At present I am experiencing an overwhelming fit of pique, and I need someone to make sense of the following. I have never managed to view Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in its entirety. Not for lack of fucking trying, but because something always gets in the way.
Today’s example comes in the form of two separate uploads, from two unrelated accounts, both of which start fucking up around the 1:01:00 mark, which “just coincidentally” happens to be when Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle begins constructing implements of death by combining handguns with household objects. Hmmm, gee whiz professor, why would the problems start there? Don’t wanna give anyone any ideas, huh?
So right when I’ve become most invested in the story, at the start of one of the most iconic scenes in cinematic history, the browser “just happens” to start buffering intermittently, obliterating the mise-en-scene that’s been carefully established over the past hour, and ruining the experience as I’m forced to refresh the browser in vain repeatedly, before finally giving up and starting this article. In a fit of pique.
The first time I tried to watch Taxi Driver, I was a teenager and it was on cable. The climactic moment when Travis Bickle mimes putting a gun to his head with his blood-soaked hand was immortally punctuated by the cable going out. My dad got pissed at me for hollering about it, and I was literally in my forties before I knew about the scene afterward where Bickle lies in a hospital bed, on the mend from his seemingly mortal wounds, surrounded by heaping floral bouquets and letters of praise for his heroic acts of slaughtering a bunch of guys. I’d been discussing the film at a bar with Jim Goad, and it was probably fifteen minutes of going in circles before I realized I’d never seen the movie beyond the finger-gun. I’d never known that in the universe of Taxi Driver, the crazy Vietnam veteran who shaves his head and goes on a killing rampage was the good guy.
Before anyone asks, I have no intentions of paying to see Taxi Driver, not just because I refuse to pay for movies I watch at home and have already seen, but because I don’t need my paranoia verified when the fucking thing doesn’t play all the way through. I GET IT, CIA SPOOK-FAGS. YOU’RE AFRAID THAT IF SOMEONE LIKE ME SEES TAXI DRIVER, I’LL START BUILDING WEAPONS AND KILLING PEOPLE. I GET IT, YOU PEARL-CLUTCHING SISSY-MARY QUISLINGS. I 100% BELIEVE THAT THE CIA IS THAT RETARDED, TO PULL SOME SILLY SHIT LIKE THIS. 100%.
Why was I watching a 50-year-old movie anyway? First off, because it’s a masterpiece, and second, I wanted to see if my hatred of Robert De Niro affected my appreciation of arguably his greatest film role. Unfortunately, I may never know. Thank the CIA and their psyop faggotry. It was my father’s method of keeping me from movies I was too young to see, but which I harangued him to show me; “Whoops, looks like the tape’s busted, sorry kiddo, it’s just not meant to happen”.
It’s a funny thing, when an actor or actress becomes or reveals themselves to be the most abominable sort of person, and having enjoying that person’s work in the past, you ask yourself; can I possibly stand the sight of this asshole any longer? Can I endure two hours of this absolute shitbird playing dress-up on the big screen, when I know them in reality to be so obstreperous, so utterly devoid of anything resembling class or decency, that I’d rather turn away out of embarrassment?
Mad Max: Fury Road was once a favorite of mine. It was an amazing return to form for director George Miller, a perfect swan song for franchise veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne, and a master class in vehicular combat action. It was where I discovered Elvis Presley’s beauteous granddaughter Riley Keough. Its world-building is lucid and lusciously detailed, exploding the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Mad Max into a fully-formed, practical reality.
But then two things happened.
The first was the release of the mystifyingly mediocre Furiosa: A Mad Max Story. Everything special and new about Fury Road became banal in Furiosa. Characters whose scant screen time once made them more intriguing were now just “around”, like they had nothing better to do. “Immortan Joe”, the peak of Hugh Keays-Byrne career, is played by some other guy, as though ol’ Hugh was interchangeable. Oh, and “Imperator Furiosa”, the role made famous by Charlize Theron, is played by a woman who took first prize in a “Looks Nothing Like Charlize Theron” contest. Charlize Theron looks more like Aileen Wuornos than Anya Taylor Joy looks like Charlize Theron.
Which brings me to the second thing that happened; Charlize Theron revealed herself as an absolute raging cunt.
Remember how she looked in 1997’s Devil’s Advocate? Soft and pretty, with a great smile? There’s a scene in that movie where Theron’s character begs her husband, played by Keanu Reeves, to “make love” to her.
That’s weird how she was able to deliver that line, because in a recent interview, she proclaimed that men who say they want to “make love” to her cause her to puke.
Oh also- Charlize Theron adopts little black boys and puts them in dresses.
So yeah, I don’t jump at the chance to watch this fruit loop play movie star, let alone pay for the privilege. In fact I’ll only watch stuff where she’s nude, because then I’ll at least get something out of it, and it takes her down a peg or three, so there’s that. But the chances of me taking her seriously as an actress, or a person, ever, are nil.
Actors are dumb. Actresses are no exception; “actress” is the female version of “actor”. If you hear someone calling a girl or a woman an “actor”, that someone is a fucking dunce. Not even the most ferocious bulldyke feminist wants to be referred to as a “prince”. That’s all clown-world commie horseshit, and don’t kid yourself.
Actors are so dumb that just one of them can sink the most profitable movie trilogy in history. No, I don’t mean Sofia Coppola; first of all, you mean “actress”, and she is assuredly not one. I also don’t mean Shia Le Beouf, because the Transformers movies continue on in spite of him, and he was in the fourth Indiana Jones flick, not the original trilogy. The actor in question isn’t actually considered much of an “actor”, to be honest.
If you want to try guessing, the name starts with an M and ends with ark Hamill.
Not long ago, I watched the second episode of the Star Wars prequels, Attack of the Clones, for what must be the zillionth time since its theatrical bow in 2002. I know almost every line by heart, and it’s not even my favorite of the trilogy. It has so much great stuff to offer; a city-planet, a chase through an asteroid field, councils of bizarre aliens, a gladiatorial battle that leads into a full-scale ground conflict, and yet in its time it was maligned unfairly by media and audiences alike. 24 years later, it stands out like a gleaming jewel, a noir detective yarn intertwined with a tense “fog of war” documentary, and yet still distinctively George Lucas’s Star Wars.
It still pains me that back when The Phantom Menace was new, lippy cynical jerk-off grifters like the RedLetterMedia fags went on and on about what a “bad actor” 9-year-old Jake Lloyd was as Anakin Skywalker. For one thing, Lloyd was perfect as some random kid stuck on Planet Bumfuck. Nothing about his performance, or the film itself, deserves nearly the amount of vituperant criticism they received. But then there’s the irony.
The irony, that all these fucking grifters who’ve staked a claim shitting on Star Wars, something they purportedly claim to have loved all their lives, while completely ignoring the undeniable fact that the original Star Wars trilogy features one of the worst actors of all time in the lead role.
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.
The irony is, when you see Star Wars at the appropriate time in your life, which is like 7 to 14, you don’t see Hamill’s performance as bad. Actions speak louder than words; stilted dialogue isn’t an issue. You’re a kid; all dialogue sounds stilted to you. When you’re a kid, it doesn’t stick that Luke unknowingly kissed his sister, because the narrative doesn’t treat it as important. Almost getting crushed in a giant garbage disposal that has a monster in it? That, kids can understand, even though (here’s hoping) it’s never been a part of anyone’s childhood.
Sir Alec Guinness originated the role of Obi-Wan (Ben) Kenobi in 1977. Some time later, a young boy and his mother recognized him, and the boy asked Guinness for an autograph, boasting to the older gent that he’d seen Star Wars over 100 times. The mother looked on proudly, grasping her son’s shoulders; this was indeed a lofty achievement.
Sir Alec replied with a smile that he would gladly grant an autograph to such an ardent fan, but only on one condition; that the boy agreed never to see that wretched space-war movie again.
The kid burst into tears, traumatized; the mother gave a stern look of disgust before guiding the weeping child away from the mean old geezer, sans autograph. There you go. That’s what one movie working with Mark Hamill did to Sir Alec Guinness. One movie opposite the twerp from Corvette Summer waving a stick and whining about power converters.
That one movie defined cinematic perfection for legions of children in 1977, especially fags like Rich Evans and RedLetterMedia, who go on to define their entire perspective of the medium of film from that one movie, warts and all. They’re “fans”, after all, not to be mistaken for “aesthetically and creatively stunted”. Many of them go on to make careers out of following in the footsteps of that one movie. There are no badly-delivered lines in the original Star Wars, like there are in the Prequels; that’s just the way they talk a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. There’s no sketchy, dated effects; that’s just the way things look in Star Wars, sometimes aliens look like extras in rubber masks, or Muppets. Han Solo unquestionably blasted Greedo to death with a hidden pistol, because it makes total sense that a galactic peacekeeper and a farm boy would entrust their lives to a casual murderer. Totally makes sense that a Jedi master who can sense danger from light-years away would say “hey Luke, this dude just fired a blaster indoors and executed another patron of this filthy watering hole, in full view of everyone. Let’s pay him to fly us out of here in his barely-functioning smuggler’s ship with his bestial, howling, hair-covered friend”.
See what happens when you don’t “suspend disbelief”, and criticize a space-opera movie to pieces?
We all love James Cameron’s 1991 masterpiece Terminator 2: Judgment Day, don’t we? What’s your favorite part, is it when Edward Furlong as 10-year-old future savior of Earth John Connor says the following line to some rando he called over for help?
“Dipshit? Did you just call moi a ‘dipshit’?”
So to today’s indefatigable self-appointed film critics, that line doesn’t break the illusion, but Jake Lloyd’s dialogue from Phantom Menace was worth bullying him to schizophrenia. Sure, why not. Most kids these days can’t even read fucking English, let alone cursive; who expects anyone under the age of 30 to have the slightest clue about the nuances of film? They think Wakanda is real.
Is The Dark Knight from 2008 really that good? We’re expected to believe that the two most eligible and handsome bachelors in all of Gotham City are fighting over a frumpy lady with a face like Ben Quadinaros from Star Wars. Really?
Catherine Bell, once the perfect Persian 10 who starred on JAG, has also acquired a Ben Quadinaros face. Women should be fucking banned from elective plastic surgery. You know it and I know it. Just age like a normal human being, you goddamn horrible bitches. Jesus Christ, there is no end to your bullshit.
The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi used to be amazing movies. At one time, I considered the former to be the greatest Star Wars episode ever made. That was before Mark Hamill opened his stupid mouth and implied that Luke Skywalker was gay. There was also another social media post he made, where he just typed the word “gay” over and over for whatever reason.
I don’t know why he did this; I don’t frankly care. I’m heterosexual. Gay movies are uninteresting to me, not just because men kissing and fucking each other makes me physically sick to think about, but because no gay character in any gay movie will be anything but a sweet harmless angel from heaven who just wants to fuck men’s asses find love, and that’s pretty fucking boring. Truthfully I find gay men boring, because their entire raison d’etre appears to be finding other gay men to fuck up the ass. If you want to build a dramatic film narrative around that, make a gay porno. I don’t pay money to see some raging queen’s homoerotic fantasies disguised as cinema.
Just like women, gay men have made it crystal clear that they can get along just fine without me and what I want out of movies, so go do it and shut the fuck up. Your “empowerment” and “representation” mean jack and shit to me. If you can’t make a movie without explicitly pandering to your home team, then you don’t deserve to make movies at all. You have the wrong mindset.
You ever watch Bad Lieutenant lately? If so, have you noticed that everything Abel Ferrara has directed other than Body Snatchers is ludicrously self-indulgent and laughably anti-Catholic? I’m not even a “cat lick” myself, and it’s blatantly obvious to me. Hey Abel, newsflash- you don’t have to show the rape. You don’t even have to show the big juicy tits of the nun who was degraded on-screen for your little allegory. When critics use the word “exploitative”, that’s what they mean. You’re not supposed to think “gee, that rape victim sure has a slammin’ bod”. You’re not supposed to see it at all.
Before movies were overt propaganda, and before Obama made propaganda nice and kosher, things were not like this. Nobody saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and assumed there’d be a rash of copycat chainsaw killings. No one presumed that a screening of the Al Pacino turkey Cruising would turn the audience into a mob of mincing leather-daddies. People saw Jaws and became scared of the ocean. People saw The Exorcist and grew closer to God. People saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and imagined they saw UFOs. They didn’t see Taxi Driver and decide that killing people looked awesome. They didn’t see a Batman villain and decide to shoot up a theater. That’s all 21st-century, plastic-in-the-drinking-water, fourth-wave-feminism shit.
People, especially “children”, are too stupid to know any better in 2026. They sodomize people and animals for shits ‘n giggles. They think numbers are funny. They delight in the fact that it’s illegal to even notice their inveterate mendacity. They get mad at Star Wars movies because of the words at the beginning. They consider Black Panther to be superior to Citizen Kane, because black kangs basketball slavery rap music something something.
There is no hope. The “golden age” of cinema is long past and will never return. Movies are dead. Thank the absolute faggots who worshiped three Star Wars movies above literally everything else. It’s their fault. If it wasn’t, something better would have arisen in the past quarter-century. Nothing has. It’s been 26 years of incompetents pretending they’re something they aren’t. 26 years of women trying to be men. 26 years of gay men pretending they’re the normal ones. See how it’s worked out?
All I wanted to do was watch Taxi Driver.
Why is that so much to ask?
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