In a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, Philippe Garrel once remarked, “Given that nowadays in France, there is a tendency to forget 1968, to erase it from the map of history, I thought it would be useful to raise the question ‘what is cinema for?’
Welcome to Fan Service, a new, typically sporadic (#onbrand) feature in which I feed the hungry beasts / wonderful humans of Patreon by focusing on a subject of their choice. (As with most things, this is borrowed from Nathan Rabin, though in fairness, for all his accomplishments, I’m not sure he can technically claim to have invented “taking requests.”)
It’s hard sometimes to remember that Martin Scorcese, the undisputed elder statesman of American cinema and advocate for cinema more generally, was once a scrappy kid trying to cobble together a feature film.
But he definitely was, and that film was Mean Streets, a slice-of-life portrait of what it means to make it in America, specifically as an Italian-American male, and focused on barely grown-up kids struggling with crime, faith, and responsibility.