Reviewing the Best Movies Ever Made: Raging Bull, Man with a Movie Camera, The Wizard of Oz
In this entry in the Review the Best Movies Ever Made series, we’ll take a look at a sports drama based on a true story, a documentary chronically life in the late-1920s Soviet Union, and a children’s fantasy adventure. Do I recommend getting into the ring with Jake LaMotta? How about a bike ride with a camera through Moscow? Or would I suggest a trip to Oz with Dorothy and Toto?
Raging Bull (1980)
AFI No. 4
United Artists, 129 minutes
Raging Bull is an overrated biographical sports drama about professional boxer Jake LaMotta, an abusive brute who boxed in the 1940s and 50s. The film is directed by Martin Scorsese, and when you consider that Scorsese has directed masterpieces like Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and The Departed, it’s crazy that this film is viewed as his best work by many critics.
Raging Bull is a well-made film, with quality acting and cinematography. It’s the story of the film, following the rise and fall of Jake LaMotta, which feels really uninspired, and is also extremely problematic when viewed in 2023. Not only are we watching a character who experiences absolutely no growth throughout the course of the film, but worst of all (in terms of storytelling), Jake is sort of boring. In lots of cases, a character with mostly negative personality traits can be entertaining because he or she is charismatic and interesting – we might not “like” these characters personality-wise, but we can’t stop watching them.
An example of this type of character is the Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. He might be a homicidal maniac, but you can’t deny that when the Joker’s on the screen, it’s hard to look away. Another captivating character is Bill the Butcher from Scorsese’s own Gangs of New York. While these two examples might not be the protagonists of their respective stories, it’s easy to argue that they are their films most interesting characters. Well, Jake is the protagonist of Raging Bull, and he’s also an uninteresting, unlikeable jerk. Oh, and he’s a pedophile.
The entire first third of Raging Bull plays out like the fantasy of a rich pedophile who’d be right at home on Epstein Island. Jake is rich with a fancy car, and he’s the best fighter in the entire city. So, when he spots a fifteen-year-old at the swimming pool named Vikki, he’s able to seduce (AKA manipulate her) with said car and money into sleeping with him. This is also despite the fact that Jake is already married (to a woman he abuses).
The actress cast to play Vikki was around twenty-years-old at the time of filming, so maybe it was easy for those original critics who praised the movie to forget that she’s supposed to be a child. It’s not only cringy, but very gross, when we watch Robert De Niro’s Jake try to get a character that’s supposed to be 15 to have sex with him. In reality, the real Jake LaMotta married Vikki when she was 16, pregnant with his child, and he was in his mid-twenties. Why anyone would want to make a movie based off of the memoirs of such a person, even if the point was to critique him, is beyond me.
The parts of the story that focus on LaMotta as a boxer are fine, with the fights themselves being choreographed well, but the plot doesn’t stand out as particularly interesting. I’d wager that basically any ex-champion boxer of the era would have an equally interesting life story. The only thing setting Jake apart is just how much of a bad person he is.
If you’re looking for a well-made boxing film, I’d recommend watching Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky instead of Raging Bull. That might not be a true story, but it’s a better movie overall that’s also far more enjoyable. Watching a film about a paranoid dullard of a man who later in his life admitted to being a rapist who beat his wives (LaMotta ended up being married seven times before dying in 2017), doesn’t have too much appeal to me.
Grade: 4/10
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Sight & Sound No. 9
VUFKU, 68 minutes
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film from the Soviet Union. The movie is unlike anything I’d seen before – the best way I can describe Man with a Movie Camera is that it’s like opening a time capsule to see what urban life was like in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s.
In the film, we see the titular man with the camera move throughout the city, but the subject of the documentary is society as a whole more than it is the man himself, though we are seeing things through his camera lens. Viewers watch citizens from all walks of life, different modes of transportation, industry, work, play, sports, life, and death, and much more. It’s quite the experience, and it provides unique insight into what the world was like at a certain place and time.
Man with a Movie Camera is divided into six separate parts, one for each of the reels it was originally printed on, and it’s made up of a series of fast-paced shots, each usually only lasting a few seconds. In total, there are over 1,700 separate shots. With its quick pace and all the different aspects of life it was showing, I was never bored during the movie.
The film is also well-known for employing a wide-range of different and, for the time, innovative techniques. In the documentary, you’ll find techniques like freeze frames, fast and slow motion, stop motion, tracking shots, and match cuts.
The version of Man with a Movie Camera I watched (on Amazon Prime), was accompanied by original music composed and performed by The Alloy Orchestra. This instrumental music was excellent and definitely added a lot to the images being shown onscreen.
Overall, Man with a Movie Camera is still very watchable nearly 100-years after it was made. Viewing it feels like watching a piece of history more than it does a typical movie, and I’d definitely recommend it to history buffs or those wanting a unique experience.
Grade: 9/10
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
AFI No. 10
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 101 minutes
There have been lots of adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but MGM’s 1939 musical fantasy film is definitely the most well-known, and that’s for good reason. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming, and starring Judy Garland, is still fantastic by 2023 standards.
Garland, in the lead role of Dorothy Gale, is great, with both her singing and acting being outstanding. Dorothy, despite her young age, is an extremely active protagonist and she really drives the story forward, both before we even get to Oz, in her running away from home (for good reason), and then after she arrives in Oz, when she begins her quest to find a way back to Kansas.
Surrounding Dorothy is one of the best casts of characters to have ever been assembled. Practically every character in the movie is well-known and iconic – from Dorothy’s three traveling companions, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, to the Wicked Witch of the West, and even Oz. It’s hard to think of a movie with more iconic characters, as a whole, than this film.
The costumes for every character are just spot-on, as is the design of the different parts of Oz we journey to with Dorothy. The look (the color!) of this movie is outstanding. The scene where Dorothy opens the front door to her house and emerges from a world of black and white into the vibrant, colorful land of Oz is probably my favorite moment in the entire movie.
The songs in the movie are, for the most part, also great. Re-watching The Wizard of Oz, I was surprised by how many of the film’s best songs occur in the first half of the movie (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Munchkinland,” “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “If I Only Had a Brain”). There’s a lot more singing in general when Dorothy first arrives, and after she first reaches Emerald City there are fewer musical numbers.
That’s not to say that the latter half of the film is without memorable moments though, because it’s definitely not. Overall, The Wizard of Oz is a magical movie filled with some of the best costumes, sets, and characters to ever grace the silver screen. It’s a supremely worthwhile fantasy epic that can be enjoyed by moviegoers of all ages that holds up surprisingly well.
Grade: 9.5/10
Rankings: The 25 “Best” Movies Rated So Far
Schindler's List (1993): 10/10 (AFI No. 8, IMDb No. 6)
The Wizard of Oz (1939): 9.5/10 (AFI No. 10)
Casablanca (1942): 9/10 (AFI No. 3)
The Godfather (1972): 9/10 (AFI No. 2, IMDb No. 2)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929): 9/10 (S&S No. 9)
The Godfather Part II (1974): 8/10 (IMDb No. 4)
Citizen Kane (1941): 4/10 (AFI No. 1, S&S No. 3)
Raging Bull (1980): 4/10 (AFI No. 4)
Beau Travail (1999): 1.5/10 (S&S No. 7)