I listened to the clip -- just great stuff, Nezua! Congratulations! I liked the in-depth analysis of the writing, your words are always evocative and wise. Am looking forward to more radiosity from you.

thank you!!! i appreciate the love, nightprowlkitty.

Great Job!

That first scene really has no relevance to the rest of the movie. At all. We've been through talking about that, but...the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems. And it is the most brutal murder in the movie. It's like "let me show you what this man is capable of on this person that you likely won't try to understand." And that's that. Really unnerving.

I really liked the review. Needed more commentary on the naked women, though. I mean, I spotted one or two of them wearing panties. WTF? What if there were drugs in there?! Very irresponsible, Mr. Lucas, and I'm not saying that because the women were hot or anything. Nope, nope.

i guess i can reason out why we came in that way. we need to see what bumpy does, and what lucas did for him. what DOES have no relevance is the choice of the spanish language. there is NO narrative need nor tie-in for that at all. which is why it stood out so much, too...

i'm with you. in the interest of Suspension of Disbelief, the panties must come off. i mean, that's what i usually say, at least.

grazzi, molina!

Great job, Nez! I'm sure the time constraint was tough on yer talky self but hey it's good discipline and you pulled it off. It sounds great and your critique is sharp and well-stated.

Me, I give the flick 3.5 out of 5 stars.

It's one of the only big-studio films I've seen which seriously attempts to portray an African American gangster with power, class, restraint, discipline, organizational brains, family life, a cinematic treatment usually reserved for white mastermind criminals while Black dudes are generally portrayed as deviant unhinged thugs. I agree with you about the holes in the writing and charaterization (most of the characters were incredibly undeveloped), and the seemingly internally-conflicted representations of our 2 heroes. But big ups from me for merely attempting this project, for putting up dangerous images (not the blinged-out caricatures of corporate poser-pop rap, but something more serious) and drawing out strong performances from Washington and Crowe in the Valjean-Javert mold.

I thought the opening scene was important (not the Spanish profanity, the killing itself) because it established this guys' tutelage under Bumpy: cold-blooded murder followed by handing out turkeys for Thanksgiving. That's his crime philosophy in a nutshell. We don't really need to see any more killings after that because you can just assume it's going on in the shadows while the money accumulates. That's why I actually wouldn't describe this as an action flick: there would have been far greater focus on shootings and strong-arming scenes and heists and such, but instead we get a rather tepidly-paced drama of an African American dynastic rise and fall, with some twists.

Incidentally I actually went to see the movie with a guy who grew up in Nicky Barnes's Harlem and whose family was actually involved with (ahem) Frank Lucas's organization. He viewed the film through a more historical lens, a retelling of a famous Harlem tale. He said Lucas was always known as a low-key behind-the-scenes operator, but Barnes was nowhere near the clown they made him out to be in the film. More importantly, however, both of us were annoyed by one big question: How does a guy from Harlem fly into Indochina and establish a world-class heroin-smuggling network using the US military as a carrier? There's only one way that this can happen, and it wasn't mentioned in the film: with CIA support. Apparently folks in Harlem kind of assumed that Lucas and Barnes had some inside track with certain boyz in DC, which allowed them to do what they did. Think Iran-Contra, but in the 60s and 70s with heroin from Indochina instead of 80s crack from South America. Pouring massive quantities of cheap high-quality drugs into Black communities is something that the US government is known to do, especially when funding undeclared wars. And the Feds eventually busted Lucas anyway; maybe they thought he was getting too big for his britches; and they allowed him to clean out the local police hustle while he was going down. With the kinds of enemies Lucas and Barnes must have made in the criminal underworld, the fact that they're both still alive should tell you something.

Anyway those are just some random renegade thoughts. On the whole I'd sum it up by saying that I definitely enjoyed the movie but it wasn't life-changing or mind-blowing or anything, just a good solid flick about a story that most of mainstream America probably doesn't know.

I'm looking forward to more of your Pacifica reviews, Nez!

Peace.

great addition, thanks kai.

that's the thing. there are SO many frames thru which to view a flick. with length (such as you had here), we can get into the nuances. with a short clip, you cannot. thus the frustration of the editor within.

i agree on the attempt "to portray an African American gangster with power, class, restraint, discipline, organizational brains, family life, a cinematic treatment usually reserved for white mastermind criminals while Black dudes are generally portrayed as deviant unhinged thugs." absolutamente. which, ironically, was part of my problem in the flick. i loved lucas...but was i really supposed to? i feel the social context of American films today says Yes (we love the gangster and the violence), but the story was meant (or should have been) to say No. where was our villain? it sort of made this a flick where the "good guy" was a hypocritical sop i couldn't get behind (roberts, who not only had selective integrity, but had bad hair and clothes), the "bad guy" was Trupo, the I-talian cop on the take, and the "anti-hero" (which felt perversely like the "good guy"), Lucas. and i think if you are going to take liberties when making a film, take liberties with the parts that gives people characters they can understand. these ones felt like constructions. there were parts missing in the back. confused constructions.

but yeah. good points. love the Harlem context and history. i was thinking on that, too, esp with the flick's use of the song Across 110th Street, a real indicator of the times, and the place.

good point, that was a piece missing from the story. the government collusion (CIA), although i was also thinking that there are always individuals (esp those in a system who are getting shorted, such as military people) who are willing to look the other way if a stack of Benjamins comes along. all's fair in love and war as they say.

so many ways to come at it. i like to look at the directors too. ridley scott has certain themes he likes. father and son conflict are one, that scene with bumpy in the beginning at the store was pure ridley. son with father at last moments, son takes off in direction opposed to father's will (cutting out middleman.) surrogate father in this case, but the same.

anyway, yeah. i could go on a while with this. thanks bro, i appreciate your adding to this, and your words.

More importantly, however, both of us were annoyed by one big question: How does a guy from Harlem fly into Indochina and establish a world-class heroin-smuggling network using the US military as a carrier? There's only one way that this can happen, and it wasn't mentioned in the film: with CIA support.

I remember thinking that there were heavy allusions to the fact that someone else that is higher up in "law enforcement" was involved through cues in the dialogue for some of Crowe's scenes. But the lack of explicit grappling with CIA involvement is a significant omission, and, as you say, Barnes and Lucas are still alive.

I found the Barnes juxtaposition telling because it seemed like a modern-day cautionary tale to the flashiness of thugs and gangster wannabes. But because so much of the story is underdeveloped, it's hard to draw out that level of critique. The movie could have done so much more with the rich history it was given, and it ran so long and fell pretty flat.

it's also hard to draw out some of those themes because it seems Zailliard (screenwriter) and Ridley were bent on making cool references to tons of gangster movies. this ends up feeling not original, and as if the film is a medley of other peoples' work, without enough time or energy put into an original telling or exploration.

por ejemplo, that chinchilla coat scene could have been lifted right out of Goodfellas (after the big heist at the airport, and the one guy gets a new car and jacket, and gets berated for being flashy). part of you is saying "yeah, that is how it must work when you are laying low," and part is saying "what is the message, what is the correlation to today's culture" and part is answering "nothing, that's just a cool reference to Goodfellas."

especially as there really is almost a constant stream of these references. i understand there is a certain vocabulary that you (usually) observe when doing a genre, but the overall impression is that Zailliard did a cut and paste of five different well-known gangster flicks to make the film "feel" american-movie-gangsterish. and even if not, that's how it comes across (if you know the movies you're going "O, scarface!" and "O, Godfather for that one!" and "O, Casino!").

Yeah, and see, that makes me want to go a step further on why the racial analysis in this film should have been stepped up somewhat. I didn't like the Black Firsts angle of the presentation either because it did leave you ambiguous about Lucas. And since I'm not a big gangster movies fan (I haven't seen any of the movies you mentioned, for instance), the homage to them was lost for me. At the same time, the critical analysis factors of some of the pivotal scenes left me hollow, too. Because racially speaking, codes of social acceptance and credibility played a big weight in shaping my interpretations of Lucas.

The colorism involved in the wife he chooses,

the overabundance of brown junkies that appeared in the films with festering wounds juxtaposed with the appearance of one or two white junkies (not to mention how long those images would drag on to impose moral culpability on something, but it's not clear what),

and the hilarity of that scene where Roberts chooses his informants (that I won't go into except to say the fact that the cinematic effect was supposed to make it seem like Roberts was questioning the lewd overt interracial mixing of the men before hiring them).

There's so much there but it's...whitewashed. Or crumpled.

wow,i have to agree with you.the story was weak.i thought the movie was like a plane it just flew right by.there was no depth.

yes, you're making me think of a lot of my notes!

colorism of la novia, yes. i thought same thing. but that was real life, you know? that's what i'm assuming. this was based on lucas' life. but yes, in the context of a story, agreed.

i had the same thought about roberts' team jeez. i was like, "oh, it's Kirk again!"

M, good points on how robert's was talking to the other white cop while they both looked on at the brown, writhing, horny primitive types pre-selection of his new team.

on the greater amount of black junkies, well. i guess i still have to say that this story is supposed to be set in the 1970s Harlem! so...tho today you can see so many white students of Columbia U and other types in Harlem, esp as it becomes more and more gentrified, i wonder if it is simply honest to show more junkies who are black in this film.

but notice, too how roberts' partner is latino, is a junkie, is another crooked cop. and after roberts talks him into turning in all that cash, even tho his partner predicts their downfall from doing so, he won't even (in the name of partners) help him escape his one bind without turning himself in. so his brown ex-partner becomes part of the morality tale.

with elements like that, after a while it really felt like the white crusader doing good and looking down on all the dark immoral people. (and how hypocritical, again, of roberts, who has a mobster as the godfather of his child, and who hangs out regularly with him, and who first tells him to deny their friendship, and then, yet, pumps him for more info!! crusader? gross.)

what i found interesting, in this light, was a piece of art direction in the first scene, where Lucas and Bumpy enter the store in Harlem. did you note? the plastic prop used to highlight the TVs they look at is a woman pointing to the sets. She is a plastic sign of a white, blonde woman! in a Harlem store! clearly they chose her on purpose. i wonder why. perhaps this was the case in the 1970s, perhaps it is a statement about how little black people appeared in media, meaning even the displays for goods meant for black consumers were advertised in a white fashion. it's probably even an accurate touch. it says a lot, very quickly and subtly.

Nez, ya I hear you on the contradictions of hero, anti-hero, etc. I find this happens a lot in modern movies, this bizarre need to make everything into a fairy tale with a moral when actually it's just A Thing That Happened, an essentially amoral story in my eyes.

Personally I tend to like (or at least admire) characters like Lucas despite the injection of cautionary brow-beating (e.g. lingering on puke-drenched junkies, as M points out). I don't know what the film-makers wanted me to think, but as I sat in the theater passing a flask of scotch with my amigo, we both kept saying of the Roberts character, "Will somebody please shoot that guy?" I mean, that intro scene where he turns in a million in unmarked cash was just ludicrous and made me despise the dude, because dudes like that get other dudes killed. I'm not sure if that was supposed to be my reaction. Actually Roberts' decision does end up costing his partner's career and life, so maybe it was, I dunno.

I agree that in a Harlem story it would have been pretty awkward to show a bunch of white junkies. At the same time, I totally agree with M that the movie's racial discourse was, let's just say, unambitious. But then, we're talking about a film made by a white Englishman with a "Sir" in front of his name. I'm not sure if he's got a profound and nuanced grasp of US racial history and discourse. I also agree that all the references to previous gangster classics were probably excessive and distracting (though all the previous ones were about Italians, plus one Italian with a quasi-Cuban accent, so having a powerful Black protagonist is, I suppose, the twist). Again, I say blame the Englishman, he's probably just trying too hard to look cool, hehe.

sipping on booze makes for a different ingestion of film! i know this.

good point about trying to make a morality tale out of everything.

i loved lucas and was frustrated by the end, personally. roberts was annoying as hell to me. thats just my personal, not thinking response.

we cant give ridley a pass on race. i agree that he is a Sir Whiteman. but if we go all the way back to his most famous film, Bladerunner, we see he is very conscious of race. Bladerunner's replicants are discussed academically as a metaphor for blacks and colonization and dehumanization. its even in the dialogue, in very obvious ways. the future of LA is pictured in that film as a mashup of multiculturalism (edward james olmos' character has ten different ethnicities, and "City Speak" is a blend of these and more, and it is meant to be coarse and low tongue). the film is said to reflect "cultural anxieties" about the social makeup of the city and our society at large...and yet the film, funnily, is mostly white. but then again, the future almost always is in Sci-Fi, another popular complaint/analysis of those types of films.

so we can't say by now that scott has no idea or is oblivious to racial dynamics. it makes the analysis of this film even more interesting. it makes it even more curious, this "unambitious racial discourse."

i mostly loved watching denzel in this one. i don't always. but he was great here. however, honestly, even his character was flat, given the potential of the director and the player we're talking about. but we must also remember that a popular critique of scott's films is that he is good at dressing but weak on substance.

kai, i submit that the reason the lingering OD shots felt like "cautionary brow beating" is that they were not connected. this is part of my critique on the poor drawing of characters and narrative development. those shots were MEANT to make us feel the irony and horror that a man could be eating a nice family meal while his handiwork is death. but did it feel that way? no! we ignore those shots pretty much, they are not hooked in, they feel placed there, and not part of anything emotional we are experiencing.

the scene was reminiscent of the godfather, for one, where we have montages showing how the mob is about family but at the same time about brutal murders etc. this type of thing plays up the Mob mystique. but in the story, it wasn't done right. as i said in my original review, the movie loves up the gangster lifestyle. far too much to throw in a few OD shots during dinner and expect us to grab a moral out of the whole thing. this is part of the confusion i allude to in the story.

Nez, hehe yes the booze-sipping may have increased enjoyment of said film!

I definitely agree on not giving Scott or this film a pass on race (actually I think I don't really believe in giving anyone a pass on race!). Especially a guy who takes on a project like American Gangster. In fact did you see Manish's critique of Bladerunner at Racialicious?

Coming back to the CIA connection, there was one scene in which Lucas visits his source in Asia (played by the One Asian Villain Actor In Every Movie) and they mention that it's a Kuomingtang camp. At that time, Kuomingtang (Nationalists) were openly funded and supported by the US government to fight Communists in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, with heavy CIA support. So I think that's as close as they got to connecting Lucas to the CIA; which isn't exactly obvious.

And about those pukey OD shots, absolutely agreed, they were just wedged in there out of the blue (as though anyone needs to be reminded of the consequences of heroin addiction). Extremely heavy-handed and awkward. And I agree that what held the film together was Denzel's performance. He has bailed out many a mediocre film in his career, I guess writers and directors have come to count on that rather than making sure the rest of the details work! ;-)

jeje that sort of came out wrong. i know how you feel about giving anyone a "pass" as such. i really meant to say "we can't assume scott doesn't think about or isnt aware of these things."

i havent seen the racialicious review. i'll scope it for sure. thanks.

ah...thanks for the CIA insight, via the One Asian Villain Actor! i see now. gracias para la historia lección.

yes. america has a star-based system. europe is more known for having a directorially-weighted appreciation and draw to their films, from what i know. so a modern director releasing a film in america actually could bank on such an assumption.

I haven't seen the movie so forgive the not-much-of-an-addition-to-this-great-conversation, but I just wanted to say: congratulations, Nez! It is super delightful to see you doing well and getting more and more much-deserved recognition.