Customer Ratings & Reviews

Although packed as a double feature, Streetwise is the real star here. It's a kinetic and moving story about teenagers living by their wits and ambitions on the streets of Seattle around 1983. There is a collection of unique kids here, all pretty memorable, and the film has been loved by audiences for years for painting a harsh but endearing vision of wayward youth who are either homeless because of the personal problems they had at home or their desire to embrace their notions of freedom. The moments of heartbreak run from the familiar teenage blues to the tragedy of struggling alone. It's Streetwise that makes this Blu-ray worth purchasing. Tiny is not terrible, exactly, but it is far from the timeless classic that Streetwise has become. Tiny focuses on the life of one teenage runaway from Streetwise almost 40 years after that film, and the sadness that stems from watching it is more of a chaotic, too-familiar brand. Following Streetwise, the same documentarians kept up with Erin Blackwell and checked in with her periodically, and most of the "recent" footage from Tiny seems to date around 2015, but it includes snippets of her life (and that of her family's) from the years since 1983. The production appears to have been finished by Kickstarter and support from fans rather than more traditional funding. Director Martin Bell is credited with the film, but it also clearly owes a debt to Mary Ellen Mark, cameraperson and co-documentarian behind Streetwise, who in her appearances shows her great fondness for Blackwell, and to whom the film is dedicated. The film Tiny comes with its own cast of unique characters, all of them part of Blackwell's family, but the joyful optimism of youth in the face of adversity that made Streetwise so enjoyable, even through its sad scenes, isn't captured as part of Blackwell's life. While she still has heart, it's clear that a cycle of drug abuse, poverty, and relationship disasters have taken their toll on Blackwell, and as a film, Tiny is a tougher experience that I'm not anxious to revisit. Imagine, basically, the hardest segment in a modern 7 Up sequel (if you are familiar with the Michael Apted series) and imagine the filmmakers extended it to 90 minutes. It's hard viewing. There's also the tough but unavoidable conclusion that Tiny just doesn't have as much to say as Streetwise does. As a film, it's inferior, and it really plays more like an extended special feature, which is how Criterion should have packaged it. The disc for Hoop Dreams (and other documentaries) follow up with the main personalities of the film, but if marketed as films of their own, they naturally will not compare well. There is certainly going to be a curiosity to see how Erin Blackwell's life unfolded, and Tiny is going to answer those curiosities, but I think more stories about the other personalities in Streetwise would have been a good choice. Maybe there was a lack of resources to find those people, but it's clear that some of them are known to have died as they are mentioned in the special features or in Tiny, but no deeper explanation is offered. One nice bonus feature is that one of the more notable characters of Streetwise, "Rat," was interviewed and we are treated to a brief segment where he shares a bit about his modern life. Maybe Tiny, playing alongside Streetwise, gives us the lesson that looking at the lives of others is easier when we stay closer to the surface rather than diving much deeper.