. Or if he's dead, a fantasy of what his screwed up mind figured would await him when he meted out justice upon the evil doers. Obvious.

...

Interpretations of the ending

Roger Ebert has written of the film's ending:
"There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis's 'heroism' of saving Iris, and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out? Are we experiencing his dying thoughts? Can the sequence be accepted as literally true? ... I am not sure there can be an answer to these questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese's characters."[6]

James Berardinelli, in his review of the film, argues against the dream or fantasy interpretation, stating:
"Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader append the perfect conclusion to Taxi Driver. Steeped in irony, the five-minute epilogue underscores the vagaries of fate. The media builds Bickle into a hero, when, had he been a little quicker drawing his gun against Senator Palantine, he would have been revealed as an assassin. As the film closes, the misanthrope has been embraced as the model citizen—someone who takes on pimps, drug dealers, and mobsters to save one little girl."[7]

On the Laserdisc audio commentary, Scorsese acknowledged several critics' interpretation on the film's ending being Bickle's dying dream. However, he admitted that the last scene of Bickle glancing at an unseen object implies that he might fall into rage and recklessness in the future, and he is like "a ticking time bomb."[8] Writer Paul Schrader confirms this in his commentary on the 30th anniversary DVD, stating that Travis "is not cured by the movie's end," and that, "he's not going to be a hero next time."[9]