Readers Letters for the 22nd December 2015.

Film This blog doesn't often get comments these days due to a mix of messy Disqus logins and social media. I'm going to try and fix this in the new year, but in the mean time there's been a lovely message on the Mean Streets post from David Pascoe which is well worth highlighting here:

"What a marvellous post, both about Mean Streets (my favourite film) and the importance of a venue where you can see a wide array of films (in my case, Falmouth Arts Centre, now called simply The Poly). I lived in Falmouth all my life up to the age of 32, and it's possible my wife and I might move back in a couple of years time after a decade away. I still try to go and see films there whenever I'm back visiting. My main spell if watching films there covered 1998-2008 and was especially important as it was the only cinema Falmouth had at that time. A more mainstream cinema called The Phoenix opened in 2009 and covered a gap while the Poly was closed for a year due to financial problems. Is it symbolic that this happened the year after I moved away?

"As for Mean Streets, I got into it during my late 90s obsession with Harvey Keitel/Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese. It became a touchstone film and one I constantly went back to in 1999-2000, probably because it captured them before their shtick had set in. A refrain at the time, as all of those incredible actors from the 70s started to age and move into projects which their reputations didn't deserve, was to check out the early work to see them "young, hungry and changing the film world". Mean Streets was dazzling, energetic, heartfelt, exciting, and looked at times like something from another world. It became my favourite film and then I didn't see it again for over a dozen years until it turned up on iPlayer. I watched it again and at the end....it was still my favourite film."