Reminiscence: Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver" : The Choice Puts Me In A Pickle.

In 1973, a year after Francis Ford Coppola changed the game for gangster movies by making Brando place the head of Khartoum on Jack Woltz's kingsize bed, Scorsese was gearing up for his would-be breakthrough film. Mean Streets was certainly iconic in its perusal of street crime and its attempts to mould a gangster movie with words and not guns. Scorsese knew crime, you see; he was brought up in Little Italy, a place in New York City where, as he disclosed in the making of the film, a whole bar would tussle over nothing at all. Maybe if you said something in jest or you didn't get a drink on time, tempers flared up and every single guy in the bar would brawl until one capitulated. He fashioned these observations into Mean Streets, which starred a young Harvey Keitel and an even younger Robert De Niro.

Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets.

I watched Mean Streets a couple of years ago when I was sixteen or maybe seventeen. It remained incised in my mind ever since because I couldn't believe a modernistic movie like that was made in a time when family films were walking away with the Oscars. 'Course, Mean Streets was spurned at the Oscars because it was too small a movie, too low-budgeted. I mean, you won't want a layman winning an Oscar, would you? Well, as they found out in the next four decades, Scorsese wasn't just another filmmaker. Anyway, I loved the movie. The coarsish script was talky, layered with dense jargon and the execution was masterful. That was pretty unexpected since I was under the daffy impression that we were dealing with a supposed amateur here. Keitel nailed his role, kept the urgency at the apex with his terse exchanges with De Niro and walked away with a coolheaded performance. Skookum!

But De Niro was the revelation here. He was. Even in his salad days, he could put together a textured performance that showed sparks of promise of a future luminary. His was a more controlled performance, a character that he was seemingly familiar with and he played him accordingly. In his four decades as an actor, I'd probably single this one out as the most neglected. Second comes the one in Ronin.

So, I was watching Taxi Driver the other day on television, a rare instance when the channel operators choose a movie sagaciously and another one of my most cherished movies, I wondered why was Mean Streets the movie with the shit end of the stick. Yes, Taxi Driver was a landmark film for obvious reasons, maybe the most audacious of all movies, but it came four years after the ravishing Mean Streets which ushered in the heavily eye-browed master filmmaker in the first place. Taxi Driver was a gorgeous piece of cinema, I won't dispute that, but it couldn't match Mean Streets in terms of style. Mean Streets was a ballad, an ode to the movies that young Scorsese saw as a boy. The soundtrack, a stockpile of old American classics, complemented the images smoothly. And it did what it did with such finesse that you're captivated from the moment it begins. 

Conversely, Taxi Driver was more of a character study. A demented man falters in his romantic life and he avenges this humiliation on the world that he sees as merciless. He meets loonies like him who fuel the rage inside him. And, in the end, it all comes forth. He goes bananas all over New York City. Scorsese isn't new to characters who work like a ticking bomb about to go off. He strayed in those waters later with Raging Bull, Cape Fear and even Goodfellas up to a certain point. But Taxi Driver was his most fearless coup, a 'man against the world' story that gave an insight into the mind of a wacko. In those times, movies like that were hard to come by. No wonder legendary film critic Roger Ebert instantly affirmed it as one of the greatest he had ever seen. Hell, here I am, all of twenty, four decades later and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

But when it comes to judging between the two, I'm iffy. Sure, go on, point your stubby little finger at Taxi Driver and chide me for not seeing the obvious choice. But when I think about it, and I mean really think about it, I ask myself - what would Scorsese have done if he had got a healthier budget on Mean Streets? What would that movie have been like? Hey, to all you twits who doubt it, remember - Scorsese made Goodfellas on a bigger budget so I wouldn't necessarily maul the idea. He can work both ways, you know. He made After Hours on a scant one and The Departed two decades later on a pricey one.

So, I'm trying to gauge what I want to say. It's a known fact that Scorsese has made a landmark movie in every decade he has worked in, like Jack Nicholson who is the other bigwig of the honor. But a lot of folks believe that Taxi Driver should walk away with the glory. I'm going for Mean Streets. I treasure those films that can whip up a ravishing experience on modest production and Mean Streets fits the bill perfectly. It gave us a gangster movie with minimal violence and a lot of smarts. A generation later, on a better production, crime movies don't match the panache of it.

Mean Streets is as close as you'll ever come to knowing a gangster in New York City and still be aware that it's just a movie. That's genius, you know.

Review: Thomas Vinterberg's "The Hunt" is the best movie of the year. Or the last five years.

The best movies out there twiddle with something you don't see coming and then, just when you buy that thought, they come right at you like the typhoon who wants to wreck your life apart. Thomas Vinterberg's too clever a man to make that so easy for you, you know. Because he's the shady guy behind the movie about shady guys, and which is perhaps the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. The best part of it is that I didn't even know that until it ended. The Danish-language drama The Hunt is in contention for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film this year, and I don't know any other movie I've seen lately that's meriting of the prestige. Because for a little over two hours, Vinterberg made sure I wasn't likely to forget the stakes, and he made a movie like the agony a dog feels when he's stuck in the poky wheels of a kid's bike, a movie that howls and howls and yet feels so quiet, so smothered. 

To aid that beguiling brute of a movie is Mads Mikkelsen, whom you might remember as the suave antagonist who poisoned Bond and broke his balls (probably not in the way Joe Pesci and the wise guys meant it in Goodfellas) in Casino Royale. I never knew much about Mikkelsen's acting chops, because he's never really had a role he could bite into. He's been playing the urbane bad guy for the Western audiences for too long now and finally he's been fed a role that's intricate in its construction and a cinch in its portrayal. And Mikkelsen hands in a towering performance that the Academy will be too foolhardy to ignore, that that terrific script is worthy of. The best acting piece of the year? Yes, yes, yes. Don't buy it? Don't buy it. Screw yourself.

Believe you me, I'll be goddamned if you find me a better script in the recent spew of films that uses its characters so well. Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a divorced dweeb who's living a rather insipid life. He isn't getting much done except walk his best friend's daughter to school and back everyday. He's the kind of guy you empathize with in a jiffy. And Vinterberg touts that thought for the rest of the movie in a manner so nifty that's bound to provoke you, to terrify you and to unsettle you.

Lucas has a job at a local kindergarten. He capers with the kids for most of the day, initiates a romance with his co-worker. Hell, he even has his teenage son back in contact with him. So far, so good for ol' Lucas. Then comes the guillotine. 

One day, right out of the blue, he's accused of being a pedophile. There. No one wants to tell him why. He wants to ask questions but no one wants to answer them. He's looked upon as a rapacious soul, even by those who would've sworn that he was anything like that. Soon enough, the whole town's believing it. There begins his ordeal.

Don't you let the strikingly simple plot deceive you. It's all peekaboo until the second half of the movie kicks in and you begin to fathom how the movie's going to turn out. Spoiler! Spoiler! : You actually don't, haha! It's unpredictable, it's hellish and it needs to be watched, mulled over, analyzed. Why? Because it doesn't give you the luxury of choice. That's not negotiable, no, no. It's a supremely well-told tale of how a man's life is torn apart by an innocent lie and how that one lie becomes the truth when it travels from whisper to whisper, from mind to mind. Try looking away.

Vinterberg keeps it brief. He doesn't want to ask questions, he doesn't give you any answers. What he does instead is suck you hard into the life he builds for his protagonist and see things from his perspective. He wants you to observe, that's it. That's all he does. He doesn't hesitate to sporadically pull cuffs and take shots at morality and social injustice, at us as human beings. That's a pretty ballsy brouhaha, eh? The script he has jotted down with Tobias Lindholm is a piece of writing of rare craft. Intuitive, observant, unflinching and sympathetic, it doesn't shy away from being candid in the truest sense of the word, even if it means slipping on the sloppy marsh into the sharp pebbles to deliver the impact it envisages. It gives us an affable protagonist and an abhorrent little antagonist but you can't fault either of 'em for the babel. That's how I figured out how good it really is. You will, too.

If I don't see the thousands of Academy heads nodding in one unified, swift motion when the Best Actor nominations pool in, I'd say Mikkelsen was robbed. He's so good, in fact, that the rest of the cast ought to not exist at all. He'll do the work alone. But, yeah, it's a terrific ensemble that captures the wrath that unfolds with just their eyes doing most of the talking. Rare, rare.

The Hunt is a great movie, an intelligent film that has depth and honesty in handfuls. It's also intrepid and gritty but in a quiet way, capturing the emotional turmoil on celluloid like no other movie this year. It leaves you a lot wiser, a little more aware.