Anybody see this yet? I went yesterday after taking the day off to wait for the locksmith (fun!), and I've got mixed feelings. Brutal and violent, yes. Overlong? Probably. Shockingly full of hate? Definitely. However, this movie, at times, gave me the most visceral feelings, and at other times I couldn't care less. Very very strange. Anyone else have any thoughts?
Yes and no both. He's not bad, but Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day Lewis) is so commanding on screen it's tough (unfair?) to compare Leo to him. The movie is allegedly about Amsterdam Vallon, but I am beginning to think it's really about anti-hero Bill, and about what a ruthless, hateful, despicable, and complicated character he is.
I don't think it was allegedly about Amsterdam at all, it only seemed that way in its marketing. It's definitely about the role the immigrant/native struggle had in shaping early New York through the eyes of its ganglords, mainly Bill the Butcher. The Amsterdam sideplot is about his interaction with the two father figures of Priest Vallon and The Butcher...I don't even see the fight as revenge at all...it's self-defense and the torch willingly being passed from Bill to Amsterdam. Bill, to me, is the central character of the movie if you want to peg one but the story has no one real central character. It's a period film, and a great success at it. I am no fan of LDC, but Scorcese manages his all-too-obvious inclusion for selling purposes well (honestly there aren't too many huge-name star actors his age whom I think could have played the role) and turns DDL's obvious De Niro slotted role into something else, something incredibly memorable and a character which in my estimation will be remebered for a long, long time. It was very close to being one of the best ever with some minor changes, but it will have to 'settle' in my estimation as one of Scorcese's best. That's not too bad of a shackle to carry.
It was a great effort at a period piece, especially at a "period" that isn't well documented. ...unfortunately, it's also bloated and unfocused. Cameron Diaz anf the DeCaprio-Diaz romance was completely superfluous; Leo DeCaprio in general looked as if he'd rather be somewhere else. Events were jumbled and tacked together in a strange order, and the ending was very cliche and Hollywood. There's not even any real "Scorsese" moments in this film which is very strange. It could have been made by anyone, and unfortunately it, IMO, ranks as one of Scoresese's biggest misfires. Daniel Day Lewis was great though.
What a terrible film. It was like a musical but with gang fights and killing instead of dancing. DiCaprio is stiffer than the kid who played Anakin Skywalker, Cameron Diaz apparently takes acting lessons from Leonardo, and Day-Lewis seemed determined to make up for Leonardo and Cameron's stiffness by overacting to the nth degree. Turning Cutter from antagonist to protagonist and back a few times over muddles the film. Historically inacurate for the most part, body counts 100X their real-life numbers, and had a movie-set feel to it. The costumes were obviously leftovers from MOulon ROuge scrubbed with dirt.
I didn't think it was bad. I was all hyped up for the big Braveheart like battle at the end, but instead the navy blew everyone up. Go figure. Also, the entire theatre smelled like horrible BO. Well, I guess people didn't shower back then, so it offered some realism.
You're nitipcking but right about the historical inaccuracies (the navy, for ex., never shelled the Five Points, although for a while they were on standby) -- but far as body counts go, conservative estimates put the death toll from the Draft Riots at well over a thousand. As an attempt to convey a larger-than-life picture of an under-examined period in our history, I liked the movie. No use looking to Hollywood for rigorous history. I was particularly interested in this film because the novel I published this summer is also set in the Five Points in the 1840s, and includes stuff on the Dead Rabbits, Old Brewery, Tammany Hall, PT Barnum, etc. Also Aztec mythology and some other stuff.
Re: Re: [R] Gangs of New York ? The official body count was 119; I've ever heard an estimae over that, most put the death toll between 50 and 100. Not that anyone neccesarily thinks that it was only 50 to 100. But over a thousand? I've never heard that...or at least never heard that from a credible source. ...are you counting arrests as well? Though there were only 400 or so of those. Or injuries? It doesent add up.
Re: Re: Re: [R] Gangs of New York My source is Edward Robb Ellis, *The Epic of New York City*, in which he quotes then-Police Commissioner Kennedy as giving a death toll of 1155, "not including those who had been smuggled to their graves" (p. 315). And it's worth noting that Herbert Asbury, author of Scosese's source, put the death toll at between two and eight thousand--although he was known to exaggerate for effect.
*A Scattering of Jades*. Available wherever fine books, etc. It made best-of-2002 lists at the WashPost and SF Chronicle.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 61,019 Is this your day job? Hehe, just kidding. My experience w/ this historical period is simply that I did my Master's Thesis on the Five Points. A few facts that are out of whack in the film: 1. There was no Dead Rabbits Gang. They were the Roche Guard (Roche was a saloon keeper and later councilman), but after the "Dead Rabbit Riot," the Bowery Boys reported to the newspapers that they killed a bunch of Dead Rabbits--a derogotory name that the Bowery Boys taunted the Roche Guard with. Kinda like calling the team you hate "sissies" or whatever. 2. There were no "Native American" gangs. There were Nativists that were all extensions of the Bowery Boys in one way or another, who were mainly English and Dutch. This ethnic division died down though by the time of the film, and the Bowery Boys were heavily Irish by then. The gang members were usually emoployed apprentices or worked for the political machine. 3. Bill "The Butcher" Cutter was a real person, and I imagine somewhat like he was in the film, excepting that his real name was Bill "The Butcher" Poole. This is one thing I really don't understand. When you have a real guy, why change his name from Poole to Cutter? Aliteration? Come on. Why? 4. The Dead Rabbit Riot was 5 years before the Draft Riots, not 16.
Err..I just pulled, "Low Life," by Luc Sante off the shelf, and by this book (and other sources), this in not quite right. And in fact In the final scene of the film, this was noted in the wardrobe. I enjoyed the film, but I'm not quite sure this is the film he really wanted to make. DiCaprio was OK, but not what I think was needed; you get the feeling Scorsese pulled his punches in order to provide Miramax with a bit of box office insurance. Perhaps "Last Tempatation Of Christ" hung over the making of this film in that way. I also thought at times, having filmed it on the lot in Italy, gave the film too fake a feeling-although there were scenes that were quite spectacular also. And as others have noted, Daniel Day Lewis, is the film. Without his performance the film really would have failed. Still, I would give it a "thumbs up," and it's good that there are people out their willing to have this kind of ambition in film.
Re: Re: Re: Re: [R] Gangs of New York Like I said, credible sources. Kidding, Ellis is (or was) of course perhaps the most prolific writer of the just-past century, or any other century for that matter. Yeah, you sort of get the feeling that some suit at some point in the process of making this film decided that it needed to be spiced up, hence the Diaz-DiCaprio romance, which is so forced you just know it was tacked on. Even so, here's hoping this will be an oscar-winning film: for Daniel Day Lewis as Supporting Actor.
Tyler Anbinder, author of "Five Points" Anbinder: There was a gang identified in the press as the Dead Rabbits. But the members all wrote to the newspapers after the riot they were in in 1857 and insisted that that was not their name. They said they were the Roche Guard (named after a local saloon keeper) But the press loved the name so it stuck. The term became one used across the nation to describe bad characters, but there was definitely no rabbit on a pike being brought to a riot. I will dig up all of my old sources in the next few days, have to get it out of storage, but this Luc guy is wrong. Very wrong.
SUpporting? No, Lewis is the main actor--DiCaprio serves as the eyes which we see things through--like a Dickens character.
I just saw this today. Overall it had its moments but wasn't enough of a complete picture to get me too excited about it. DDL seems to have studied De Niro as prep for this role -- he sounds like him, he moves like him, he even kinda acts like him. I'd chalk that up to Scorcese. The Cameron Diaz role is so totally superfluous that it's a joke. Leo wasn't as bad as I expected, though it felt like he dropped his Irish accent halfway through the filming. The best parts of it were the vignettes, like the Irishmen being taken off the boat from Dublin, and getting citizenship and conscripted into the Union army simultaneously. Election Day was also well-done. But what's wrong with just telling a story of Irish immigration and the draft riots? Why tack on this silly little fictitious revenge story? Scorcese watched Titanic and said, "I wanna make a picture just like that." Sadly, he kinda did.
Like I said, all of this historical nitpickery being raised on these boards is technically correct but in the end irrelevant (although Heywood's thesis on the Five Points would be interesting if it was more original than his nickname --is it published?). Anyone who expects real history from a Hollywood movie is bound to be disappointed--so pointing out historical inaccuracies is beating a horse that can't get any deader. And a note on Amazon rankings: the Internet is full of articles explaining the inscrutability of Amazon's algorithm. My book isn't a bestseller by any stretch, but anybody who watches Amazon rankings knows that if you sell three copies in a day, you're all of a sudden in the top 1000, and the next day, if none sell, you can be ranked 200,000. Then the day after that, no copies might sell and your rank goes up to 60,000 anyway. This is what's happened to me, and friends of mine who are also writers report the same thing. So I don't worry too much about what Amazon says.
Are you sure? Luc Sante is pretty famous and credible source on this stuff. I'm surprised you did not use his book as reference. In the book there is a reprint of letter sent to the "Times," the day after a July 4 riot on the Bowery Boy with the Plug Uglies-in fact in the report of the incident, the Roach Guard actually joined the Rabbits and Plug Uglies in an attack of a bar on Broome Street. In the letter it notes If you can dig up your research and post it, that would be cool. Seems like all the sources say that the Dead Rabbits split from the Roach Guard.
Heywood: "this Luc guy"? You did a thesis on the Five Points and you've never heard of Luc Sante? Concerning Sante's credibility, there was a recent article in Harper's or the Atlantic or somewhere in which some of his sources were questioned. The Dead Rabbits question is in the end a question of who laid the name on this group of people, themselves or someone else; and in the end I'm not sure it matters.
Exactly. The ***************er cost me three months of revision after my professor "suggested" I not use Sante as a credible source. Relies too much on newspaper accounts apparently. You believe everything you read in the papers? he says to me... Anyway, there is primary source material--a number of diaries, one from one of Roche's underlings. Next year I'll dig. As far as it mattering, sure it matters. I contend that the Dead Rabbits was a moniker coined by the Bowery Boys as given to the newspapers. The newspapers LOVED the name, so it sperad like wild-fire in the press accounts. Meanwhile, the Roche Guard were telling anyone who would listen that they were the Roche Guard and NOT the Dead Rabbits. The term Dead Rabbits was simply a historical joke pulled on the Roche Guard by the Bowery Boys. Again, think of calling your rival team Nancy Boys or Woosie Boys, and you get the picture as to what stuck. The press loving the name Dead Rabbits helped the myth.