Might I propose a new website? Zeitgeisty.com
Also, you might check Amy Taubin's review of ``Gangs'' in Film
Comment--although it leans towards the negative, it points to the most
interesting aspect of the film, in my opinion. That is, how ``Gangs''
represents, in actual, visible terms, the contradictory aims and inevitable
conflicts between art and commerce in today's Hollywood, and how the final
film (not the longer, non voice-over cut Scorsese originally made, and which
I've seen) is an ideal result of those conflicts. The release version is
both exhilarating and unwieldy, making great effort to balance all sorts of
considerations that often work, and sometimes don't. I think that, despite
Miramax's undoubted concerns, the radical politics is fairly intact, as is
the sense of a growing, ruthless war machine looming in the background
(which does indeed place ``Gangs'' right at the center of our current
crisis). And even the much-noted ``messiness'' is one of ``Gangs''' charms.
But next to the earlier cut, it is unquestionably a lesser film than
Scorsese originally imagined, harmed by changes that he felt forced upon him
by Miramax. One of Taubin's points is that when making movies at this level
of expense, you inevitably lose things--such as, in this case, the desire to
tell your story without voice-over comments making obvious what is plainly
to be seen on screen. The current version of ``Gangs'' has, at some level, a
distrust that audiences will get it; but I believe this distrust lies at the
doorstep not of Scorsese, but to the man he had to cede some control to:
Harvey Weinstein.
Robert Koehler
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