Gangbangin' in the 19th Century

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"Remember the first rule of politics. The ballots don't make the results; the counters make the results. The counters. Keep counting."

Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent)

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"Gangs of New York," which premiered on this day in 2002, can be a difficult movie to watch. Apparently, it was also a difficult film to make. Costs overran the budget by 25%, ballooning to over $100 million.

It opened with hand–to–hand battle in the snow in the infamous 19th–century gang fight of Five Points between the Protestant "Natives" and the Irish Catholic "Dead Rabbits," a fight "recorded in American history," wrote Roger Ebert, "but not underlined."

I don't know what the actual battle was like, but the movie depiction was grim. The combatants went at each other with clubs and hatchets, leaving red stains on the carpet of snow beneath them.

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Actually, grim is a good word for "Gangs of New York."

It was a rough movie, full of violence and bloodshed.

Ebert acknowledged the film was a "triumph" for director Martin Scorsese "and yet I do not think this film is in the first rank of his masterpieces. It is very good but not great," he wrote.

"Scorsese's films usually leap joyfully onto the screen, the work of a master in command of his craft," Ebert continued. "Here there seems more struggle, more weight to overcome, more darkness. It is a story that Scorsese has filmed without entirely internalizing. The gangsters in his earlier films are motivated by greed, ego and power; they like nice cars, shoes, suits, dinners, women. They murder as a cost of doing business. The characters in 'Gangs of New York' kill because they like to and want to. They are bloodthirsty and motivated by hate. I think Scorsese liked the heroes of 'Goodfellas,' 'Casino' and 'Mean Streets,' but I'm not sure he likes this crowd."

Granted, there really wasn't a whole lot to like, but there were some worthwhile observations to be made.

For example, Ebert pointed out that the movie was loaded with Dickensian characters, and he compared the hero of the story, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, only five years removed from his heartthrob role in "Titanic," to David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. I had to wonder how the young girls who had flocked to theaters over and over again to see DiCaprio in "Titanic" felt when they saw Daniel Day–Lewis put a hot knife on DiCaprio's cheek, disfiguring his character. It was, to be sure, a different kind of role.

And Cameron Diaz, who played as volatile a love interest as the screen has ever seen, was compared to Nancy in Dickens' "Oliver Twist." Diaz was "a hellcat with a fierce loyalty to her man," Ebert wrote — not unlike Shani Wallis in "Oliver!" several decades before.

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The movie also gave an unflinching look at democracy in America in the 19th century.

In 19th–century New York, that often meant the buying and selling of votes and the delivering of constituencies like lambs to a slaughter. Given the subject matter of the movie, that is probably a pretty good analogy.

"Gangs of New York" received 10 Oscar nominations but didn't win a single award.

Taming a Raging Bull

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Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro): She says he's pretty.

Joey LaMotta (Joe Pesci): Yeah, well, you make him ugly.

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I like black–and–white movies. I know some people don't. I've noticed that younger people are often dismissive of black and white, but they deprive themselves of some truly great movies that way — classics, whether they came out in the '30s or on this day in 1980.

That was the day that Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull," the story of boxer Jake LaMotta, premiered — and it seemed fitting to tell the tale in black and white, just as it seemed fitting 25 years later to tell the story of Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy in "Good Night, and Good Luck" in black and white.

Both movies were based on true stories that took place at a time when color was cost prohibitive, something you really only saw on movie screens, not the much smaller screen of the television set. And you certainly didn't see color in news footage of either LaMotta's fights or the Murrow–McCarthy clashes.

But "Raging Bull" wasn't really a boxing movie, and Roger Ebert came about as close as anyone has to explaining what it was really about. He wrote that it was "about a man with paralyzing jealousy and sexual insecurity, for whom being punished in the ring serves as confession, penance and absolution. It is no accident that the screenplay never concerns itself with fight strategy. For Jake LaMotta, what happens during a fight is controlled not by tactics but by his fears and drives."

LaMotta's obsessiveness with his wife (played by Cathy Moriarty), who was 15 when they met, told the story best.

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LaMotta constantly worried that she would have relationships with other men. When she made an offhand remark about one of his opponents, saying he was "good–looking," LaMotta made a point of pounding the man into a pulp, then glaring at his wife in the crowd. She got the message.

It's one of those basic, primal urges in man, I guess, to stake out a territory and be jealous of anyone who posed a threat to it, whether that territory was land or livestock — or female. It may not be the sort of thing that can be changed, as deeply ingrained as it appears to be.

In modern man, much of that instinct is contained by various factors that didn't exist or were much less pronounced centuries ago, including professions, but some professions still urge those within them to utilize such instincts. One such profession is boxing, where violence is not just permitted but openly encouraged.

It really shouldn't surprise anyone when a professional fighter resorts to violence outside the ring. It is the only way many of them ever learned to resolve any kind of conflict.

The story was told in a kind of flashback style with the present day being an aging Jake LaMotta, past his boxing days and doing standup routines to support himself, followed by reflections on his life and career.

The movie followed a recurring theme that those familiar with Scorsese's work must have recognized. Again, Ebert may have described it best: "the inability of his characters to trust and relate with women."

"Jake has an ambivalence toward women that Freud famously named the 'Madonna–whore complex,'" Ebert observed. "For LaMotta, women are unapproachable, virginal ideals — until they are sullied by physical contact (with him), after which they become suspect."

Or, as Groucho Marx put it, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."

It isn't funny, though. Jake even went after his brother (Joe Pesci) in a jealous rage.

Ebert couldn't stop gushing about the movie. He wrote that it was "the most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema— an 'Othello' for our times. It's the best film I've seen about the low self–esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women. Boxing is the arena, not the subject. LaMotta was famous for refusing to be knocked down in the ring. There are scenes where he stands passively, his hands at his side, allowing himself to be hammered. We sense why he didn't go down. He hurt too much to allow the pain to stop."

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"Raging Bull" tied with "The Elephant Man" for the most Oscar nominations at eight apiece. De Niro won Best Actor, and Thelma Schoonmaker received the Oscar for Best Film Editing, but "Ordinary People," in hindsight a rather routine drama, won Best Picture and Best Director.

There are probably some Oscar voters who regret those decisions now. Certainly the folks at the American Film Institute would go along with awarding those Oscars to Scorsese and his movie. AFI ranks "Raging Bull" #4 on the all–time greatest movies list. "Ordinary People" didn't make the Top 100.

Living in a Material World

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"Paulie may have moved slow, but it was only because Paulie didn't have to move for anybody."

Henry (Ray Liotta)

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So much has been said about "Goodfellas," which premiered on this date in 1990, that it almost seems redundant to go over the plot.

So I will content myself with making some general observations.

First of all, let's talk about its place among the great films of all time. The American Film Institute ranked it #92 of all time — only about one–tenth of the movies that were ranked ahead of "Goodfellas" were made after "Goodfellas" made its debut, and I can't really quibble about any of them except for "Titanic" — which I thought was good but not great.

The thing about "Goodfellas" was that the motivation was the desire to be treated like someone special. There have been other great movies about organized crime in my lifetime — the first two "Godfather" movies come to mind — but I never got the sense that the central characters were motivated by a yearning to be treated better than anyone else, although I suppose that was always implied. Those other movies have always seemed to me to be more about money and power, but "Goodfellas" was about a bunch of guys who grew up in underprivileged homes and wished to have the privileges they had been denied. Driving fancy cars and wearing fancy suits were ways of showing that one had risen above humble circumstances; so was having all the people around fall all over themselves to satisfy your every whim.

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster," said Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), whose life story inspired the movie. "To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States."

At the end of the movie, Hill was nostalgic about the old days. "We were treated like movie stars with muscle," he recalled. "Today, everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like everyone else."

Roger Ebert described this sense of entitlement in the context of "the most famous shot" in the movie: "[Henry] takes his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) to the Copacabana nightclub. There's a line in front, but he escorts her across the street, down stairs and service corridors, through the kitchen area and out into the showroom just as their table is being placed right in front of the stage. This unbroken shot, which lasts 184 seconds, is not simply a cameraman's stunt, but an inspired way to show how the whole world seems to unfold effortlessly before young Henry Hill."

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Bracco's character was groundbreaking in that she was allowed to speak at length. Most of the time, even today, the women in gangster movies are occasionally seen (if they are lucky) but never heard.

Violence always comes with the territory in a gangster movie, and in trademark Martin Scorsese fashion, the violence in "Goodfellas" could be shocking and explicit. I guess it needs to be that way in a gangster movie to underscore how things are done in that universe.

The violence, Ebert wrote, "is a story of economic ambition. Henry and Karen come from backgrounds that could not easily lead to Cadillacs, vacations in Vegas and fur coats, and she justifies what he has to do to pay for the lifestyle."

Robert De Niro, of course, was great in his role as Jimmy the Gent — but, really, doesn't De Niro seem to belong in gangster movies?

One final observation, and this has to do with Joe Pesci.

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Pesci won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a psychopathic gangster. It is the same award for which he was nominated 10 years earlier but didn't win. Although he has given performances since "Goodfellas" that were worthy of Oscar consideration, I do not think he has been nominated again.

Perhaps that mistake will be corrected one of these days.

After All, Jesus Was Only (Part) Mortal, Right?

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Looking back on things, I would have to say that 1988 was a truly transitional year.

It certainly was for me, anyway.

In July of that year, I gave my two weeks' notice to the newspaper where I had been working since 1984 (I had been reading it since I was old enough to read). In August, I moved to Texas to enroll in graduate school, which I did later that month.

I don't recall specifically what I was doing on this day in 1988. I only know that I must have been very busy with my school work — among other things. The fall of 1988 was a hectic time in my life, adjusting to a new home and a new job — and being in the classroom again.

It's safe to say I wasn't going to the movies very much. In fact, I probably didn't go to the movies at all in that first semester of graduate school.

Anyway, I know I didn't go see "The Last Temptation of Christ" when it made its theatrical debut 25 years ago today. The first time I saw it was awhile later, when it was being shown on TV, and I'm sure I would have been more impressed had I seen it on the big screen, but I didn't.

I did, however, hear of the over–the–top responses from those who are charitably called the Christian right.

The fact that Jesus' final days were chronicled on film wasn't new. That's been done before. And anyone who has had any exposure to Christianity — and I was raised in a Protestant home in which the patriarch, like his father before him, was a religion and philosophy professor — knows the story of the crucifixion.

Apparently, it was an unusually painful and brutal way for a person to die. Early film depictions weren't as graphic as, say, Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," but they got the point across well enough.

And "The Last Temptation of Christ" pulled no punches when it sought to show how brutal the practice of crucifixion was. But that was not what troubled the faithful so.

Allegedly, it was the introduction of that old bugaboo — sex — that enraged them. Movies had never before featured a Jesus on the cross hallucinating about having sex.

Jesus' partner in his hallucination was no stranger to Christians. She was Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), a close friend of Jesus (Willem Dafoe) whom the Gospels tell us was there in his final days, witnessed his death, remained by his side even when his disciples had all fled and was either the first or one of the first to see Jesus after the Resurrection.

An account of Jesus' death would be as incomplete without her as it would be without Judas.

And it wouldn't have been inconceivable for Christians of the late 1980s to accept the idea of a sexually active Mary Magdalene.

For centuries, Mary Magdalene was confused with another Mary mentioned in the Gospels. The other Mary was said to be "a sinful woman," a prostitute; consequently, Mary Magdalene long was thought to be a prostitute.

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That idea was discredited by the Vatican in 1969, but the public image lived on two decades later; thus, the cinematic notion that Jesus' thoughts, in his final conscious moments, were of a sinful woman was offensive to believers who held that Jesus was free of sin.

Well, that was the story.

The truth was that the novel on which the movie was based had been a source of controversy ever since it was published nearly 30 years earlier. And sex was a convenient scapegoat for the temptation of the mortal side of Jesus.

But I have long believed that the exceptionally negative reaction to the movie and the book on which it was based had more to do with its general challenge to deeply held beliefs that really went beyond sex.

That is the thing about religion that really appeals to people — the idea that, no matter how sinful a person may be, he or she can always find redemption. Jesus was/is symbolic of the accessibility of that redemption. To be the spiritual middleman between a perfect God and imperfect men, it was necessary that Jesus be closer to perfect than imperfect.

"You don't know how much people need God," Paul (Harry Dean Stanton) said to him during his hallucination. "You don't know how happy He can make them. He can make them happy to do anything."

And Paul concluded that idea of the Messiah was far preferable to the reality of the man.

"I'm glad I met you," Paul said, "because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful."

The Jesus of "The Last Temptation of Christ" was much too human for many of the faithful.