Word: gangsterisms
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...reporter supposedly once asked the legendary criminal Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. "Because that’s where the money is," the gangster replied. A similar answer could be given to anyone who questions why women continue to frequent the clubs that exclude them: that’s where the parties are. Final clubs have unfettered access to social space that simply doesn’t exist outside their walls. Telling women (or men) who are sick of segregation to just go somwhere else doesn’t cut it because there really isn’t anywhere else...
Because the protagonist, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), enters the prison at the age of nineteen after dropping out of school at eleven, the film isn’t as much a gangster picture as it is a bildungsroman. He doesn’t just learn how to kill people, or how to build a drug empire from the inside; El Djebena also learns how to read and write. Through his brief encounters on the outside, he also discovers what there is to live for in the real world...
...movies he's been an angel, an inspirational teacher and the Black Muslim icon Malcolm X. He's played soldiers, policemen, coaches, doctors. He's spoken the words of Shakespeare and Spike Lee. Even as a killer, in American Gangster, he carried himself like a cool chief executive, the mayor of the Harlem underworld. He has the gift of making melodrama seem plausible just because he's doing it. And always in Denzel Washington's screen demeanor is the sense of power withheld, of anger internalized. He doesn't shout or strut, doesn't need to. Why raise your voice...
There was no shame in the runner-up slot for Eli's directors, the twins Albert and Allen Hughes, or for the star, Denzel Washington, who in his first real action role enjoyed the second highest opening weekend of his career, after the 2007 American Gangster. Peter Jackson's dreamlike horror drama The Lovely Bones, about the afterlife of a murdered girl, ended five weeks of very limited playdates and earned $17.1 million in three days of wide release. Analysts credited the decent showing for this odd, no-star drama to a marketing campaign aimed at teen girls. (Think...
...smuggling empire may now be taken over by Beltrán Leyva's feared chief of hit men, Edgar Valdez, 36, a Texas-born fugitive known as "The Barbie" because of his blond hair. Mexican officials allege that Valdez was behind the videotaped torture and killing of a rival gangster in Acapulco in 2005. Similar to an al-Qaeda propaganda film, the video triggered a wave of copycat movies posted on the Internet, raising the stakes in the Mexican drug war. Such a figure could unleash even more carnage if he were at the top of a cartel...