The new UK trailer for American Gangster comes in the British equivalent of a red band edit. Download it in 100k, 330k, 850k or 1500k Quicktime versions - or even 1500k Windows or 1500k Real Media if you want.
There's even a 12 certificate edit - again Quicktime, again 100, 330, 850 or 1500k versions - if you want that too.
I reviewed American Gangster a couple of weeks ago - and very, very good it was too.
American Gangster is one of the year's best films (alongside Hot Fuzz, Ratatouille, Goya's Ghosts, Son of Rambow, Across the Universe... what else am I forgetting?) and you can now gee yourself up for it's November release with a new featurette.
Choose from 480p, 720p and 1080p resolution. Right click to save and rename the file something like howyousaygdaybruce.mov to ensure it works.
Expect only minor spoilers in this review. Indeed, you can expect me to dance around a few plot points that have been made public knowledge in a lot of discussion of the film so far. I think you're better off not knowing some of those things before the film gets around to telling you them itself.
Michael Mann's Heat famously culminates in the first onscreen pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, presented as a larger than life cop and a robber duo coming together for a cup of coffee and a chat. It's tempting to see a climactic scene in American Gangster as tipping a wink to this once-historic meeting of method masters but, not to spoil anything, it certainly doesn't take place in a stylised diner and, to be honest, I doubt the combination of Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington will generate anything like the same amount of buzz. As the reviews start coming in, however, I expect this to be just one point of comparison between the two films even while, in actuality, they are worlds apart in execution, and therefore effect.
Bookended between 'Based on a True Story' and 'what happened next' title cards, American Gangster is, at the very least, plausibly realistic - sufficiently so that the minor issues of actual realism and minute historical accuracy can be easily discounted without investigation. It tells twin stories, the two threads that come together for something like the Heat moment, of Frank Lucas, the title character as played by Washington, and the cop Richie Roberts, played by Crowe, who ultimately ends up on his case. Before these stories entwine closely, however, they wind away separately - Frank climbing the ranks of Harlem drug dealers and, accordingly, celebrity night club empresarios; Richie going through a divorce and becoming a pariah amongst the bent coppers on the force through his incorruptibility. Thankfully, there's sufficient narrative drive and incident in the long stretch before the ultimate collision between Frank and Richie is inevitable, that nothing much feels wasteful or needlessly expositional, and the film never depends on jaded generic familiarity to tell us 'It's okay, this is all going to a showdown'. Indeed, Frank and Richie could have quite easily spent a good chunk more of the movie in their individual orbits without the audience wishing it would all come crashing to earth. That they are brought together through sensible cause and effect, and that it all reads clearly in the plotting, only guarantees that we're happy tracing the routes laid out for us.
Not that there aren't echoes and points of similarity between the two stories from the earliest opening scenes and, of course, one rather tired argument can still be heard rumbling in the background - that good guy and bad guy have so much in common - but over that relatively uninspiring bassline, there's a whole lot more. One early sequence with a dead junkie in Richie's storyline subtly resonates with a key plan of Frank's that, much later, Richie has to crack and I couldn't help but wonder if it was an invention of screenwriter Steve Zaillian or director Ridley Scott or if they were just highlighting this curious collusion of independent lives.
Overall, Frank's story is ultimately the more compelling - he gets title billing after all, and is, in effect the thing that happens to Richie, rather than Richie being the thing that happens to him. One particularly well-devised set of ups, downs and ups again in his rise to power revolves around ego, high fashion and flash, dramatised with the help of a crazy big fur coat (which is in a way somewhat reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka and her hate-love affair with decadent western hats). Frank ultimately undergoes much more change than Richie, is surrounded with a much more attention-grabbing cast of secondary characters - including the brilliant Chiwetel Ejiofor as one of his brothers - and, in the final evaluation, can be seen as being subject to the film's real lessons. Washington is generally better than Crowe, too - and not only because he doesn't end up delivering a number of his lines in an Australian accent.
As you'd expect for a Ridley Scott film, the production design and cinematography are absolutely top-notch stuff and, in fact, they even rise towards the top in Scott's exceptional pantheon. I could list details of set and shot design all day long, but do keep a close look out for the small church across the street from Frank's chosen place of worship, the phone numbers and notes doodled on Richie's wall by his phone, or the way Scott flaunts the final hiding place (ahem) of Frank's supply in the third-act search scene. This is truly a film of many, many layers, visual, auditory and narrative, most of them quite brilliantly conceived, often very imaginative and fundamentally cinematical. Because of this I think American Gangster has now bumped Matchstick Men aside and taken its place as the best of Scott's films since the incredible early years run of The Duellists, Alien and Bladerunner. Specific mention must also go to editor Pietro Scalia who, a few deliberate jump cuts aside, knocks just about every splice in the film out of the park. A raid on a drug processing operation in a tenement block showcases the same kind of comprehensible chaos that Scalia preserved flawlessly in Black Hawk Down.
My hands down favourite moment in the film comes in a dramatisation of the Ali-Frazier bout of 1971. It's relatively early in the investigation and Richie Roberts is tracking Frank Lucas, still not yet clear on who he is, or quite what impact he is having on the city's organised crime and drug trade. The cop has a camera and snaps a couple of shots of the gangster, flashed up on screen as still images as he does so. As we move from the first to the second, not only is Frank's character crystallized but we understand that Richie himself now understands who this guy really is, and something of what he's going to have to do now. It's awesome stuff - a monumental moment in the story related largely by two still images - if dependent, of course, on their surrounding shots and other info we've been fed here and there in the scene, if not elsewhere in the film. This is why I go to the cinema, for bolts of lightning like this.
American Gangster is released in November in most territories, by the end of January in most others. Do your best to see it, and see it on a very big screen and with very good sound. This cops 'n' pushers film is a genuine classic, easily the best of its kind since The French Connection and, any comparison between Hackman and Crowe or that car chase aside, better even than that.
Download the UK version of the American Gangster trailer. Not very well encoded, unfortunately. The film is going to look a thousand times better.
You'll have to rename the file something like bomchikawahwah.mov before saving to get it to work.
The story of big time Harlem heroin dealer Nicky Barnes is the subject of Marc levin's latest documentary, Mr. Untouchable. It should make a fascinating companion piece to Ridley Scott's American Gangster.
Download the trailer now.
If you've seen Carlito's Way: Rise to Power, then you've seen P. Diddy's turn as Hollywood Nikki, a character based on Nicky Barnes. The reality appears to have been rather different.
Courtesy of Yahoo, download the American Gangster trailer in low, medium or high resolution normal definition, or 480p, 720p or 1080p high definition.
The American Gangster site is now live, and has a small number of stills for you to enjoy. They've so few, so far, that I've only run one below.
Expect more from the American Gangster script review later in the week.
Let's break a while from the Janus-faced bawards-forwards looking obsession with Blade Runner for a moment - as truly astonishing as that DVD set is going to be - and concentrate on Ridley Scott's upcoming American Gangster.
I've received a script for the film today, undated and without a title page or writer's credits. As such, I don't know how far removed it is from the film as shot, let alone the film we'll see after post-production hones things further.
But I've read enough scripts now, and seen enough films, even done enough writing and filmmaking myself to know that, really, the overall structure of a story is of absolute fundamental importance. The blueprint for a movie I have in my hands here is going to tell us an awful lot about the finished product.
We'll begin on page one, shall we?
A TELEVISION
broadcasts silent images of soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam at the height of the war, 1968. A rich, culture, authorative voice offers:
VOICE
This is the problem. This is what's wrong with America.
The war footage multiplies by twenty, becomes a stack of TVs with proce tags dangling from the knobs.
VOICE
It's gotten so big you can't find your way.
Two figures come past without looking at the sets - two black men - one in his 60s, the other in his 30s - both wearing expensive suits. The voice belongs to:
BUMPY
The corner grocery's a supermarket. The candy store's a MacDonalds. And this place. Look at it. Where's the personal service? Where's the pride of ownership.
You know who owns this place? The federal government. They won't give you health care, but they'll sell you a TV. Tell me: what right do they have to compete in the private sector?
And so we begin. The concerns of this film are already quite clear.
Bumpy continues his observational stream as he looks around the store... before suffering a heart attack and dying in the Kitchen and Bath department. We cut briskly to his funeral...
The governor of New York is there. The mayor of New York is there, and his entourage. The Chief of Police and other civic leaders. New York cops. Joe Louis and Wilt Chamberlain. Entertainment celebrities. Itallian mob bosses. The press. And, furthest away, in their cars, fitting long lenses to cameras, FBI agents.
Who was this Bumpy? Well, the script tells us before showing us: Bumpy was a Harlem crime lord. I can read this on page 2, though viewers won't know for sure. Bad scriptwriting, if you ask me.
Viewers find out in the next scene, a page-turn later, through the age-old cheat of a news report. More bad scriptwriting? You decide - but it made me make a face, I have to admit.
This TV report comments that Bumpy's death 'marks the end of an era' - just incase we hadn't gathered this from the first scene. On paper at least, this is starting to feel like quite leaden stuff, a bit too on-the-nose, and certainly a little repetetive. Thank heavens somebody as skillful and perceptive as Ridley Scott is in charge.
I've glossed over something important, however: when Bumpy is in the store, he's accompanied by Frank, and Frank is at the funeral and then, it is on Frank's TV we see the news report. Frank Lucas is played by Denzel Washington in the film, one of the two stars. So far, he's been nothing more than an observer.
The other star is Russel Crowe, and we skip over to meet him next. He's playing Detective Richie Roberts.
In his first scene, Roberts is delivering a Subpoena with his colleague Sanders.
They come through a stairwell door and continue along a corridor.
SANDERS
Who's going to do this?
RICHIE
He knows me; he'll take it from me.
SANDERS
Just throw it in, he doesn't take it. That's good service.
He hands Richie a subpoena. They stop in front of a door. Knock. Listen to footsteps approaching on the other side.
The door opens the length of a chain lock, revealing a man in an undershirt. He sees the subpoena and starts to close the door -
SANDERS
Throw it!
As Richie flings the subpoena in, the door slams shut on his hand. He wails in agony; tries to shoulder it open. Sanders too throws his weight against the door but it doesn't budge.
Inside, the man is locking the door with a dead bolt. Blood from Richie's hand runs down the jamb. The man steps back just as the door rips from one of it's hinges and the detectives crash in.
So, there we go - our stars.
Turns out this chap - Campizi - does know Richie and he panicked and slammed the door before recognising him. Things calm down pretty quickly, however, and we get a pretty good idea of Richie's manner. He's a good cop, of course. What's the betting he becomes Franks nemesis, his 'flip-side'? Yep - that old chestnut.
Again - Scott can pull this off, easy. Washington and Crowe can do it too. Let's hope they do.
For a few scenes, we see the roots begin to take hold - Frank is considering picking up the pieces of Bumpy's legacy, becoming the next big thing on the streets; Richie's studying law and nipping at the heels of lower-down hangers on of the gang ladder.
Essentially, we have out set-up. I'll be able to skip ahead some pages for you now...
...so, next time, I will. Stay tuned.
Leonardo DiCaprio.
I think he was rather good in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He makes a lot of sense in Romeo + Juliet...
I... I'm struggling now. What else has he been good in?
This boy is one of those burning-eyed method monsters. His acting is pretty much the performance equivalent of a Martin Scorsese camera move. That is: you certainly notice it - how can you escape it? - but you're not sure that it was really so connected to any recognisable human psychology. Maybe in an overblown, pantomime fashion.
So, it makes sense to me that DiCaprio lines up for Spielberg, Mendes, Scorsese... and sadly, it makes sense that Ridley Scott wants to work with him too.
Scott's an odd one. He's clearly a hugely talented filmmaker, massively inventive and posessed of a visionary eye. He's a dedicated and talented craftsman, and is able to turn his hand to films in a wide variety of styles and genres. Sometimes, though... a little creeping corner peels upwards. Sometimes he oversteps a mark and a dislocating effect, a distancing conceit, gets pushed to the fore - the sequence at the edge of the drained swimming pool in A Good Year being a recent disappointment. His films are so good that it really matters when he fumbles the ball. And they're always very serious - for better and for worse.
I think DiCaprio's style (he's sometimes at eleven, sometimes only at two or one, so rarely dialled to five, or six) fits with Scott's taste in actors. Not a taste I share, to be honest. I tend to find that real people in real life operate around three to eight most of the time (or, at least, that's how I've calibrated the dial, specifically to illustrate the extremities of a DiCaprio turn). And I think that seeing real people - albeit in unlikely circumstances - is one of the key pleasures of narrative cinema (including animation).
Scott and DiCaprio will be collaborating on Body of Lies, to be adapted by William Monahan from a David Ignatius novel. Monahan's previous collaboration with Scott was Kingdom of Heaven, and he has also penned the pending Tripoli. They'll make a nice set.
The story in Lies revolves around a CIA team up with Jordan intelligence in an attempt to stop Al Qaeda attacks on America. The CIA 'hero' will be DiCaprio, and his character is revealed to have once been a journalist. Was this some kind fo wish fulfillment for Ignatius, maybe? I wonder just how unpredictable these titular lies will be?
Scott's next, American Gangster, should be one of the better films of the fourth quarter this year. Fingers crossed.
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