Word: gangsterized
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...solemnity, EZ Streets somehow manages to avoid melodrama. Indeed, Haggis brings a mordant wit to his new show. He has conceived head gangster Jimmy Murtha (Joe Pantoliano) as the kind of guy who mercilessly blows people up, then goes to confession and can't quite deliver the goods. "I know what you do. God knows what you do," the priest chastises. "You're trying to tell me that the only sin you have to confess is that you took the Lord's name in vain?" Murtha's response: "I'm giving you what I can." Then he negotiates his penance...
That the latter, in the case of Bound, is between lesbians--a gangster's moll named Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and Corky the handywoman fixing up the apartment next door (Gina Gershon)--has caused a certain amount of prerelease stir. But their relationship is more verbal than physical (with their sexual encounters very discreetly managed), and the fun of this movie--written and directed by the brothers Wachowski, Larry and Andy--lies elsewhere...
...Francisco to New York City. From the '70s to the '80s, from jazz to rock, from lumpia (a Filipino dish) to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, from Tagalog (a language native to the Philippines) to English, from assimilation blues to a graceful homecoming. Jessica Hagedorn's new novel, The Gangster of Love, is a book about transition, movement, emigration, immigration and repatriation. Though the title could hardly be sillier or more ungainly--it sounds like an afterhours movie on Cinemax--the book itself is written with wit and style and ultimately achieves an elegant poignancy...
...point of view, sometimes through the voices of other side characters--for the most part the book focuses on Rocky. She is a pugnacious, tough-talking sort. She loses her virginity to a rock-'n'-roll rebel named Elvis Chang, co-founds a rock band with him named the Gangster of Love, and carries on a years-long flirtatious friendship with a bisexual painter-photographer named Keiko...
Hagedorn's first novel, Dogeaters, was widely acclaimed and was nominated for the National Book Award. The Gangster of Love should firmly establish her reputation as a writer of considerable talent. The book's only misstep is in its portrayal of Sly, a black member of the band the Gangster of Love, and the only significant black character in the entire book. Sly is the group's drummer, his last name is Washington, and he lusts after white women, abuses drugs and carries a gun--in other words he's a pistol-toting, coke-snorting caricature...