Word: gangsters
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...know your name is an adverb?" a woman he is trying to woo snaps at the title character. The wit in this spoof of the old-fashioned gangster melodrama never rises above that mildly agreeable level and is often below it. But perhaps because the writers outnumber Director Amy Heckerling 4 to 1, Johnny Dangerously offers more verbal felicity than it does visual flair. Heckerling has no feeling, affectionate or malevolent, for the genre she is trying to parody and no sense of comic rhythm either. The result is a thin and clumsy thing, in which talented Michael Keaton leads...
...screenplay, rather than the mobster's bullet proves to be the actors worst enemy. The dialogue is reminiscent of old gangster films in the worst sense, particularly surprising coming from the man who made films like "The Godfather." Coppola and his cohorts provide almost no basis for the romantic entanglements that we are expected to believe. The Sandman falls in love with the lovely, leggy Lila Rose when he first sees her. "Will you marry me?" he asks impulsively. This one, searing sentence is the only expression of the couple's love...
...movie, not the gossip machine-deserves less. The volatile drama that attended its making rarely flares onscreen; working at flash point made no sparks fly. On even the calmest of sets, the premise would have shown promise: to blend the early talkies' two most popular genres, the gangster film and the musical, into a sort of Public Enemy Goes to 42nd Street or, modernized, The Godfather Gets One from the Heart. Why, then, is The Cotton Club such a frigid, juiceless mess...
...witnesses wore black robes and cowls and testified through voice-altering devices. A Japanese gangster held up his hand to show how he had chopped off half his ringer to prove his repentance after having been disrespectful to his leader. He had put the severed finger in a small jar and sent it to the gang boss. One expert on the Chinese gangs told how members drank wine laced with both human and chicken blood while being initiated into their crime societies. He claimed that they condoned the murder of infants so that the tiny bodies could be stuffed with...
...member Vietnamese crime network in the U.S. Ky, who fled Viet Nam when U.S. troops pulled out in 1975, lives in Huntington Beach, Calif, and owns a liquor store. He contends, "I'm not a Mafia chieftain. I'm not a gangster. I'm a poor man. I would love for the Government of this country to take official action and investigate these allegations to clear my name." The commission is not expected to turn in its report until...