Product: Mean Streets (1973)
Rating: 5.0
an intelligent and artistic film
For those of you that have seen all the mob movies out there, mean streets isn't like any of them. Its not really a mob movie. Its not supposed to wow you with a plot wherein so and so double crosses so and so and gets wacked by franky the bull. Having not grown up in that time period and having only been to new york a few times, this film transports me to another world. When its over it seems like that world still exists. You'll feel like you are in New York, you'll feel like the characters are real people because the acting, dialogue and camera work are fantastic. My favorite scene is where johnny boy (deniro) is explaining to charlie (Keitel) what happened to all his money outside of the bar. No one could have written that dialogue, its so fresh and off the cuff, so believable and you can't take your eyes off of that scene for a second, even though its really a pointless scene in the plot. Scorsese shows you the decisions made by the ever complex Charlie and you can spend the entire movie trying to figure out why charlie does the things he does. You can't categorize Charlie, one minute he's comforting Johnny who goes crazy and starts shooting a gun off the roof of a building, and the next minute he's throwing a guy out of a bar simply because he's jewish; one minute he's kissing his girlfriend and the next he's telling her he doesn't love her. Charlie's not always the nice guy he seems to be. He wants to be a good person, but he's influenced by his friends and by his uncle, the local mob boss and by his desire to help Johnny boy and make a pennance for his sins. Charlie has too many conflicting agendas on his plate and that's what leads to the dramatic ending. This is one of those intellectual type movies, so for those of you that just want to be entertained and can't appreciate art and intelligence in a film, this isn't for you, hence some of the bad ratings below.