Word: gangsterisms
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...others were greeted with a yawn. Even figures who have become synonymous with evil in the West have yet to fall from grace in long-isolated Serbia. Not long ago, 500 Belgraders turned out on a midwinter morning to honor the memory of Zeljko (Arkan) Raznjatovic, the notorious paramilitary gangster who was gunned down in a hotel lobby a year ago. Dressed in rich furs and long black overcoats, the mourners snaked past Raznjatovic's gaudy monument, kissing the cold marble and sharing plastic cups of soda. Serbia's neighbors view such demonstrations of misplaced loyalty with disgust...
...same, many Koreans remain enthralled by their wiseguys. The myth of the noble mafioso may be badly frayed in most countries but Korea's gangsters?or "fists," as they are called?are still folk heroes. (The term comes from a traditional preference for fist fights?not until the 1970s did Korean gangsters move up to sashimi knives, and guns are still rare.) Fists are the subject of best-selling books, and most of last year's hit movies were gangster flicks. In real life, most mobsters make their living from extortion, prostitution and gambling. But films about the underworld...
...Godfather Cho has done as much as anyone to burnish the image of the gentleman gangster. He has had 21 books published, mostly thinly disguised autobiographical screeds with rosy depictions of gang life. Of course, the books are pure pulp?a sample chapter heading from one 382-page tome: "Oh, Finger Cutting! Such a Bittersweet Glory"?but readers lap them up. His Son of the Fire sold 200,000 copies. Cho chopped off his own pinkie in public in 1974 after an ethnic Korean gunman from Japan shot the wife of dictator Park Chung Hee. Called danji (finger chopping...
...always been difficult to separate the reality of Beat's life from his embellishments. Certainly, his depictions of violent yakuza lives are so realistic and tinged with such closely observed comedic touches that it's no surprise to learn that he grew up amid gangsters in his Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo. "I watched yakuza guys getting stabbed in the stomach, punched in the head, all that stuff, ever since I was a kid," he recalls. In Brother there's a scene in a sushi restaurant in which a gangster rams chopsticks up the nostrils of a rival gangster. Then...
...Beat Takeshi's world has become as hierarchical as the society he has plundered for so much of his comedic loot. And Beat Takeshi's rebellion, which started as a genuinely subversive take on Japan, has become as ritualized as the culture it spoofs and as stylized as the gangster chic in his latest movie...