Friday,
November 16,
"American Gangster" About
Legendary
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
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,
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
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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