Word: gangly
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...Oliver Stone let this one get away? A gang of '60s rebels, an aura of righteous violence, the charge that fbi boss J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia flooded America's cities with cheap drugs-why, it's all so lurid, it must be true. And if it's not, it can still be a movie...
Alabama's first chain gang in decades does not yet know the drill. On a lonely stretch of highway near the Alabama-Tennessee border, guards and bloodhounds look on as 320 convicts from the Limestone Correctional Facility try to negotiate the tricky business of walking in unison while shackled. Clad in immaculate white uniforms (emblazoned with the words chain gang lest anyone mistake them for pastry chefs), the men are equipped with a variety of tools and not quite sure whether they should be trimming, digging or picking up litter. One makes a desultory attempt to start up a work...
Once a common sight along Southern highways, chain gangs fell victim to a reform movement that reached its zenith with the 1932 film exposa I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. By the late 1940s, the gangs were well on their way to joining stocks and public floggings in penological limbo. Thus there was little in the way of models when Alabama Governor Fob James decided last year to revive the practice. "We started from scratch," says Limestone warden Ralph Hooks, pointing proudly to a new, specially designed toilet that allows the men to relieve themselves in privacy while...
...single stroke, the gangs have fulfilled two of Governor James' dearest campaign promises: saving money (inmates, when chained, require fewer guards) and getting tough with criminals. Fortunately, today's crews do not have to wear the heavy ankle irons that used to cause "shackle poison" (the new, handcuff-like shackles are made of lighter metals). Nor, in theory, will the men have to endure the overwork, beatings and disease that led to death rates as high as 45% among "classic" chain gangs. Still, working on a '90s-style gang is no picnic: inmates will be toiling through 12-hour workdays...
...Then his wife dies, and his fatherly obligations to his little girl start calling. So does the D.A. (Stanley Tucci), who makes a proposal: help him catch the rest of the mob, and Jimmy can go back to daddying. The trouble is that while Jimmy is away, that old gang of his is taken over by Little Junior, played by the peerlessly creepy Nicolas Cage. Even though he doesn't get to push a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs, as giggly Richard Widmark did memorably in the original, hypnotic psychopathy is never in short supply when Cage...