Word: amsterdams
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...LIVING IN NEW AMSTERDAM...
...TIME: Tell me about Amsterdam Vallon, your character in "Gangs...
...gaudy, pestilential Five Points section of lower Manhattan, Gangs begins with an 1846 street fight: Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis ) and his Nativists against Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) and his horde of Hibernians. It ends in 1863 with another rumble--Bill now battling Priest's vengeful son Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio)--as the city explodes in riots that escalate from a protest against Civil War conscription to a four-day massacre. In between are violent scenes played out with a ferocity as erotic as it is deranged; murder and mutilation, when performed by men who have been close, are acts...
...film's climax, the Draft Riots engulf the city as Bill and Amsterdam line up for their final face-off--a Celtic clan skirmish that has little to do with the larger atrocities. The point may be that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of corpses when anarchy breaks loose. This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement. --By Richard Corliss...
...Number of days the Amsterdam will be out of service to be disinfected...