gangsters

Once Upon a Time in America

by James McNally on February 2, 2011

in DVD

Once Upon a Time in America
Warner released Once Upon a Time in America on Blu-ray in Canada on January 11, 2011. Help sup­port Toronto Screen Shots by buying it on Amazon.ca.

Once Upon a Time in America (Director: Sergio Leone): The first and best thing I can say about the new Blu-ray of this classic gang­ster saga from Warner is that it finally allows the viewer to enjoy the entire 220 minutes without having to change discs in the middle. And the full exper­i­ence is def­in­itely what you want. Never has a film needed and made better use of the larger canvas afforded by breaking (smashing!) the ima­ginary two hour bar­rier some studio exec­ut­ives feel is the upper limit for audi­ence atten­tion. Let me illustrate:

Approximately an hour in, young gang­ster Patsy (Brian Bloom) climbs the stairs for an assig­na­tion with teen­aged pros­ti­tute Peggy. He’s been told he can exchange a freshly-baked cream­puff for sexual favours and as he waits for her, he sits on the stair­case while gingerly pla­cing the cream­puff next to him. Over the next two full minutes, he sits looking at this deli­cious treat while waiting for one of a dif­ferent sort. He picks at the icing and rearranges the wrap­ping nervously until he finally can’t help him­self any longer. He greedily devours the cream­puff, and just as he pops the cherry into his mouth, Peggy emerges from her apart­ment. “Whaddya want?” she demands. “Uh…I’ll come back another time.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better por­trayal of the fine line between child­hood and adult­hood, and in a shorter film, this is the sort of scene that would be cut first.

I won’t attempt a full review, but Leone’s tale of Jewish gang­sters in New York spans more than 30 years in the lives of pals Noodles (Robert DeNiro) and Max (James Woods). The often-overbearing soundtrack by Ennio Morricone piles on to the already-sentimental dir­ec­tion by Leone, but it’s a good story and some of the images are just fant­astic. The film also stars Joe Pesci, Tuesday Weld, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Wiliams, Burt Young, Danny Aiello and in her first film role, Jennifer Connelly.

Extra fea­tures include a com­mentary by film critic Richard Schickel and an excerpt from the doc­u­mentary Once Upon a Time: Sergio Leone focusing on the making of the film. It runs about 20 minutes.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: gangsters, newyork, newyorkcity, nyc

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

West 32nd

by James McNally on November 16, 2008

in Film Festivals,Reel Asian

West 32nd

West 32nd (Director: Michael Kang): John Cho (Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle) plays John Kim, an ambi­tious young lawyer who offers to rep­resent a Korean teen­ager accused of a gang-related murder in New York’s Koreatown. His firm wants to raise its pro­file and he feels by doing this pro bono work, he can advance his career as well. His own Korean back­ground helps con­vince the boy’s family to sign on, but in reality, he doesn’t even speak the language.

Before he knows it, he’s caught up in an under­world he didn’t even know existed. He meets Mike (Jun Sung Kim), a mid-level gang­ster trying to move up in the hier­archy, and the two quickly recog­nize each other’s ambi­tion and begin an uneasy cooper­a­tion. But John is soon over his head in a cul­ture he doesn’t really under­stand, and before long, there are more dead bodies and he’s no closer to win­ning his case. By the end of the film, any hint of altruism in John’s offer to help is peeled away to reveal that he’s really not that dif­ferent from the gang­sters he’s trying to bring down.

Though Cho is effective as John Kim, it was Jun Sung Kim’s char­acter Mike Juhn who really lit up the screen for me. Unfortunately, the female char­ac­ters seemed largely dec­or­ative, but that seems to be part and parcel of the tra­di­tional Korean cul­ture that runs these crim­inal organ­iz­a­tions. The loc­a­tions in Manhattan and in Flushing, Queens added to the gritty realism of the film, and Kang used many actual Korean-American den­izens of the neigh­bour­hoods to fur­ther boost the authen­ti­city factor.

Kang has made a slick and effective thriller that, while not par­tic­u­larly ori­ginal, pays homage to both the American gang­ster films of the 70s and the more recent wave of Korean crime films. His co-writer is Edmund Lee, a former Village Voice reporter who spent years thor­oughly researching gangs and organ­ized crime in New York’s Korean com­munity. As Kang described the pro­ject, he started out trying to make a Korean-American ver­sion of The Departed and ended up with some­thing more like Mean Streets.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Michael Kang from after the screening (con­tains pos­sible spoilers):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 14:00

Official site of the film
Director’s blog

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: #reelasian08, crime, gangsters, korea, newyorkcity, nyc

{ Comments on this entry are closed }