Marty Jacobs

It’s like it’s a crime movie about Catholic guilt. That’s what I’m hearing. There’s literally little to no crime until the end. It’s just a rough neighborhood, so I get why this feels like Scorsese himself understanding how he was raised in Little Italy, but it just feels like Little Italy is the hood and Charlie is trying to save Johnny Boy’s ass all the time until he realizes, yo, this guy doesn’t even want to save himself, so he has to force saving himself. But you can’t force salvation. It’s religious because faith is a choice in Catholicism. You have to have faith to be saved; you have to make that choice. And Johnny Boy could’ve, in a way. Charlie was sacrificing himself for Johnny Boy to do his penance, aka pay up, but he didn’t, and that had to be paid in blood sacrifice at the end of the movie. And it’s like, you could read into the elements, but I have to try a lot and stretch a lot for the themes that I want, and I don’t know if I want that. The crime is just, let’s beat each other up for a bit, then at the end, let’s shoot and kill somebody. The Catholic guilt is just the fire, and that’s really it. Like, we know Charlie is kind of a hypocrite, but it’s like in the loser-bum way, not in an introspective way. I think it’s a fine character-analysis film about Italian Americans. It’s the debut of that Scorsese trilogy that gets followed up by arguably his best movies in Raging Bull and Goodfellas. So yeah, this film is disappointing, but it’s oddly human, and it has its own charm. It’s a charming movie that’s just weaker than I was hoping.

Aaliyah and I we watched that new Spider-Man movie. I peeped the lowkey Jesus symbolism again with Spider-Man’s isolation consuming him. His mutation makes him more violent, almost killing a cop. His rage, his isolation—it consumes him, making him become more arachnid. And I had just watched Raging Bull earlier, so I noticed the similarities: his arachnid side is just him lashing out, his anger at being trapped behind the mask. The end of the movie is him realizing he’s neither. He takes off the chip that suppressed his arachnid side, yet he doesn’t lose his human side. He becomes truly both, just as Jesus is truly both God and man. Because of His love for His creation, God became man to redeem His creation. Peter Parker became fully Spider-Man out of the love for his friends, his love and care for Jean Grey, and Jean Grey’s love for Peter is what saves Peter from death. Through love, death is defeated, and we become fulfilled. Aaliyah just said, “Thank God they didn’t die,” and even in the romance between MJ and Pete, it’s lowkey chastity because we are intentionally deprived of the mutual romance in favor of just friendship, which I believe was the best decision because it gives the next films different options outside of MJ. And with the chastity theme, Peter doesn’t have to lose himself as much as he did for MJ earlier in the film. He isn’t a slave to that romance anymore, as he achieves closure through rejection.

This is a masterpiece and an amazing character study of Jake LaMotta. It’s very understandable why it’s considered De Niro’s best role. It’s primarily a movie about a boxer and his descent in every aspect of life. The ring is his escape, and as seen after retirement, the lack of it causes everything to collapse. His wife leaves him, his children leave him, he goes to jail, and all he does in that jail is punch his anger out by himself. LaMotta is a possessive man first and foremost. Everything must be under his control. He’s a proud man too. Vickie doing too much, according to him, is defiance of his authority. It attacks his pride, so he lashes out. He beats her. A kiss on the cheek is adultery to him because it removes her from his possession. His pride is only a façade, as he’s deeply insecure when it comes to Vickie. He believes his brother had sex with his wife, and based on nothing more than suspicion, he lashes out. LaMotta in the ring is a devil. He’s an animal. He’s a killer. He lashes out in the ring, where he’s a winner, the middleweight champion of the world. Yet, in my favorite scene from the film, LaMotta gets the ever-loving shit beaten out of him by Sugar Ray Robinson in their championship fight. He should be down, but he doesn’t go down, and his pride latches onto that. He walks up to Ray and says, “You never knocked me down.” LaMotta doesn’t even look like himself anymore, yet he clings to that because the only thing he truly controls is his pride.