Product: Mean Streets (1973)
Rating: 5.0
5 stars for me...maybe not for you
I remember taking a date to see Goodfellas when it came out in 1990 or 1991. When we left the theater I turned to my date & said "it kind of reminds me of my family". My date looked a little stunned and I had to expalin:, "well-you know--without the guns, the drugs and the killing. but the director got the attitudes just about right."Goodfellas got me interested in Scorsese, but it took me another 6 months to see "Mean Streets".If anything, the feeling of "it kind of reminds me of my family" became even stronger--again without the drugs, the murder and the guns, but until "Mean Streets" I'd never seen a movie where I felt like I knew everyone in the movie. It was intensely personal.There's a lot of quasi-snobby stuff written about how Mean Streets is a classic movie. People also say citizen kane is one of the greatest films ever. I've seen CK a couple of times and I think it's a pretty good film. I liked the story & I liked how it was filmed. But I probably fail to appreciate CK's greatness because i take a lot of its groundbreaking film-making for granted.Mean Streets might make you feel this way, too. There isn't much in the way of a standard plot in the movie. People lounge about, get in barroom brawls for dumb reasons. People argue about debts, about right and wrong, and yeah, a couple of people get shot.But if you're going to love the movie, you're either going to have to appreciate the fancy breakthrough cinematography or you're going to have to be the type of person who appreciates watching great actors and great characters go about their business, living their lives, like we all might have done in the early 1970s.That being said, I think the "mook" scene is one of the best movie scenes-ever.