Movie Details
| Title: | Streets of New York | |
| Director: | Alan Bradley | |
| Year: | 2009 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 05.28.15 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 05.28.15 | Internet | This no-budget doc made by youtuber Al Profit is surprisingly good. It's pretty well documented on here that I have an obsession with NYC in the 70s and 80s and how low down it got. This presents a story as a rise and fall of crime itself, starting with the heroin trade of mid 20th century, the rise of gangs in the 70s, hip hop, how crack changed everything, the prison gangs, the street violence, the drug violence, school violence, how prevalent it was for so long, and follows through Guliani's clean-up and ensuing gentrification. It ties in the summer of sam, the subway vigilante, the bensonhurst murder, and a bunch of other stuff. I feel like when I was growing up I heard about kids getting shot over Air Jordans. I never really understood that but get a good insight from some of these interviews of people who were there. The movie constantly displays statistics and newspaper headlines while you're listening to interviews so it's pretty dense and created this rich chain reaction in my brain that explains so much of New York-set films of that era. Kind of like how Cocaine Cowboys contextualizes Miami Vice and Scarface, this doc contextualized a ton of NYC movies from the 70s and 80s for me. So yeah, I really liked this. And something about the amateur nature of it - I watched this on YouTube - also worked for me. It felt raw and truthful, stripped of pomp. Right up my alley. |
