yeah. i said it. gangs of new york is
a movie you should see if you want to consider yourself a grown person.
i'm making this illogical assertion mostly for the very
selfish reason that gony is my litmus test for finding true
friends. if you and i can have a serious conversation about gony and you can withstand the horrible self-righteous
thoroughly uneductated film critic bitch i am when discussing the MYRIAD (OH.
MY. GOD. SOOOOOOOOOO MANY.) faults of gony... well, hey, we
can be friends.
(alternately, if you hate to see me on my high horse,
avert thine eyes from this blog post! you've been forewarned.)
my gut response to gony is this:
AAAAAGHGHGHAGHHGHEHHHHGRRRRR.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...
grr.
rrrrrrr.
rawr.
r.
...
mind you, that's the pseudo-articulate response i've
managed to cultivate over the last 8 years. heaven help everyone who was
around when i was mounting inarticulate arguments against the inarticulacy of
martin scorsese's film-making ability circa 2003.
but if we're going to be Grown People, we need to be
able to make effective arguments and we also need to know where we stand on
really, really important things. like gony. so here goes. in
my fling with Grown Persondom, i will now attempt an articulation of my problem
with gony.
there's a part of me that wishes martin scorsese were
more like oliver stone (sentences one would not expect to ever need to have
exist), and that he would do three or four gony director's
cuts. so we could see where, precisely, it all went wrong. and know who to
blame.
gony should be good. it SHOULD be.
there are at least twenty (i've counted) solid reasons for why it should be a
success, of which i will now discuss three.
solid reason why gony should be a
success, #1: in gony,
daniel day lewis is UH-MAZING. he is so good as bill the butcher that, through
two viewings, i believed he was timothy dalton.
for reals. i spent the eight zillion hours that comprise
the running time of gony x 2 thinking that bill the butcher
was played by the 2nd least successful of all james bonds. come to find out it
was good old DDL. while this is, admittedly, a reflection upon my own
unfamiliarity with the ranks of prestigious thespians at the millennium's dawn,
it's also a testament to DDL's mad skills.
people, them's be some SERIOUS acting chops. how can this film possibly fail?
solid reason why gony should be a
success, #2: martin scorsese worked on it for thirty years.
(btw, i have now thrice mistyped martin scorsese as
martin sheen- which raises the spector of an alternate world where gony was directed by martin sheen and turned out
SO.MUCH.BETTER.
anyway...)
thirty years. seriously. poor martin scorsese.
to be haunted by an ummade film that you simply know will
be the best of your career only to finally produce it when meryl street is too
damn old to play the lead you have written for her, so you have to settle on
freaking cameron diaz instead.
pity. that. man.
he had thirty years to get this right. add to that the
extra time created by the delay of the film's release in the wake of 9/11, which would've been an excellent time for reflection and taking stock and
saying, now, hey, wait a minute. this is my life's greatest work and
it kinda doesn't rock so maybe i should take a few seconds to perfect.
but no. and, FAIL.
solid reason why gony should be a
success, #3: gony is a historical epic. historical epics cannot not be successful (with the exception of those starring kevin costner post-1993).
here's a quick course in what it takes to make a
historical epic: a memorable theme.
yes, that is all. any and all historical epics have this. it
isn't optional and it's key. because the memorable theme situates history in suitably
epical soundtext while also immediately evoking the memory of the awesomeness
of your particular historical epic whenever people hear its particular memorable
theme.
this doesn't have to be orchestral (see also: any song
bryan adams has sung that has appeared in a feature film), but it has to be
memorable.
though i cannot overstate the importance of the memorable
theme, i also can't overstate how mastery of the memorable theme isn't
particularly difficult. even freaking far and away by little
oppie cunningham howard effectively used the existing music of enya to create a
memorable cinematic mood.
gony stars The Star of titanic. even six years after the fact, the name leo
dicaprio was still drenched in the teen lust of james horner's bagpipe and
celine dion's "my heart will go on." and yet...
gony is twelve zillion years long.
scorsese spent thirty years making it. and still it has no cohesive orchestral
score nor soundtrack.
there is at one point a folk song that sounds vaguely like it involved the participation of peter gabriel.
there is at one point a folk song that sounds vaguely like it involved the participation of peter gabriel.
even more infuriatingly, there's a u2 song over the final credits that provides a melody that would've been suitably memorable had
it been employed throughout the entirety of the two and a half hours that came
before. but it wasn't.
and so, at the film's end, we are confronted with bono's
earnesty and edge's guitars, which come busting out of nowhere at deafening
volume during a pensive homage to the twin towers. an event that obviously had
not occurred thirty years prior when scorcese first conceived of the film and
which appears, in the aftermath, ruthlesslessy tacked on.
i repeat: AAAAAGHGHGHAGHHGHEHHHHGRRRRR.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... grr. rr.
ok, so maybe my articulation hasn't improved much in the
last 8 years. but i still contend gony is A Movie You Should
See If You Want To Consider Yourself A Grown Person. if only to know where you
stand on the exploitation of 9/11 in film and leonardo dicaprio's
ponytail. but also to see the sad, sad death of a thirty-year-old dream.
5 comments:
it was so odd, i was just sitting here at work when i had this odd 100% absolutely sure feeling that someone on the internet was saying glowing things about DDL (or Timothy Dalton). I typed in O in the C and BOOM.
You do not disappoint.
Also the rest of this essay is, how you have put it UH-Mazing.
This is awesome. You could also insert "Ben Kingsley" for "Daniel Day-Lewis"(and "Armine Mueller-Stahl" for "Timothy Dalton") and also have a review for "Hugo."
thoughts on hugo, sensei? due to the martin scorsese factor, i'm afraid to go.
It really reminded me of GONY in that it's also a deeply personal project for Scorcese, has some great acting, is a period piece, has great potential, moments I love, but is ultimately a big ol' mess. I mean, it's really two movies poorly stitched into one. There's a deeply moving, beautiful film about the birth of cinema; and there's also a really cliche, boring, sub-Dickensian, groan-inducing Harry Potter rip-off. Critics loved "Hugo" because it was essentially a giant cinematic hand job (it's message is literally that "Movies Are Magic and Life Changing" so OF COURSE nobody who reviews films for a living noticed the terrible plot, acting, and silly gimmicks surrounding said message). Like GONY, I sort of like Hugo in spite of all its considerable flaws, but thinking about it also sends me into rage-convulsions. But then most 21st Century Scorcese does that to me ("The Departed" as well). Which may be a sort of an argument in Scorcese's favor.
i think this is, in large part, why scorcese annoys me so much. because in being so frustrated by his films, i wind up talking about them at great length in an attempt to understand why i am so frustrated by them- which, ultimately, may be a sign of how good of a filmmaker he is. maybe? the rage-convulsions must mean something. or maybe they mean nothing? blurgh. scorcese is my existential dilemma.
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