Tag: Gangster
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The Irishman: How Giants Confront Mortality
On a snowy day in the woods of present day Austria in AD 180, Maximus rallied his troops before the final battle and shouted, ”What we do in life, echoes in eternity!” The battle ensued and Maximus’ men came out triumphant. This happened in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator from 2000. Meanwhile, nineteen years later, Martin Scorsese…
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A Bronx Tale: Wasted Talent
”You did a good thing for a bad man,” is one of the first things that Lorenzo, De Niro’s character in A Bronx Tale, tells his son, Calogero. This is also one of the first moral dilemmas we are presented with as we witness the coming of age of an Italian-American boy in the 1960s Bronx…
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How to Get Away with a Stinker
Many people have asked my opinion on what I consider a bad movie, or what makes a director bad. The answer to these two questions could have been simple: Michael Bay and his entire filmography, Zack Snyder and his superhero fascination, M. Night Shyamalan and a big chunk of his last few movies, but in…
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Black Mess
Today’s topic: what went wrong with this year’s Johnny Depp gangster drama, Black Mass. I’ve been thinking about tackling the subject of a wasted movie’s potential for a long time, sniffing around the negativity, trying to think of a nice way of putting all my thoughts into one single post. I waited for the right movie, a movie so…
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Middle Man
Today’s topic: the raw realism of Goodfellas. The gangster genre is one that has been popular since the early 1930s, with the original Scarface and Public Enemy, and it went on to be recognized as one of the most well received genres of cinema. In the early 70s, the world and history met the grandeur of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, two…
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