Mean Streets

It's kind of unbelievable how good this movie gets in the third act. Not that it's bad before then, but even though you know it's going to explode eventually, even though you see it coming through the whole movie, when everything goes to shit it's still shocking. And wow could Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro act back then. Did they just get sick of it or something?

Also, even though Scorsese's never really gone quite the way of those two, there's a real anger (or something, something trying to get out) that I'm not sure is present in his more recent string of really good movies. Maybe should see the Departed again, just for comparison purposes.

It could be that there's just something I find inherently more interesting and powerful when you can tell a person's trying to figure out there craft, that explosion of creative energy and power when they're just starting see what they can do and are maybe even a little in awe of it themselves, more interesting in that case than the type of controlled mastery Scorsese's been showing off lately.

I still don't think this is quite as good as Taxi Driver, though, but it certainly erases any sense that Taxi Driver's whole understated opacity was just all Scorsese really knew how to do, which I think I kind of thought. Though a lot of this movie is just about as opaque as Taxi Driver was, there's not a whole lot about that's understated, I'd say.

Plus, who knew that Wes Anderson cribbed his whole slo-mo film w/pop music thing from Scorsese? Some of the times Scorsese does it in this almost made me think I was watching a Wes Anderson movie for a second, but of course there's not even a hint of that storybook cuteness that Anderson somehow gets in every single frame. (A lot of that probably has to do with the framing of the shots.) I wonder if Scorsese did that a lot in his other movies? I don't remember seeing it anywhere else before...