[11/11/07]
[Streetsweeper]
12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Cinema Sweepings: The Ugly Honesty of Gangster by George Will “American Gangster" opened last weekend and many of those who bought tickets - $43.6 million worth from Friday through Sunday - surely came away feeling as Mark Twain did when he said his memory was so powerful he could remember things that never even happened. Many moviegoers must have thought: I remember seeing this brand-new movie before.
They did. Its emulations of "The Godfather" are obviously intended to be obvious. But these genuflections to the archetype make "American Gangster" more, not less, interesting as a symptom of something permanent in the American mind - cynicism for sentimentalists. [more at New York Post]
[11/9/07]
[Streetsweeper]
12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Cinema Sweepings: Gangster’s Paradise More from the Hollywood hood. By Peter Suderman Not too long ago, the world was treated to the news that some passionate reformer had developed a twelve-step program for gang members, a sort of “gangster’s anonymous” meant to help those burdened with lifelong addictions to gang culture find their way out. Whatever one thinks of the program’s virtues in the inner city, it may eventually find its home in the writing and pitching rooms of Hollywood movie studios — because clearly, they just can’t get enough.
For decades, Tinseltown has engaged in a torrid love affair with the gangster. And like so many love affairs, the allure was based as much in myth and fantasy as in truth — meaning that many of cinema’s greatest scoundrels and criminals have also been its greatest heroes. Murderers, drug dealers, thieves, corruptors — the silver screen has welcomed and celebrated them all, provided they supply they requisite style and gravitas.
American Gangster takes this notion to its logical extreme. Often dazzling, often gripping, always watchable, it exerts the sort of glamorous, high-gloss magnetism that comes from having the best Hollywood minds and star-power that money (about $100 million, in this case) can buy. Directed by Ridley Scott, the man behind Gladiator, Alien, and Thelma and Louise, written by Steve Zaillian, who previously scripted Schindler’s List and Gangs of New York, and, with A-list leading men Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in the leads, featuring a supernova’s worth of star power, the movie is never less than entertaining. But despite the epic proportions to which its title aspires, it rarely rises above the level of entertainment. And its narrative implications, by any reasonable reading, are simply bizarre. It lionizes a man who was among the progenitors of inner-city drug culture, and weirdly implies, without any hint of irony or self-awareness, that the spread of addiction in black culture was a triumph of racial equality. [more at National Review]
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