Word: nicholson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Felix Chong, which became one of the all-time top grossers in the ex-colony. Now it has been remade by Martin Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan as The Departed. Chances are that, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the good cop, Matt Damon as the bad one and Jack Nicholson as the crime boss, this very entertaining, densely layered, just-short-of-fabulous melodrama will rustle up some sturdy box office business...
...Massachusetts State Police - evidently state troopers do more than set speed traps - who reports to Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), the only two people who know his true identity. The mob cop is Colin Sullivan (Damon), and his boss is gangland kingpin Frank Costello (Nicholson...
...Monahan has given Scorsese and the actors plenty to work with. Frank, played by Nicholson with a George Carlin goatee and crusty demeanor, is a juicy creation, a mobster who revels in his connoisseurship of executive violence. ("One of us had to die," he says of a gangland face-off. "With me it's usually the other one.") He has words of wisdom for a thug who says his mother is near death. "So we all are," Frank observes. "Act accordingly." In Billy he sees a bright, focused young man with ambitions, though Frank misreads them. "You wanna...
...Damon's performance is suave and scrupulous; Nicholson has almost too much fun; and in a large, stalwart cast I especially liked Ray Winstone as Frank's ruthless hit man, and Farmiga as the woman two lonely men need to confide in or betray. DiCaprio is the standout. Every second of Billy's life is as a spy behind enemy lines; DiCaprio shows the tension such a man feels, the determination and the grace inside...
...David Weigel of ReasonOnline.com, in an astute piece about Death of a President piquantly titled "Other Than That, Mrs. Bush, How Was the Film?", mentions Nicholson Baker's 2003 novel Checkpoint as one of many novels about a plan to kill Bush. The novelist Richard Condon never lacked for poli-scifi cojones - in Emperor of America he blew up the White House - but his specialty was death-of-a-president fantasies. In The Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959 and filmed three years later, he postulated the assassination of a presidential nominee by a Joe McCarthy type (the right-wingers...