A distinctly gay sensibility characterized the 1970s work of John Waters, and it is also the signature, 20 years later, of Marc Rappaport, a pop sociologist who’s made fictional film biographies his specialized genre. Rappaport’s meditations on life, art, and Hollywood have defied Public TV’s earnest docudramas as well as Hollywood’s more conventional biopictures. His […]

In 1992, the hottest ticket at the Sundance Film Festival was Reservoir Dogs, made by a then unknown director named Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino became inspired by the success of Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers in the mid-1980s. Unlike Jarmusch, the 1980s indie leader who has shown contempt for catering to the mass public, Tarantino is a natural-born entertainer whose work is more dazzling than consequential. For inspiration, Reservoir Dogs drew more on old movies than on real life, but as self-conscious as the film was, it still boasted a clever script and superlative performances by an all-star cast.

Rob Weiss's Amongst Friends (1993) is a kind of a Jewish Mean Streets, except that the protagonists are not Scorsese's lowlifes, but upper-middle class youngsters who choose crime as a way of life. Unlike their peers, who went to college, they decided to stay home. Weiss set his tale of Generation-X angst near the Five Town area and Hewlett Harbor, not far from where he was born, Baldwin, Long Island. He wrote the script for Amongst Friends quickly, in two weeks, later boasting to the press, “I had never written anything before in my entire life.”

A terrifying nihilism, an out-of-control normlessness, mark all of Nick Gomez's movies. Laws of Gravity (l992), his first and most emotionally effective picture, is a Brooklyn variation of Mean Streets. Tightly focused and intensely dramatized, it's a bleak, hard-edged, ultrarealistic exploration of the reckless lives of small-time hooligans. Gomez's down-and out characters are offsprings of Mean Streets's Charlie and Johnny: Like them, they are too anarchic and dumb to get anywhere. They bluster or shout, unable to articulate any discernible emotion or mental activity.

Scorsese has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Cassavetes' dramatic realism and his boldly inventive style. Uncompromising, he is arguably the most brilliant filmmaker working in American film today. Over the last 30 years, Scorsese has directed an impressive cannon of innovative and controversial films. He combines a cineaste's passion for film noir with appreciation for rich characterization and evocation of precise sense of time and place. Scorsese's brilliant, if also erratic, career has been emulated by young indie directors. His intoxicating belief in the infinite possibilities of the film medium is most apparent in the work of Abel Ferrara, Quentin Tarantino, Nick Gomez, and most recently, Paul Thomas Anderson.