Friday, November 16,

"American Gangster" About Legendary Harlem Heroin Dealer in 70s - Italians STILL the Villains

The ANNOTICO Report


In "The Godfather" Italians are Cold Blooded Killers, Conniving, Greedy, but love their Family...but.....

In the "Sopranos" they are all of the above, But also Slobs, Crude and No so called "code"....

 

Now we get a Movie about a Black gangster, ....What a Relief.......a notorious legendary  Black Heroin Dealer in Harlem and the Cop who pursues him relentlessly,  But, Villain and cop are both outsiders. As a black man, Lucas is the underdog, massively patronised and then hated by the white Mafia he outflanks. Roberts is Jewish, an identity signalled by just two touches: a star-of-David neckchain  and a white bigot calling him a "kike" near the end. Whatever their actual reputation for anti-semitism, the Harlem African-Americans voice no such slurs on Roberts' religion in this film, preserving the important solidarity between the two men. It's not just a question of two alpha-males grudgingly respecting each other; Roberts wants to arrest Lucas so that he can expose the massive network of corrupt police officers who leech on Lucas's drug money....; here it makes for a questionable moral equivalence between these two charismatic street-warriors. The real villains are obviously supposed to be the hapless Italian-Americans ....

 

It never fails to amaze me how often we Jews can insert a Jew into every conceivable situation, and make them a sympathetic victim , or relentless hero, and in this case both. Pretty clever. But what bothers me is how often we must negatively portray the Italian, as mobster, buffoon, vicious, crass, etc. After all, Italy  has the oldest Jewish settlements in Europe, and where the Jews enjoyed great success for over 2000 years. What motivates Jewish Media????

 

American Gangster

Guardian Unlimited, UK
Peter Bradshaw
Friday November 16, 2007

Here's a startlingly original true-life story told in an oddly unoriginal way. And that attempt at instant classic status in the title doesn't quite convince. It's got no more dark grandeur than American Idol.

The film is about the 1970s Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts, the straight-arrow cop who took him down. Lucas's career is heavily pregnant with one irresistible metaphor; he claimed to have directly imported high-grade heroin into the United States from the far east during the Vietnam war, hiding the drugs in the flag-bedecked coffins of fallen American troops - containers that, naturally, no one dared touch. Criminals tend also to be liars,... but director Ridley Scott has taken the inner-city urban myth at face value in this muscular period drama starring Denzel Washington as New York's emperor of smack, and Russell Crowe as the rumpled officer coming after him... .

Scott has shuffled the classic scenes and tropes of the gangster movie and dealt them like a deck of playing cards. There's a big face-off between old-school bad guy and old-school good guy in the manner of Michael Mann. There are nightclub scenes and epiphanic glimpses of beautiful women, blasts of pop music, and plenty of nostalgic voiceover-montage, explaining how the wiseguys' scams worked, in the manner of Scorsese. And, further back than that, there are churchgoing gangsters presiding over pious family events, intercut with horrible shootings in the style of Coppola. There is even a bit of lachrymose brass on the soundtrack, which somehow makes you think of oranges rolling all over the sidewalk.

It's not cliched exactly; it's just very, very familiar....

Villain and cop are both outsiders. As a black man, Lucas is the underdog, massively patronised and then hated by the white Mafia he outflanks. Roberts is Jewish, an identity signalled by just two touches: a star-of-David neckchain glimpsed while he rows with his estranged wife near the start, and a white bigot calling him a "kike" near the end. Whatever their actual reputation for anti-semitism, the Harlem African-Americans voice no such slurs on Roberts' religion in this film, preserving the important solidarity between the two men. It's not just a question of two alpha-males grudgingly respecting each other; Roberts wants to arrest Lucas so that he can expose the massive network of corrupt police officers who leech on Lucas's drug money. That may well have been precisely his motive in real life; here it makes for a questionable moral equivalence between these two charismatic street-warriors. The real villains are obvi ously supposed to be the hapless Italian-Americans and one straightforwardly horrible bent copper, played by Josh Brolin. ...

Just occasionally, with a kind of guilty start, Scott shows the victims of drugs: poor black people living in squalor. But proposing the gangster as a scary but somehow thrillingly real American design classic is uneasy, and uninspired.

 

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