Mean Streets
Know what I hate?
Woman comes home from the grocery store. Bag full of groceries. Has a conversation on the steps. There’s a bit of action involving the bag of groceries.
The grocery bag looks like it’s six weeks old. Looks like it’s been through a dozen rehearsals and takes. It’s all worn and torn and crumpled. Doesn’t look like she came in from the store, looks like she’s a crazy lady who carries the same bag of groceries around for months.
Otherwise, pretty good movie.
Where’s the Paper or Plastic Wrangler when you need him/her?
I mean, “master filmmaker!” Hmmmph! What about the grocery bag??
More importantly, is it ever revealed what’s really in that bag?
Maybe Scorcese was making an early, and subliminal, endorsement of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” ethos. Mean Streets did come out after the first Earth Day, after all.
At least it’s not as bad as the moment in “The Kid with the Broken Halo” where fallen-to-Earth angel Gary Coleman is trying to help nasty spinster lady Katherine Helmond with her grocery bag. After the ensuing fracas, the groceries spill all over the street, and it turns out they consist ENTIRELY of those square cartons of supermarket ice cream!
I tell you, I lost all suspension of disbelief right there.
Or that moment in all those action movies where the fight breaks out in the warehouse and the guy gets thrown up against a stack of cardboard boxes, and they all tumble down to reveal themselves as — empty cardboard boxes. And we cut to an establishing shot of the building and the sign that says Empty Cardboard Box Storage.
In a biker movie I saw a couple of weeks ago, there was a shanty town that banded together and barricaded itself against an attack by bikers – and the barricades all seemed to be made up of those same empty cardboard boxes! Sure, they looked great when the bikers crashed through (some of them on fire), but I had to wonder… what were those dipshit townspeople thinking, anyway?
Know what I hate?
When it’s night and somebody drives somewhere and when they get to their destination, they get out of their car without turning off the headlights. It doesn’t matter what else is going on; at that moment, the thing I am most concerned about is the car’s battery.
There’s a moment where this kind of happens in Slacker, but the driver notices and reaches inside to turn his lights off. I wonder if Linklater had him do that deliberately.
Or the chase scene, where the car goes out of control and skids across the street and smashes into something, and you notice that the street is already covered with skidmarks from all the rehearsals and/or previous takes.
Most new cars and even older ones lights will automatically go off when you turn off the car. I think for modern movies you can take that one off your list of things that distract you from the Hollywood magic.
For the Special Edition re-release they’re digitally decrumpling it.
The devil is in the details. I myself have had the good fortune of being the guy that holds the clipboard and micromanages everybody on crew of a few studnet shoots (i.e. script supervisor). It can be a crappy job but it is very important.