Word: thugs
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...Silly me: I'd been looking forward to Taken, in part because it was directed by Pierre Morel, whose previous film was District 13, a fast-'n'-brutal, half-classic crime movie highlighting the art of parkour. That's the working-class-thug form of gymnastics that sends athletic young men hurtling over roofs, through transoms and down staircases, all without the aid of a digital art brush. Morel, a cinematographer directing his first feature, kept things moving and snarling with a scuzzy brio and made expert use of the artless screen presence of the leading men (one a stunt...
...large extension law and order. As I as a piece published in the Boston Globe, “this largely unacknowledged crisis is part of a larger international narrative: from Kingston to London from Los Angeles to Chicago, we are witnessing the globalization of ‘thug life’…this phenomenon has emerged as a powerful symbol of the cultural and political decay of Black civil society...
...problem is Kumar, who has risen in the Bollywood hierarchy from thug to action star to top comedian. Bearing a disconcerting resemblance to Adam Sandler in his clownish moments (and, when he finally achieves heroic stature, to John Turturro), Kumar must play a child-man whose talisman is a potato imprinted with the elephant likeness of the Hindu god Ganesh; but the 6 ft. 1 actor is too big and imposing to lend vulnerability to this naif. Instead of being innocent, he just seems slow. (On the flight to China, an Indian man seated behind Sidhu asks him, in English...
Scarface Nation details the 70-year history of the Scarface story, reconstructs the juicy details of the 1983 Brian De Palma / Oliver Stone / Al Pacino production, and then traces the cultural fallout - questioning how this "antidrug movie [became,] in its pop-cultural afterlife, a pro-thug movie." In being fair to both those who hail the crime thriller as a survivalist masterpiece and those who consider it a blunder of grotesque gratuitousness, Tucker bolsters his argument that whatever your opinion on the film, Scarface cannot be dismissed...
...good cop. He nails criminals other police couldn't get--albeit using shady deals and the occasional beatdown with a steel chain. He's a shameless racist, yet he lives to take down crooks who prey on one of L.A.'s poorest and brownest neighborhoods. He's a brutal thug and a loving...