Magical Scorsese

I know heaping praise on the movie Taxi Driver isn't very original of me, but I'm amazed how it just gets better and better every time I see it.

I own a tape of it with an abridged "Making of Taxi Driver" featurette at the end, which I saw for the first tim tonight. I don't usually watch the "making of" stuff. I like not knowing and simply being left entertained. But tonight curiosity got the best of me, and I'm shocked how much planning and tweaking went into the making of this movie.

This is dumb, I know. I live under the illusion that artistic masterpieces -- and Taxi Driver comes about as close to this term as I know in cinema -- are borne out of happy accidents. Maybe I envision this as being the more romantic view ... that art cannot be fully controlled or contained, but merely captured, when inspiration and energy collide in a certain way.

Anyway, there's a part in the "Making of" where director Martin Scorsese talks about feeling the emotions of the characters in the movie after reading the script...

"If I could verbalize it, I wouldn't have had to make the picture ... I felt all those feelings in that story, at that time.... and so this was something I thought that was special to express."

...which reminds me that that's what I always thought made a great film, book, work of art, song, etc. truly great. Expressing the unexpressable. It's like making the impossible happen. It's like magic.

A couple other fun things...

Roger Ebert's original review of the film.

The Making of Taxi Driver, via YouTube.

Drinking

We're talking about alcohol in "homework club" last week and I'm wondering what it is about my own drinking that I enjoy, fear, crave, and sometimes fear because of the craving.

I do think humans, by and large, are somehow drawn to intoxicants (and all sorts of other things), but in my case, I don't think it's as simple. And when I look around I'm amazed how pervasive it is in my life.

Ten years ago it would not have bothered me if I had no beer in my fridge. Now it does. It is the same fridge, in fact, that I had growing up -- filled with the same sort of cheap beer that I fetched for Dad. Or the guy that was physically there when Dad was drunk.

Adding to these thoughts was my slip into memoir territory a few days ago, when I picked up Augusten Burroughs' Dry, which is about, of course, alcoholism.

I'm a cynical about memoirs, and Burroughs seems to have made a career out of them. Two-thirds the way through, my cynicism remains intact. But this book has planted in me this notion -- that there's a slight possibility that I have another person inside of me, a person with desires different than my own, maybe even contradictory desires. And that this person could be working against me. That maybe I need to watch it.

Warm fuzzies time

To me, good writing is about the communication that happens between writer and audience, but it's basically a one-way street -- until the reader is right there in front of your face, telling you what works and what doesn't. Or, like Evil Kneivel, taking a baseball bat to your arm.

Anyway, I don't know why I waited 41 years to join a writer's group. I've been traveling down a one-way street for a long, long time... unless perhaps it was fate guiding me, because the writing group I'm in is pretty effing amazing.

Of course I have nothing to compare it to. But I can't imagine a more talented, funny, and self-motivated group of individuals. Every week I learn something new, and leave joyful and inspired. And thankful.