Gangs of New York

Rating:
Summary: Leo's Oscar
Review: I think that this movie will make history.Martin Scorsese never has won an Oscar and the Academy also must give an Oscar nomination for Leonardo DiCaprio.
He wasn't nominated for his role in the winner 'Titanic',the film that made of Leo a great star and he deserved this nomination.The Academy must know that DiCaprio is the best actor of his generation and he's able to change for each performance.In fact,in this film he's fat and different of all his films.I think this movie that is about the gangs in the 1900's New York will be a success in the box office because seems interesting for all the audiences.Also will be the Oscar for a classic movie director as Martin Scorsese and,of course,one of the best movies of the next year.
Good luck,Leo!You are the best!

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Rating:
Summary: of course it will win oscars!
Review: This is by far the most anticipated film of the year, and I have been following it since last April. It was shot in Rome Italy, and Scorsese really did a marvelous job as far as location and actors, with such bohemians as Leonardo Dicaprio, Daniel-Day Lewis, and Cameron Diaz. If you miss this film, than you miss history!

Rating:
Summary: Will live up to expectations
Review: Just from the trailer I can tell this will be a special movie garnering many academy awards. I can't wait to see it. Even scorses himself said it's his best work in years. The bugdet was the largest in Miramax history ($90 million) and the cast is superb. Not since Oliver Stone's J.F.K. have I seen a cast with this many stars in it. Scorsese has made arguably the best movie of the decade in each he has been working. Taxi Driver in the 70's, Raging Bull in the 80's, Goodfellas in the 90's, and hopefully Gangs of New York for the 00's.

Rating:
Summary: Nope
Review: This is one of those mundane movies that shoots for the stars at every turn but never really gets off the ground. God's and Generals, The Last Samurai, that sort of thing.

Gangs of New York portrays a little known era of American history, the Union during the Civil War. In the history books the North is often shown as a quaint, upper-crust society, intolerant of the bigotry in the south. GONY paints quite a different picture, the spirit of racism and violence very much thriving in the Northern states.

So that's where and when the movie takes place. Beyond that, I can't tell you what it's about. It's really several movies in one and there isn't a clear plot. The characters are very deep, but that's the problem; their motives seem constantly shifting and undisclosed to us, so they are really hard to relate to. We rarely know what the main character, Amersterdam played by Leo Di Caprio, is thinking, feeling, or scheming. I don't mind him being cast in this role, as others have complained. I just think a pretty shoddy script didn't give him any avenues to act.

Daniel Day Lewis, on the other hand, is very well cast and does shine through a thick, fake New York accent. Now, I'm not a historian, but did New Yorkers in the 1800s really talk with the same accent that they do today? It's hard to believe. Add on the fact that absolutely nobody else in the cast talks this way and Lewis sticks out like a sore thumb, a complete anachronism in an otherwise ambitiously portrayed historical account.

I don't really want to go into the specifics of what the story was about - poverty, street gangs, crooked politicians, avenging family members, etc. - but more how they went about it. It really felt like a, well...sort of a high school drama production. Everyone was overacting to an almost embarrassing level, and very few of the actors were of native Irish-dialect, so it was mostly fake accents. This just gives the film and others like it (Far and Away) a really inconsistent feel, since people who are supposed to be from the same social class and country speak entirely different from one another. And the costumes were, in my opinion, terrible. Many reviewers have been gushing over them. I guess all they need is a top-hat and a cane to be convinced of good "era" wardrobe. It was so overdone - like everything about this movie - that it stood out. Wardrobe is supposed to blend into the movie seamlessly, so that you don't even notice it. In fact, I think if the costume designer has done a good job, you won't even notice that the costumes were great. The fact that so many people feel the need to mention how amazing the costumes were is testimony to how much they stood out. Whether we like it or not, we viewers already have an image in our minds of how an era looks. Throw in too many details and we start paying attention to them and of course, it will clash with what's in our heads no matter how authentic the costume/set designer thinks it is, and thus it becomes "fake" looking. Put it this way - the costumes? They *looked* like costumes. The sets? They *looked* like sets. It didn't look like a movie, it looked like a poorly constructed play. Despite how "authentic" it might've really been, the entire thing looked fictional, sort of what Tim Burton might've done if he were directing.

The most memorable thing about the movie for me was that not only did they split it up onto two DVDs, they chose to edit the cut in the middle of a sex scene. Is that not odd? I mean, that might be the worst possible place you could do an edit. Not only should this not have been on two DVDs (it could've been put together on one in a smarter way to avoid this), but there is literally almost no worse place in the film to cut than in the center of a love scene. At the end of disc one Leo and Cameron Diaz are mostly naked. Black screen. Beginning of disc two, Daniel Day Lewis lays on a bed with three naked women. Random? Yes.

I don't recommend this movie, for any reason. The acting is so-so, the script is terrible, the plot is too thin to really get a grasp on, and the characters are so reclusive to the audience that we don't connect on any level - add to this an epic length and it gets even worse. If you just watch Titanic, Last of the Mohicans, and Being John Malchovich instead of this, you'll actually spend about the same amount of time and see the three stars playing essentially the same character in much better movies.

Rating:
Summary: Watchable nonsense
Review: Martin Scorcese's epic tale of gang warfare in New York at the time of the Civil War is an overblown, exaggerated account that is very watchable but ultimately fails as a cohesive story. I don't doubt that much of what happens in this film is inspired by fact, but I don't think that the actual participants looked quite as much like the cast of "The Road Warrior" as do the characters in this film. Take, for example, the main villain, William Cutting AKA Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). One of his eyes is a steel ball with an American eagle on it; he cut out the original to present as a gift to the man who gave him a magnificent beating. There's also a woman who has filed her teeth into fangs. And a guy whose club is notched to commemorate his victims. Star Leonardo DiCaprio's father (Liam Neeson) wore a priest's collar even as he marched into battle.

I have come to expect gritty realism from Scorcese, but in this film he goes way over the top. The enormous (and surprisingly well-lit) catacombs and cavernous interiors with ratty characters hanging from bamboo scaffolding seem like left-over shots from "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome". It often seems like a film made by a much less skillful director who is willing to sacrifice the reality of his scenario for a cool effect, a bit of dramatic posing, or some easy violence.

Rating:
Summary: TECHNICALLY PERFECT, HOWEVER, THE PLOT HAS HIGHS AND LOWS.
Review: "Gangs Of New York" was a film with huge expectations when the movie hit the screen in december of 2002. The fans of the great director Martin Scorsese were eager to see his latest film in years. Well, finally "Gangs Of New York" was in theaters and the movie got a lot of mixed reviews, and I think it's obvious why that happened. You make a movie with a long running time (almost 3 hours), with a plot based in a controversial book, you throw graphic violence and racism, and obviously you will offend a lot of people.

Those are the controversial elements in "Gangs Of New York", however the movie has a lot of things to talk about. This film has depth in almost every single technical aspect: the sets are beautiful and above all, they are very real. The costumes and makeup are very specific and believable. The music score was made by the always efficient Howard Shore. Most of the performances are excellent, specially Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill "The Butcher", he created one of the scariest villains in recent years, also he got a lot of acting awards for this role. Liam Neeson is outstanding in a brief, but essential role, he plays Priest Vallon. John C. Reilly as Happy Jack and Jim Broadbent as William "Boss" Tweed are also highlights in the cast.

Of course, there was a lot of controversy with the selection of Leonardo DiCaprio in the leading role, some might find him too weak and some might find him outstanding, I think that he did a good job in this movie, but this is not one of his best performances. The acting talent of Cameron Diaz had little use in this movie. The direction of Martin Scorsese was very good, because he had a lot of elements and he made a complex movie, not a lot of directors can make a convincing work with such a complicated material.

Now, the plot does have highs and lows. The opening scene is one of the most impressive battles in recent years, overall all the battles in the film are excellent. But I think that the movie could have been edited more efficiently, there are a lot of scenes that doesn't add continuity to the plot. The movie lengths almost 3 hours, I think that 130 minutes could have been more effective, but at the end of the day there are more good things in "Gangs Of New York" than flaws.

The DVD features are very interesting (if you liked the movie, of course), the audio commentary by Martin Scorsese is the highlight of the DVD features. The documentaries are very detailed and informative, they offer a lot of different perspectives. The Five Points study guide and the multi-angle sets are just amazing, almost make you feel like you are in there, so if you liked "Gangs Of New York" you are going to love the bonus disc.

"Gangs Of New York" may offend a lot of people because the movie tells a story about violence and obviously says that USA history is plagued with violence and racism since the beginning, but the movie also says that a lot of brave people fought to create the USA. So yes, the movie may be controversial but "Gangs Of New York" has too many good things, so rent it first, if you like the movie, this DVD is a must-own. Specially recommendable to fans of Martin Scorsese.

Rating:
Summary: Boring Mess from a Once-Great Director
Review: "Gangs of New York" is almost pointless. Oh sure, there's something about xenophobia and the shabby treatment of Catholic immigrants in mid-19th-century New York, but this point is never developed. Actually, nothing much is developed in this movie. Characters and situations are introduced, then dropped altogether or forgotten about for long stretches before being awkwardly dragged in again.

The main story is so old and stale I couldn't believe Scorsese would stoop to using it: Young boy sees father murdered, comes back years later to avenge him, infiltrates murderer's circle, begins to waver, gosh will the young avenger ever carry out his plan? Unless you have some really original twist to put on this hoary old plot, you had best stay miles away from it. Sad to say, Scorsese and his scriptwriters have absolutely nothing original in mind. It's just a dull, ineffective framing device for the movie.

Then there's the totally anachronistic feel to the movie, starting from the very first scene. A big gang fight is staged like a scene from Mad Max full of garishly got-up freaks and scored to a hard-rock electric guitar soundtrack. There are the token black members of the Irish gang (yeah right, I'm sure that's historically accurate). The absolute nadir, though, was the depiction of the notorious New York City Draft Riots as some kind of glorious uprising of oppressed peoples against their racist oppressors, when in fact it was a vast lynching rampage in which pro-Confederate whites murdered dozens of black Americans. In the midst of this riot, we get a rather anti-climactic "duel" between hero and villain.

Not since "Titanic" have I seen so much money and effort poured into such a lame, trite, ridiculous story. (Funny that they both starred this DiCaprio kid, who's also in Scorsese's latest snoozer. Are they lovers or something?) I don't know what has happened to Scorsese. He was once one of our brightest cinematic hopes. Maybe he's just going through a slump and will pull out of it soon. But after seeing "The Aviator" this weekend, I fear he may be in permanent decline.

Rating:
Summary: Pornographically violent
Review: The glorification and celebration (not merely the depiction) of extreme physical violence has been a dominant theme in American cinema for the last 30 years. Tarantino presents his bloodletting with a verve and wit that at least maintains the aesthetic integrity of his films. In Gangs of New York, Scorsese has no such excuse. This is literal and graphic butchery, designed to disturb and nauseate. His film set of nineteenth-century New York is avowedly theatrical rather than realistic and becomes a latter-day Coliseum in which are enacted scenes of gladiatorial slaughter. The violence itself is realistic yet inauthentic, by which I mean it is heavily stylized and ritualized. It portrays the imaginative cruelty typical of religious and political persecution rather than the workmanlike, crude brutality more characteristic of gang killings. Situations are set up in artificial and implausible ways in order to provide opportunities for bloodier and nastier acts.

The plot is cobbled together from incidents and characters culled from Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, a 1927 concoction of lurid journalism and dubious anecdote.

The irony is that the few concessions to historical truth that the movie makes are what has denied it wide acceptance by American audiences. It shows the brutal hostility with which Irish immigrants were received in the New World and the terrible suffering they encountered there. To a people comfortable with the well-established myth of poor Irish families escaping British tyranny to find freedom and prosperity in America, these truths are unacceptable. The riots that form the climax of the movie are actual but little-known events, and the manner in which the rioters targeted blacks is not the least uncomfortable fact. It is this indigestible history that curbed the movie's success, not the extreme violence, which it struggled despite, rather than because of.

America today is a land where a little nudity, even when tastefully or humorously presented, on the large or small screen, provokes outrage, censorship and penalty, but the most pornographically explicit violence passes relatively unremarked. Watch this movie if you must but, in the name of Humanity, please keep it from your children.


Rating:
Summary: "Gangs Of New York" Review
Review: I don't see how people are saying this isn't a great film. This is most deff. a classic of our time! I agree, it is kind of long and violent, but it has to be to give the "full effect". I recommend seeing this, all-in-all it's a great movie.

Rating:
Summary: A bit Long
Review: The story was interesting but it was tough staying interested. Danile Day Lewis kept changing accents throughout the movie, not sure how this happened so quickly.