I saw it the other night. Is it just me or is it a very very very shit film. The whole thing, from the acting, to the actors to the script annoyed the hell out of me. And worst of all it seems that they COULD have may a good film with the material they had but instead added to everest of mediocrity that is modern cinema. or some such such and such.
Well so did anyone actually like it and why? I’m curious
mog
There are some threads here already if you wanna do a search.
I wouldn’t call it a shit film, but it was definitely disappointing. I hate looking at my watch during a film, but this one made me do it. I thought Day-Lewis was excellent and Neeson was a good cameo, but the rest of the acting was mediocre and the plot didn’t make sense.
Things I wondered, plotwise:
[spoiler]When Bill the Butcher killed the newly elected sheriff in front of many witnesses, why didn’t Tweed have him arrested? It’s not like this was Tombstone or Dodge City- this was the capital of American society and there were plenty of troops in town to make the arrest.
Why did Cameron Diaz have washboard abs and a Caesarean scar?
Why did Bill never bother to ask Amsterdam’s last name?
Some character development over the years Amsterdam spent in lock-up might have been interesting.[/spoiler]
I can’t believe U2 won a Golden Globe for that godawful song, btw.
My favorite moment in the entire film was the very end when the cityscape morphs from 1863 into today’s skyline (plus the WTC towers).
Hey, I know this is off-topic, but what’s the trick to reading the blacked-out spoilers?
I was able to do “view source,” but that’s kind of akward.
Thanks
OMG 
lol
you just click three times in the black square
anyway, i didn’t realy like the movie either 
Actually, you need to click and scroll over the whole box.
Anyway, about the movie, and I’m NOT using spoilers tags, because the thread title already has spoilers in it.
I liked it quite a bit. Lewis was flat-out amazing. He owned this movie. DiCaprio was decent. He was overshadowed by most of the other characters, but I think that was a function of the way his character was written, not a defect in his acting. Most of the other performances were decent to good. I really liked the guy playing Boss Tweed.
Cinematically, the movie was gorgeous. It was interesting the way a lot of the violence was framed just off screen. I thought the movie would be significantly gorier. The plot was huge and sprawling, but it kept me interested through out. I was surprised when I realized how much movie was still left after Amsterdam’s failed assassination attempt. Too many movie don’t even bother with a third act.
Sampiro, my take on your questions:
Bill the Butcher owned everyone in Five Points. There were, effectively, no witnesses at all. No one would dare to testify against him, because they wouldn’t survive the first night. Tweed, in particular, wouldn’t dare to bring charges because Bill knew too much about his corrupt practices.
Same reason that a scar caused by holding a red-hot blade against someone’s cheek for several seconds almost completely fades after three months. These are Hollywood Beautiful People, not actual 19th century slum dwellers. Yeah, kinda annoying, but it’s pretty much the nature of the genre.
Amsterdam supposedly came from an orphange, and he’d been there from such a young age that he didn’t even know what part of Ireland he came from. Seems not unlikely, in those circumstances, that he wouldn’t even know his last name. At any rate, had Bill asked, he obviously would have given a fake last name to match his fake first name, Amsterdam being the spur-of-the-moment name his childhood buddy made up for him when he introduced him to Bill.
Christ, wasn’t the movie long enough already?
Anyway, to sum up, I really liked this film. Not Scorcese’s best, but still one of the better films I’ve seen this year. At this point, it’s my personal front runner for Best Picture.
I liked it visually, and for some of the detail bits that were included, such as the drinking from a hose the mixed up leftover booze (the original Cold Duck?). Historically, Scorcese sort of compressed things - it seems to me that the state of the Irish shown was more like 1840-1850 than the 1860’s, and I don’t think there was really a Chinatown yet. Yeah, the plot just sucked. I think he had a lot of images and story lines in his mind, but could not present them in an elegant way. The book the movie is based on is that way, a lot of colorful characters and stories but no plot.
Have you seen MOULIN ROUGE? With that, Iris, and this, he’s one of those “where have you been hiding for 60 years and why aren’t you a household name” character actors.
Has anybody here read the book? I was wondering if it explains all the birds in Boss Tweed’s office (and was that fact or Hollywood).
The she-he prostitutes and Barnum’s museum fire were nice touches, both of them quite real at that time. I didn’t like the way the riot was handled (especially the “you are there!” broadcast of where the crowd was going).
Sampiro, the answer to Question No. 3 is Morrie.
Miller and Sampiro, the actor is Jim Broadbent, and I agree, he’s a fun actor to watch, and actually has a pretty lengthy film bio.
I’d forgotten he’d been in Gilliam’s “Brazil.” Going to have to rent it, just to see that.
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If you are still reading, I guess you don’t care.
I enjoyed the movie up intil the point of the failed murder attempt. I thought it was odd that Bill didn’t finish Amsterdam off, and I thought the motivation of the snitch was a bit thin. My main problem, though, was that it seemed like after the failed attempt, the writers weren’t really sure where they were headed. The last hour or so just sort of floated through episodes that seemed almost like stream of consiousness. The brawl while being shelled thing struck me as just plain silly. Visually, a great movie, but as a story, so-so IMHO. If the butcher had simply gotten offed and Amsterdam left with the girl, I think the movie would have been much better and an hour shorter.
A good Scorsese film’s merits are even more appreciated years after release.
The theatre scene was awesome in detail,Jim Broadbent will get an Oscar nomination,and Scorsese had a nifty cameo.
A more fully fleshed out DvD version will probably make a profit to rival a large state’s annual budget.
…and if anyone doesn’t like ‘Gangs’ then stick to ‘Jackass-the Movie’
I saw it but was rather disappointed.
Visually it was beautiful and the atmosphere was done very well.
Historically, was decent. Many of the events and people were real, but not at the times they were shown to have happened or certain details were changed. I can accept that.
Plot wasn’t anything special. Particulary since Dicaprio’s revenge motivation isn’t quite as “acceptable” as it could be. His father was not ambushed in the dark by Bill the butcher. His father and Bill both knew what was going to happen, both agreed to the rules and fought face to face with their comrades. No dirty play. His father didn’t need to be avenged.
Editing needed a lot fo work. Some parts just didn’t feel right. Also, the bit with the draft riots needed to be longer.
The ending was…anticlimatic, to say the least. I wanted something more then just bill running out of the smoke at amsterdam while slashing. If they had both died at the end, I felt it would have worked better then the “happy” ending.
It was good, but I was expecting great.
I second HPL’s take. Visually stunning, great acting from Daniel Day-Lewis, but somehow it does not work in the end. The mythical story of Leo’s character did not mix well with the attempt to present an authentic version of old New York [IMHO].
I liked the individual moments, and the individual performances, and the scene settings, and the effects. The dialog was fine, on a sentence by sentence basis.
But there was no whole. It was just a start, run, stop, sort of thing. And a damned long one, too.
Lewis was magnificent, by the way. And Broadbent as well. Hell, even Cameron Diaz was pretty good. Leo was a bit puffed, but not objectionable. Lots and lots of cameo parts were great, too. Too bad they never made a movie out of it.
Tris
I’ll third that take as well. I had a much higher opinion of Gangs the first time I saw it, but when I went back for a second showing, the numerous flaws really stood out.
Amsterdamn in particular is a weak character, and I don’t think Decaprio can be blamed for all of it, because they evidently didn’t give him much to worth with. This is the same monotonous revenge obsessed character that appeared in the earlier drafts of Gangs, and there’s nothing really interesting going on with him.
I also disliked the lack subtext between Bill and Jenny. He took her in as a child and raised her in his own way, then began sleeping with her, and eventually rejected her? It’s a intriguing backstory that doesn’t get developed at all, and if you’re not going to develop something, then why even mention it? Better to have left the Jenny character like the earlier drafts, where she was Sheng’s girlfriend and had no connection to Bill.
Also, for all the historical detail, it’s kind of ironic that the one aspect that’s shortchanged are the gangs themselves. We don’t get much information or narrative on their day-to-day activities.
We get a small taste of it (corpse-selling, extortion, illegal boxing matches) but it would have been more beneficial to the movie if the storyline had more of a center around it…in fact, I think it’s the lack of clear focus that ultimately makes Gangs a disappointment in some ways. We get a basic revenge plot that’s haphazardly jammed with narrative concerning Irish immigrants, political corruption, romantic subplots, male friendship, father/son dichotomies, Civil War discontent, upper-class society, and so on. And for the sake of jamming everything in, nothing really gets a full exploration, and the film winds up just becoming a history primer.
The more that I think about it, the more I realize that I’ll probably wind up watching Gangs the way that I watch **Gladiator ** or Suspiria…as a bunch of terrific scenes that fall short of adding up to a cohesive movie.
Loved Daniel Day-Lewis. What an amazing actor!
Loved the music.
Thought DiCaprio was weak, both character and acting.
Thought Cameron Diaz looked way too healthy to be the kind of character she was portraying. Remember how she looked in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH? That would have been more like what this character should have looked like.
I also had this intense feeling that everything was too stage-y! It was shot on sound stages in Rome. I wanted it to have some look of true outdoors instead of always having this flat, light blue sky. Where were the clouds? Where was the natural light?
But my biggest problem with this movie is that it relied too much on knowledge of history of New York in the 19th century to make sense. I’m pretty much a history dud, so I was lost. Had no clue about why those riots were taking place, etc.