The industrial steel town of Clairton, PA and the community of Russian-Americans who reside there provide the primary backdrop for Michael Cimino’s existential war epic The Deer Hunter. The lives of the main characters are clearly repetitious. They work at the local steel mill, clock out, hit the bar, guzzle […]
Robert DeNiro
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During the late 60s into the 1970s, the civil rights movement was at the apex of its impact on popular culture and this had an important effect on the movie industry as well. Black filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles were finally able to make groundbreaking works of rebellious indie […]
For this new series on FC, we’ll be looking at, or to be more precise, listening to, scores from some of our favorite furious movies to see how they tie into the scenes they are played over. Some of these installments may be just a brief basic review with a […]
“Being right is not a bulletproof vest Freddy!” – Figgs James Mangold‘s 1997 film Copland comes from a different angle in the crime genre taking the good guy/bad guy plotline and flipping it on its ear by dealing with themes of corruption within the police force. In the town of […]
FILM REVIEW When we first see Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) he walks into a taxi cab stand as a ghostly cloud of steam evaporates around him. It’s an entrance of some kind of angel from hell. Travis suffers from insomnia, so he rides around on buses and subways at night. […]
After a close brush with death caused by a cocaine overdose in the late 70s, Martin Scorsese felt he was at the end of his career as a director. It wasn’t until his friend Robert DeNiro (Mean Streets) visited him in the hospital with a project based on a book […]
INTRODUCTION Sergio Leone. Whenever I hear that name I think of cinema at its most exhillerating and wildly creative. His take on Westerns single handedly revitalized the genre in the 1960s. His unique Mediterranean – bred post modern, operatic eye for storytelling was something cinema needed very much at the […]
I was recently told that when telling others about how many films you have seen at a film festival, you are not supposed to count movies you saw in the market (i.e. the films shown to potential distributors) or retrospectives, but only films in competition. Since the three films I […]
In 1973, a new director named Martin Scorsese arrived on the scene and came crashing through the door of cinema with a wildly different look at life in New York City’s Little Italy. Mean Streets was the first breakout film from the kid from the Lower East Side who always […]