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Movie Review: Raging Bull (Scorsese)

Raging Bull is one of those movies that is always on lists of great movies, so I had tivo get it for me, and it sat unwatched for months. I finally watched it, and after all of the things I had read about it, I wound up disappointed. The closing titles seem to indicate it was supposed to be a story of redemption in some way, but I didn't get that out of it. Trying to compress so many years of LaMotta's life into the movie made me have a hard time really feeling for the characters - it seemed so constructed. And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Movies don't need to have sympathetic characters to be good by any means, but they need to have emotionally engaging characters. And that didn't happen for me. I feel like I should put some more disclaimers on this, since it is supposed to be such a good movie - maybe I was too much under the influence of the margarita, or Dogme95, or something. But this didn't live up to the expectations. Maybe I know nothing about film. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for watching someone self-destruct in so many different ways. Maybe I wanted to understand why these people were doing what they were doing. It wasn't that I disliked it - it was well-constructed, seemed well-acted, definitely had some good scenes - but the whole thing together wasn't as good as I had seen it made out to be.