Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese brought to “Taxi Driver” not only a shared passion for European neorealist film but also the knowledge of what it is to feel lonely. The experience of isolation is what they both had in common with the film’s central character Travis Bickle, played with such implosive power by Robert De Niro.

“We identified with him,” Scorsese said of his first collaboration with Schrader. “We knew how he felt.”

Schrader was raised in Michigan by strict Calvinist Christian parents, and didn’t see a movie until he was 18 and could manage to sneak away to theaters, where he eventually fell in love with film.

Scorsese was born in Queens to devoutly Catholic Italian-American parents who often took him to the movies because he was too stricken with asthma to live a normal childhood playing with other neighborhood kids. He fell for movies early in life.

All of this fascinating background comes from a rich package of bonus features included in the 35th anniversary Blu-ray edition of “Taxi Driver,” featuring a revelatory making-of documentary and engagingly forthright interviews with Schrader and Scorsese, who also collaborated on two other modern classics, “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Fortunately for both men, they found better ways to work through their alienation than Bickle does. Their unbalanced, insomniac Vietnam vet takes a job as a dusk-to-dawn cabbie on the sleaziest streets of New York, meets and is rejected by a beautiful-but-vapid campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), fails in an attempt to assassinate her candidate, meets and makes a connection with a young prostitute (an amazingly savvy 12-year-old Jodie Foster) and (spoiler alert!) at the peak of mental overload slaughters the little girl’s slavers in one of the most shockingly realistic, graphically bloody denouements ever seen in a mainstream non-genre film.

Schrader’s pitch-dark screenplay was rejected by many a timid studio until producers Michael and Julia Phillips (“The Sting,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) stepped in to champion its cause, finally securing a deal with Columbia Pictures.

Bernard Herrmann finished the masterfully haunting, atmospheric musical score on the day of his death, Christmas Eve 1975, less than two months before the film‘s release. In remastered 5.1 surround, it’s never sounded better.

Packaged in a hardback cover with postcard reproductions of the U.S. poster and scenes from the film, this one is a must for any film buff’s collection.

— Gene Triplett

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Many a seasoned actress might be daunted by an identity-challenged character named “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” not to mention a player who’s still in drama school.

But Elizabeth Olsen, 22, slipped into the title role of Sean Durkin’s psychological thriller like a practiced pro.

“It’s so easy for people to write others off who do become part of a cult,” Olsen said in a phone interview from a publicity tour stop in Dallas. “It’s really easy for someone to say, ‘Oh, you know, clearly they’re easily influenced, they’re more likely to (give in to) peer pressure.’ But the truth is that it can happen to anyone who’s trying to fill a void or be part of something larger than themselves.”

She was speaking of Martha, a young woman who escapes from a cultlike farming “family” in the Catskills and attempts to re-enter the normal world at her sister’s posh lake house in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a film by first-time writer-director Durkin.

“I think initially the first thing I responded to, which I found really fascinating to explore, was kind of her growing paranoia,” Olsen said. “And that was something that was kind of like the launching-off point, where I just felt like I had so much compassion for her. … Instead of trying to figure out where it came from, and instead of making something like a clinical choice or creating a victim, I thought it would be really interesting to try and figure out how you could stand behind someone and defend them, in this story in particular.

“And so that was really what was the goal for me, was to not make her the victim and make her stronger than people would imagine.”

Serious about acting

The film also marks Olsen’s big-screen debut, although she’s no stranger to acting in front of a camera, having grown up playing herself in a series of direct-to-video films starring her famous twin sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. But interviewers are instructed by Olsen’s publicists not to ask about her siblings, as she’s obviously determined to stand on her own as a serious performer.

To that end, she studies her craft as a full-time student at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. She understudied on the off-Broadway play “Dust” and the Broadway production of “Impressionism” while attending college. Her other workshops include “Bottom of the World” by Lucy Thurber (Atlantic Theatre Company) and “The Living Newspaper” (DRI Theatricals). Olsen also has trained at the Atlantic Acting School and Moscow Art Theatre School.

Last year she landed her first feature role in the yet-to-be released “Peace, Love and Misunderstanding” with Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener, followed by “Martha Marcy May Marlene” with John Hawkes and Sarah Paulson, then “Silent House,” a remake of a successful Uruguayan horror thriller. This past spring she finished “Red Lights,” a drama about the paranormal with Robert De Niro, Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver, and she recently began work on “Liberal Arts,” a story about a relationship complicated by age difference, opposite Josh Radnor. All will be released in 2012.

“Martha” is the first of her films to hit theaters.

“Sean and I, what we did … we filmed all the farm stuff first at the cult, and then we went to the lake house,” Olsen said. “So, by the time we went to the lake house, he had already

Elizabeth Olsen, Sean Durkin

almost given the character to me and trusted me with it. And so when I would have questions or I would feel apprehensive, Sean would always say, like, ‘You know what you’re doing.’ Like, ‘You know her. You’re fine.’

“You know, if I did need help, he’d give it. But for the most part I did feel superconnected to this character. So when I saw it for the first time, it was also my first time seeing myself on-screen. It was very strange, because I did feel so connected to her, and now when I watched, I was like, ‘I am nothing like that woman.’ That was an interesting experience.”

Behind Phil Spector’s lush, multi-layered acoustic “Wall of Sound” – the richly engrossing recording style that defined an entire epoch of pop music – the visionary record producer was busily evolving into a world-class eccentric, a resentful egotist, a self-styled unappreciated genius and a convicted murderer.

Recent bizarre news images of Spector, with his fright-wig hairstyle and sallow eyes, belie the smart, whippet thin, mod hipster who scored his first pop hit (“To Know Him Is to Love Him”) at age 17 and went on to produce in his painstaking, inimitable style countless generation-defining recordings of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, ranging through “Be My Baby,” “He’s a Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Let It Be” and “Imagine.”

“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector” offers up a fascinating if erratic documentary portrait of this tortured genius at the nadir of his career and life, while he was first being tried for the shooting death of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson one hazy-boozy night at his Alhambra, Calif., mansion.

British director Vikram Jayanti constructs his film around a series of BBC interviews he conducted with the notoriously reclusive Spector in the midst of his first murder trial in 2007.

While Jayanti supports the interviews with rich archival footage of musicians reminiscing and performing Spector’s signature songs, with printed critical analyses from rock journalist Mick Brown and with spotty peeks at Spector’s murder trials (after an initial mistrial, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years to life), it’s the interview revelations from the eminently quotable Spector that provide the film’s most juicy bits of celebrity psychopathology and music history.

For instance:

Despite his wealth and myriad successes, Spector still deeply resents those who ostracized him as an oddball in high school. He also resents rock great Buddy Holly (“He got a postage stamp even though he was only in rock ’n’ roll for three years,” Spector sniffs.)

Spector views his own accomplishments, his “little symphonies for the kids,” as being on par with the works of Bach, Michelangelo, Leonard da Vinci and Galileo.

Spector claims credit for salvaging the careers of filmmaker Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro by not shutting down the release of “Mean Streets” for the unauthorized use of “Be My Baby,” and for massaging the Beatles’ chaotic studio tapes into the classic “Let It Be” album.

Spector views editing as a cheat, a lazy shortcut to great music. He scoffs at Brian Wilson’s celebrated “Good Vibrations” as a mere “edit record.”

Despite his obvious megalomania and paranoia, Spector proves to be hugely entertaining in conversation – although he clearly emerges here as a deeply troubled, profoundly delusional and creepily dangerous man.

Jayanti’s film works best when it’s letting Spector speak. It falls far short of providing any real insight into his guilt or innocence in Clarkson’s death. And its sketchy depictions of the murder trial are more maddening than enlightening.

Still, as a sort of rock-Shakespearean tragedy of hubris and human frailty, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector” is essential viewing for any baby boomer who ever rhapsodized over the radio romanticism of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” or puzzled over the queasy, misogynistic mysteries of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).”

- Dennis King

“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector”

Not rated
1:42
3 stars
(Language)

Jessica Alba

As chopped-off noggins roll around like careening bowling balls and as blood spews in ghoulish crimson fountains, “Machete” pushes the boundaries of on-screen action violence to the limits of ridiculousness and beyond.

To say writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s comic-book vigilante saga is madly, gleefully over the top is a gross understatement. In fact, it’s a vigorously in-your-face, gloriously gory, politically incorrect romp through B-movie exploitation territory, all gussied up with a campy Hollywood cast of stars, starlets and has-beens.

Serving as an unlikely star vehicle for Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo, whose pocked face and lumbering countenance scream anti-leading man, “Machete” realizes a long-held scheme by the Austin-based filmmaker to create a franchise that casts Trejo as a sort of Mexican Charles Bronson.

Machete, a renegade Mexican federale who dispatches bad guys with vicious sweeps of his broad blade, first showed up on movie screens in a garish “fake trailer” inserted into Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s tandem 2007 B-movie tribute, “Grindhouse.”

And true to Rodriguez’s penchant for wasting nothing, the filmmaker responded to the wild popularity of that tongue-in-cheek trailer by dusting off a mothballed 1993 script and giving us a full-out Machete, a sort of brutish but decent modern-day Zorro who wields not a whippet-like rapier but instead swings a mean, meat-cleaving machete.

The story is mainly boilerplate stuff (with some sly satirical digs at so-called immigration reform and U.S. schizophrenia toward migrant workers from south of the border).

Machete is hired by a shady political hack (an oily Jeff Fahey) to assassinate the bloviating Texas state Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro in a wink-wink performance), who’s advocating an electric fence all along the U.S.-Mexican border.

But quickly Machete finds himself double-crossed and on the run, accused of the failed assassination attempt. Soon he’s caught up amid the sexy wiles of a pursuing ICE agent (Jessica Alba), the underground schemes of a fiery Hispanic revolutionary (Michelle Rodriguez), the dastardly conniving of a cruel Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal in the blackest hair-dye job imaginable) and the political chicanery of the crooked McLaughlin and his murderous border vigilante cohort (Don Johnson sporting prison-warden shades).

Another Rodriguez regular, Cheech Marin, shows up to earthy comic effect as Machete’s ally and brother, a profane, shotgun-slinging Catholic priest. Also, Lindsey Lohan turns in a good-sport appearance as the pampered, petulant daughter of wealth who goes from stark naked to a nun’s habit in the wink of eye.

Throughout, Rodriguez (along with co-director Ethan Maniquis and co-writer-cousin Alvaro Rodriguez) keeps the camera focused on the hulkish but oddly likable Trejo. And he paints the whole thing in garish, comic-book hues, packs it with pithy-campy dialogue and punctuates it with ultra-violent set pieces featuring shootouts, gang rumbles and grisly killing effects (how about those multiple decapitations or a zinging machete blade through a skull?).

It’s all offered up with the darkest, most mocking fanboy brio. “Machete,” with its cynical humor and zestful urge to shock, might not find a mainstream following. But among comic-book fans, youthful hipsters and admirers of Rodriguez’s maverick methods, this will certainly be cutting-edge stuff. Characteristically, Rodriguez ends the film with teasers for two supposed sequels – “Machete Kills” and “Machete Kills Again.”

- Dennis King

“Machete”

R
1:45
2.5 stars
Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson.
(Strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity)

Danny Trejo

Austin-based Robert Rodriguez has earned his reputation as a maverick, do-it-all filmmaker who makes the most of every resource at his disposal. Give him left-over chicken gizzards, he’ll make a tasty chicken soup.

He was, after all, the guy whose first breakout hit, 1992’s “El mariachi,” was made for the Mexican video market for a paltry $7,000, part of which he reportedly earned by working as a test subject in medical science tests.

Since establishing his Troublemaker Studios in his Texas hometown, Rodriguez has gone on to much bigger things, but always with that hand-made ethic that often sees him serving on his films as director, producer, writer, editor, musical composer, cinematographer, sound technician, visual-effects artist, electrician, actor, production designer, miscellaneous crew and more.

So it’s not surprising that this style of using everything but the kitchen sink to make his movies comes to the fore in his newest picture – the over-the-top actioner “Machete,” an amazing amalgam of low-budget, B-movie panache and big-time Hollywood star power.

The overarching gag about “Machete” is that it’s the classic example of the tail wagging the dog; it’s a feature-length movie drawn from one of several “fake trailers” included in Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 exploitation double feature, “Grindhouse.”

Apparently, audience buzz for the “Machete” trailer was so strong that Rodriguez decided make a “Machete” movie for real. So he dusted off an unproduced script he’d written in 1993, after he’d first cast Danny Trejo in “Desperado.” Then, recycling footage from the fake trailer, casting Trejo in the lead and adding star power with a surprisingly potent cast that includes Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson and Lindsey Lohan, Rodriguez gradually built a “Machete” that 20th Century Fox elected to release as a late-summer theatrical feature.

“Machete” will screen at the 67th Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday (Sept. 1) and open nationwide in the U.S. on Friday.

Oddly enough, this is not the first time a trailer has created a sensation that turned the fate of the movie it was previewing.

When Warner Bros. was prepping Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” for its 1991 theatrical release, a preview trailer was released months in advance to whet audiences’ appetites. The trailer featured a cutting-edge, digital arrow-cam shot that followed an arrow from the archer’s bow as it zipped through the forest and thudded into the trunk of a tree. The shot was not originally included in the film. But the buzz created by that remarkable digital sequence persuaded director Kevin Reynolds and the producers to include a similar arrow-cam shot in the finished film. It became the movie’s signature image.

See? The tail wagging the dog.

- Dennis King

Silly names have been a staple of comedy since the early days of vaudeville, and when old burlesque performers eventually moved in front of Hollywood’s rolling cameras their outlandish sobriquets, garish noms de plume, goofy monikers and loopy pseudonyms came along with them

And so pioneers of comedy traipsed across Nickelodeon screens in the guise of characters such as Egbert Souse, Cuthbert J. Twillie, Larson E. Whipsnide, T. Frothingill Bellows, Rollo La Rue, Elmer Prettywillie and Professor Eustace McGargle (all W.C. Fields inventions), or as Wolf J. Flywheel, Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Otis B. Driftwood and Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (a.k.a. Groucho Marx).

That va-va-voom vamp Mae West gave us the suggestive Marlo Manners, Flower Belle Lee and Peaches O’Day.

And while the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy mostly appeared onscreen in their heyday as Stan and Ollie, their earlier screen incarnations, both together and individually, were rich with purple appellations. Stan boasted performances as Ferdinand Finkleberry, Romaine Ricketts, Winchell McSweeney, Rhubarb Vaselino, Gabriel Goober, Dippy Donawho and Magnum Dippytack, while Ollie donned such character names as J. Piedmont Mumblethunder, Sharkey Nye, Oswald Schwartzkopple and Solomon Soopmeat.

Preston Sturges, that master of screwball comedy from the 1930s and ‘40s, wrote into his scripts such distinctively nutty character names as Dr. Zodiac Z. Zippe (“Hotel Haywire”), Charles Poncefort Pike (“The Lady Eve”), Constable Edmund Kockenlocker (“The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”), Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith and Sgt. Heppelfinger (“Hail the Conquering Hero”), Harold Diddlebock and E.J. Waggleberry (“The Sin of Harold Diddlebock”) and Judge Alfalfa J. O’Toole (“The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend”).

Comic Bob Hope kept close to his vaudeville roots with such movie names as Milford Farnsworth (“Alias Jesse James”), Pippo Popolino (“Casanova’s Big Night”), Hot Lips Barton (“Road to Rio”), Painless Peter Potter (“The Paleface”) and Humphrey “Sorrowful” Jones (“Sorrowful Jones”).

Even sexpot Marilyn Monroe wasn’t immune to a little suggestively silly nicknaming, appearing on screen as such characters as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (“Some Like It Hot”), Pola Debevoise (“How to Marry a Millionaire”) and Dusky Ledoux (“Right Cross”).

Hollywood he-men generally veered toward macho character names in their movies, but every so often they also got saddled with slightly silly monikers. John Wayne turned in one of his best performances ever as Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit,” and as an early matinee cowpoke the Duke labored under such trumped-up sagebrush pseudonyms as Stony Brooke, Duke Slade, Biff Smith, Dare Rudd and Singin’ Sandy Saunders.

Even big star James Stewart suspended his leading man image to play such whimsically named characters as Mattie Appleyard (“Fools’ Parade”), Elwood P. Dowd (“Harvey”) and Rowdy Dow (“The Gorgeous Hussy”).

Some modern comic actors still hold to that old tradition of silly names, notably Ben Stiller, who has created such amusing screen roles as Gaylord Focker (“Meet the Parents”), Tugg Speedman (“Tropic Thunder”), Derek Zoolander (“Zoolander”), Bwick Elias (“If Lucy Fell”), Garth Motherloving (TV’s “The Simpsons”) and Reuben Feffer (“Along Came Polly”). And Woody Allen has contributed two of the best with nebbishy Fielding Mellish (“Bananas”) and the pseudo-murderous Virgil Starkwell (“Take the Money and Run”).

Of course, the silly name phenomenon isn’t limited to film comedies. Occasionally, goofy character names even show up in heavyweight dramas – note Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt (“Interview With the Vampire”) or Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle (“Taxi Driver”). The list is endless.

If there were a Silly Name Hall of Fame we’d nominate all of the above, plus the following, for a place of honor:

Tom Cruise again as Cole Trickle (“Days of Thunder”), Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (“Goldfinger”), Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe (“Every Which Way But Loose”), Uma Thurman as Beatrix Kiddo (“Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2”), Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler (“Boogie Nights”), Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo (“Midnight Cowboy”), Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street”), Scott B. Morgan (uncredited) as Keyser Soze (“The Usual Suspects”), Harvey Korman as Hedley Lamarr (“Blazing Saddles”), Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink (“Reservoir Dogs”), Yano Anaya and Zack Ward as Grover Dill and Scut Farkus (“A Christmas Story”), Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips O’Houlihan (“MASH”), Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite (“Napoleon Dynamite”), Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley (“Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”).

And naturally there’s George Lucas, who stands in a category of his own for silly and sillier names via “Star Wars” – from the mainstays Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader to supporting players such as Boba Fett, Mace Windu, Jar Jar Binks, Hermi Odle, Jek Porkins, Kit Fisto, Lak Sivrak, Momaw Nadon, Mon Mothma, Nute Gunray, Ponda Baba, Salacious B. Crumb, Sy Snootles, Sio Bibble, Plo Koon, Dexter Jettster and on and on.

Did we leave any out? Have your own favorites? Send them in to dking@wimgo.com and we’ll include them soon in an updated version of this post.

- Dennis King