Customer Reviews

Mean Streets [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Reasons why this is my favourite film (I've watched it around 30 times in 2 or 3 years):

* It's as authentic as Martin Scorsese ever gets. He lived this film and you get that from the first minute. He also wrote it, which is pretty unusual for a Scorsese film.
* The opening quote: "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is BS and you know it".
* The opening titles over 1970's family home videos. I love it, and the song too, 'Be my Baby'. Any time you hear that song after watching this film you see Charlie's head hit the pillow and the credits start up. The wall of sound music makes me well up, in a happy way. Note: Martin Scorsese appears (young and sporting a very '70's hairstyle) for a fraction of a second during these. You only see him if you spend five minutes looking for it by using the the pause or slow button on your remote control!
* The end scene (CAR CHASE! YES!). I'm not giving anything away here, but it was a scene that became an influence and source of admiration for many directors for a reason. Unforgettable.
* There's not a speck of filler in this film, even during the laid back moments in bars. It's lean and mean.
* It's also hilarious. People often miss the fact that Scorsese films are rich in humour and often very quotable (e.g. "Mook? I'm a mook? What's a mook? I'll give you mook!" *thump* N.B. A mook is a kind of bigmouth, all talk and no substance).
* The semi-docudrama look. I often prefer this style to high-budget gloss.
* The fact that it's not only a realistic portrayal of gangster life (supposedly, I wouldn't know) but a rich and deeply felt portrayal of a community. The people of this community don't chase violence - violence seems to follow directly after them. Scorsese's dubious glamourisation of thugs, thieves and killers would come later.
* Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro both give excellent performances. De Niro shines in one of his greatest early moments - he just doesn't get more entertaining than this. Keitel proves that he can be both macho and sympathetic, and, importantly, that he can equal De Niro in the acting department. I would actually say that Keitel is the better actor in this movie due to his his understatement. Of course a quieter performance doesn't automatically mean a better one, but here you can tell that De Niro is trying to outdo Keitel through a little overacting. But Keitel's performance, in my opinion, is less manic and more thoughtful, insightful. You sense his guilt and frustration without seeing him explode completely. It's more heartfelt. You feel his pain growing throughout the movie. Having said that, De Niro is still very convincing despite being occasionally over the top and certainly delivers in the entertainment department. 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' indeed.
* 1970's New York. The grime, crime, streets, real people and their experiences, the city at night, atmosphere, mob, clothes, haircuts, look and sounds, etc. It's fascinating and exciting despite (or due to) its being shadowy and gritty. I'm 27 years old and British but this film makes me feel like I was there. Remember the quote from Once Upon a Time in America: "I like the smell of the streets, it opens up my lungs"! (also De Niro). You don't just see and hear this film, you can almost breathe it in.
* The music. Songs by The Rolling Stones are used to great effect, but the whole film is a jukebox of eclectic music from many eras. And if you enjoy Neapolitan love songs, there are many here. If you don't, you soon will!
* The classic quotes. "What's da matter wi' me? What's da matter wiCHOO?" Never gets old.
* The use of a live (and rare) rendition of Steppin' Out by Cream over the car chase.
* The very last song. It's a corny old Italian/Sicilian tune sung by a group of very patriotic amateurs, and I always find myself listening to it until the end credits are completely finished rolling.
* The Sicilian/Italian American accents.
* It made me want to learn Italian! I did learn Italian. I sucked, but I tried.
* It runs at the pace it wants to, i.e. it can be slow. But this isn't a story you can shoot through like a bullet, it needs your attention if you want to appreciate it at all. If you have attention deficit disorder don't bother. If you want a movie with a quick buildup of pace, a truckload of special effects and sounds that blast at you crudely like insane foghorns, watch Shutter Island or something like it. If you want a good story with engaging and complex characters, watch this - twice at least.

Overall an excellent film for Scorsese fans and admirers, movie buffs, cineastes and the like, but also makes for great entertainment.

'Mean Streets' is, in my opinion, one of Martin Scorsese's best, if not THE best, film he has made. It's the film that established him as a unique film director, and it's an absolute must-buy!

Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' was released in between the two Godfather epics in 1973, and although it shared with the Godfather a passion for Italian-American gangsters, 'Mean Streets' went a completely different way and focused on the everyday lives of gangsters when they mess about, get drunk, shoot some pool, etc. Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, a man who has dreams of moving up in the world; his uncle, a big player in the New York underworld, has plans for Charlie, but Charlie is prevented from rising due to his friendship with Johnny Boy, a 'bum' who gets Charlie into a lot of trouble. When Johnny Boy continues to avoid paying a large loan back to Charlie's friend Michael, things take a dramatic turn for the worse...

Everything about this movie is brilliant. The acting, especially Keitel and Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy, is amazing; it's unbelievable to think that the following year De Niro would win an Oscar for playing the young Vito Corleone, a character that is miles apart from the unstable Johnny Boy - his performance clearly shows what a talent De Niro is. Critics have argued that the plot is too weak and thin, yet I believe it's exactly the opposite: the film is rich in detail (a Scorsese trademark), and the movie addresses Charlie's Catholic guilt - he wants to move up in the underworld, but he fears he will be punished in hell if he does not look after the crazy Johnny Boy. Charlie is torn between the Church, Johnny Boy, and his uncle - you can see why 'Mean Streets' is anything BUT thin!

But the main attraction of the film is Scorsese's direction. You can see how 'Goodfellas', 'Pulp Fiction', 'The Sopranos', etc. came about thanks to 'Mean Streets' - it looks gritty, the fight scenes are chaotic, and very rude language dominates the film. And despite its low budget, Scorsese makes the film look very realistic, along with his trademark rock 'n' roll soundtrack scoring the movie.

The film is like a fast rollercoaster; the camera never stops moving, and it's never boring. I would recommend 'Mean Streets' to every Scorsese and gangster fan as well as most film buffs, because not only is it a fantastic movie, but it's one of the most influential movies in American cinema, and I urge you to buy it! NOW!!

Orson Welles said that a director's first film was always his best because he would put more into it and hadn't got into bad habits like developing a style yet. Mean Streets may not be Scorsese's first film, but it otherwise bears out Welles' words. Set in New York's Little Italy, Harvey Keitel plays Michael, who exists on the fringes of crime and whose dreams of managing a restaurant his money-lending uncle is about to take over are threatened by his affair with his epileptic cousin (Amy Robinson) and his terminally unreliable childhood friend Johnny Boy's pressing debts.

As with Goodfellas, it is plot-lite and style heavy, but where in the latter the style dominated, here it has a rough-cut and ready-dubbed feel that energises the film and accurately reflects the precarious state of the characters, be it financial, mental or moral. All the trademarks are here - the tracking shots down bars, the sudden explosions of violence, a popular music soundtrack that exists as much within the film as over it, the concern with incompatibility of religion with everyday life - but here they are fresh and integral to the film rather than carefully stage-managed.

If De Niro's unstable Johnny Boy now looks a bit too much like barnstorming with many of the tricks he has since pretty much worn out through over-use, Keitel's diplomatic lead and the astonishingly natural performances from the supporting cast are the real glue that holds the film together and convince us we are eavesdropping on real lives.

Filled with astonishing moments Mean Streets remains one of the few key American films of the early Seventies that still grabs your undivided attention with none of its original power diluted by time and imitation.

This is an overlooked and underrated masterpiece from genius Martin Scorsese. Obviously made on a low budget with (at the time)budding actors Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro this is a genuine, gritty and grainy depiction of Italian-American inner city life. The vast majority of the film is set in bars and backrooms or in dark streets and alleys, filmed with a handheld camera that occasionally sways, pursues running characters or makes use of other obscure techniques that sometimes make the film so real that you think you are watching a documentary.

It is the stark realities, the slim budget and the improvisational work and looseness of the plot that makes 'Mean Streets' so shockingly real in tone and much more aggressive and emotional than 'Goodfellas' or 'The Godfather'. The characters are amongst the most evocative and human ever committed to film, they are like real people summoned up from the lives of the director and the actors.

Harvey Keitel is brilliant as Charlie, a young man with power and respect in his neighbourhood, yet also privately troubled by his faith and his conflicting compassionate nature which involves loving his epileptic girlfriend his uncle has forbidden him to see and supporting and helping her irredemable and troublesome cousin Johnny Boy.

De Niro plays Johnny Boy to perfection: laughing, jeering and fighting, really a young man in desperate need of support (which Charlie offers) but ultimately remains the insensitive idiot fool that leads to his downfall. Johnny Boy is the central focus of 'Mean streets', and he is so tempestuous and troubled and so naive and a fabulously watchable character.

It is said 'Mean Streets' lacks a tangible plot but I don't view this as a criticism. The film is an intimate painting of troubled city life that explores a number of very powerful themes in its 2 hrs. What does exist of the plot is a very simple story of unpaid debts and eventual violence, but the setting, the charcters dilemmas and the relationships between the charcaters is what makes the film so fantastically gritty and dangerously real and disturbing. There is vast space for Scorsese to throw in witty, humorous dialogue, extreme character development scenes, a vast music score (alternating between popular music of the time and Italian operetta style) and extreme violence and obscenely good camera work.

'Mean streets' is a college of beautiful scenes and characters, it is violent, touching and funny. The best scene is the improvised piece between Johnny Boy (De Niro) and Charlie (Keitel) five or ten minutes in when they discuss Johnny Boy's debts. Ten times more powerful than the disappointing 'Goodfellas' and 'Raging Bull's' earlier equal. However, I would suggest watching 'Raging Bull', 'Goodfellas' or 'Taxi Driver' to summon up the mainstream essence of Scorsese and De Niro's work before watching this more underground and different film.

I feel 'Mean Streets' is one of the finest films ever made, but for perhaps different reasons to many fans. True, it marks the start of the Scorsese-De Niro partnership. True also that it deals with issues of Catholicism, disturbed male protagonists alienated from society, and the gangland ethos, all of which are seen to inform much of the director's later work. But 'Mean Streets' is no dress rehearsal for the classics that are 'Goodfellas' and 'Raging Bull'. For me 'Mean Streets' is at least the equal of (and probably surpasses) Scorsese's later work.
The film deals with univeral 'human' issues in a very stylish and gripping way. The film centres on Charlie's (Harvey Keitel) various moral struggles and the dilemma of not being able to do the right thing by everyone all of the time. It deals with the painful paradox of wanting to live by your own rules, yet at the same time being unable to escape the values you've been brought up to believe in. For Charlie this is shown in his ambiguous relationship to the Catholic faith: confession doesn't work for him and he wants to make up for his own sins in his own way. Hence the saint-like devotion and tolerance he gives to the drop out, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). At the root of it all there is a lack of self-knowledge that I found heart-wrenching but at the same time not uncomfortable to watch. Charlie can't even admit to himself, let alone his girlfriend that he is just a young hoodlum who runs a numbers racket. A wannabe Corleone who is really more akin to the Dead End Kids.
So far this may sound like a well-to-do moralistic, not to mention pretentious, film, but these philosophical issues are imbued with a pulsating (mainly early-mid 60s) soundtrack and fresh film style. Scorsese is said to have drawn on the Frech New Wave filmmakers (in addition to his Hollywood hero directors) for inspiration, but the style that emerges is truly one all of its own. Right from the opening scenes it becomes clear that this is neither another typical Hollywood movie, nor just a marginal counter-cultural film. The pop soundtrack, inner monologue voiceover, expressionistic lighting and jump cuts make this one of the most visually and aurally compelling films I've seen. It has been criticised for its lack of narrative structure, but for me, the film rejects narrative conventions in order to expose them as precisely that: conventions. It stops listening to monolithic dictates about how films ought to be made in order to more fully explore the radical potential offered by the filmic medium.
Unfortunately the region 2 DVD is very limited: it is not presented in original widescreen aspect ratio (although there is no real harm done to the image) and has no extra features of any note. The music was often deliberately compressed by the filmmakers so a DVD transfer seems quite pointless in that respect. Nonetheless, whether on DVD or VHS, I heartily recommend this film to people who want to see something different to 'typical' polished Hollywood productions in terms of style, subject matter and storytelling. This is about as close to accessible 'art' as cinema has so far reached. It is also highly entertaining. Even if considered as merely a 100 minute pop video it is still auxilarating, visceral stuff.

I can understand why some people would dislike mean streets due to it's lack of plot and structure should they have watched the movie only once. It is, however, the same as passing comment on good music after only listening to it once. Impossible to judge, in my opinion.

Scorsese plays heavily on his childhood in content, introducing the audience to his world through the eyes of four local hoods. There is none of the morals of it's contemporary mafia based film, The Godfather... and none of the thrills and wealth portrayed later by Scorsese in 'Goodfellas'. It is a real world where gun crime is unusual and shocking and violence is sporadic and adrenalin fueled.

The cogs that keep the film moving forward are that of Charlie's questionable faith and his desire to prove himself by helping Johnny Boy free himself from a mountain of debt he has built up with Michael, a small time shark. The centre point for the scenario is a bar owned by Tony, and the four players weave in and out of each others lives with tensions getting more serious and a downfall becoming more inevitable as the film progresses.

Mean Streets is also improvisational comedy at it's best in parts. The relationship between Charlie and Johnny Boy (and the sheer talent of the two leads) allow much unscripted conversation to flow and it leaves you grinning widely, if not full out laughing.

I believe that taste is accountable for most things, and quality comes to a slightly lesser extent. To me, this film has something that I cannot put my finger on that makes it shine brightly. As mentioned before, it demands multiple viewings, but give it a chance... and watch it on the big screen if you're lucky enough to have it shown locally, and you might well discover a film that takes pride of place as your favourite, just as I did.

Martin Scorsese's most autobiographical movie bestows an energy and a vibrancy that hasn't diminished in the 30 years since it was made. Part of this wonderful energy is created by Scorsese's use of music, a cinematic trait he has continued to use successfully in all of his best movies. In fact in 'Mean Streets', Scorsese's use of 2 different styles of music, Italian and rock, can be seen as an expression of the divergence between the older and younger members of the Italian-American community in which he grew up. Scorsese himself valued the use of music so much, that he was willing to fork out $30,000 just for the rights to use the 2 Rolling Stones songs in the picture and this in a movie which cost $750,000 to make.

Another powerful aspect of the film is the acting. Along with the intense charactarizations created by the actors, there also seems to be quite a lot of improvisation used (especially in the backroom scene where DeNiro tries to explain his losses to Kietel). This creates an air of pathetic authenticity, a welcome attribute in most of Scorsese's films.

Ironically despite the fact that the film is set on the 'Mean Streets' of New York, all the interior shots were filmed in L.A. with a different camera crew than the one that shot the exterior shots in Manhatten.

The film is also a visual document of the decline of Little Italy, much of which today is just an extended part of Chinatown.

A 'mook' by the way is Neapolition for bigmouth.

Though 'Who's That Knocking On My Door' was Scorcese's first picture, it was with this extraordinary movie that we saw the film-maker coming to terms with his craft and his own blossoming genius. The exquisite camerawork and sublime use of music for which the director became renowned are here in abundance, and Scorcese's largely unknown cast [with breakthrough roles for both Harvey Keitel, as a Catholic trying to reconcile his lifestyle and hie religion, and Robert De Niro] are on top form. Too many movie-goers have overlooked this movie, or even criticised it- seeing it plotless or dull, but it's every bit as good as Scorcese's more mainstream movies: 'Taxi Driver', 'Raging Bull', and a good deal better than 'Goodfellas'. Cool, thoughtful and funny, this must rate as one of the greatest films of all time.

A cracking picture which portrays a deadpan study of street life in little Italy. Scorsese has co-penned a sizzling script thats the best in motion picture history while DeNiro makes an impact to a film that turned him into an international star, in his performence as a troubled man who owes a gang some money. Despite the fact that its a vehicle for Deniro and the director, Martin Scorsese! its Harvey Keitels film all the way! performing as a caring, conscientious hood trying to help DeNiro's character while the rest of the cast are simply superb. The cinematography is also very good! ensuring the style of filming summarises the realism of the film, right through to its shattering finale, also it has an excellent soundtrack.

A superb film. Harvey Keitel and Robert De Nero turn in stunning performances, in fact the whole cast shines, especially Teresa, the girl Charlie (Keitel) shouldn't be dating as her epiplespy is frowned upon. As usual with De Nero, certain scenes just explode, and the intensity is literally fightening, for example the scene where he (Johnny Boy) erupts with rage at Charlie (or rather, himself, due to his own predicament at being unable to meet owed payments). The charm of the film is the way Keitel is torn between his mob lifestyle and a sense of ethics. The musical score is incredibly effective; as pointed out by another reviewer the drunk-in-bar scene is brilliant, and the music just highlights the rather eerie and dark feel of the whole scene. To think I snapped up this film for about £5 off Amazon; I guess some things in life are fantastic value for money after all! Awesome.