Raging Bull (1980)****
You can pick up the 2-disc collector's edition at Target this week for just $10. Watched it with the Scorsese-Schoonmaker commentary on last night and I was surprised to learn that the amazing fight sequences, which appear to be marvels of the film editor's art, were in fact all planned out in advance. Schoonmaker says "There wasn't much for me to do" in putting the sequences together since Scorsese had already cut it in his head and storyboarded everything. So maybe I was a little hasty in chastising Steven Soderburgh below for editing "Bubble" on the fly? Not so fast. Scorsese says that one of his original cuts had a flashback structure where we would see the older Jake, then a sequence in the past, then the older again, then back to the younger, etc. After watching it though, he said almost looked like there were two characters, two Jakes and it was off-putting. He hit upon the bookend approach and that made all the difference.