Raging Bull

 Raging Bull - good movie, good movie. DeNiro, Scorsese, Pesci, Schoonmaker, Schrader. It's rightly considered a masterpiece. I mean, it's no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Braindead or Evil Dead 2, but it's good.

 In short, the movie follows Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) as he struggles to make it in the world of middle-weight boxing on his own terms with his brother (Joe Pesci) as his manager. That doesn't work out and he's finally forced to throw a fight to get a shot at the title. This he does, but in such a (hilariously) shoddy way that his career gets derailed for a while. Once he becomes a contender he quickly wins the belt, defends it for a couple of years and loses it to Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes); He quits boxing for personal reasons soon after, and ends up playing host on increasingly seedier clubs.

 But this isn't a sports story, it's an unsparing character study, so all that is the background to Jake's motivations, hang-ups, and his relationships to his brother (Joe Pesci, never better) and his second wife (Cathy Moriarty).
 It's a brutal movie: the fights look more like torture - or self-flagellation - than sport, rendered in beautiful, stark black and white by DP Michael Chapman. Meanwhile the drama aspects are awash in the stew of toxic masculinity the La Mottas breathe day in day out and Jake's inability to not be the sort of bum he keeps denigrating. It's a sad, upsetting, cringe-inducing story that's deceptively simple and pretty hard to watch even as Scorsese and his editor of choice Thelma Schoonmaker keep the pace brisk and deceptively breezy. And the acting is, of course, incredible.

 I really don't feel equipped to talk about this one! I like it, I can appreciate what it's doing and how well it does it - but its brutal, ugly thing is very different from the type of brutal, ugly things that I enjoy. Over the years I've read up on it enough to appreciate a lot of what it's up to (and watching a lot of Schrader-scripted films has also helped get a handle on it). But as a watching experience, I enjoy almost every other movie Scorsese's made more than this one.