[Wallace T.]

The movie was pretty poor. For $70 million, Martin Scorcese produced what was essentially a "spaghetti Western." Even some of the background scenes looked similar. With that kind of money, even adjusted for inflation, Sergio Leone could have produced over a dozen spaghetti Westerns. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef (as they looked 35 years ago) would have been far better in the roles assigned to Leonard DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis. Eli Wallach would have been a far better two-timing cutthroat than the lightweights they hired. (No doubt his Irish accent, overlaying his real life New York whine, would have been funnier than his Mexican one.) Ann-Margaret or Ursula Andress (again, circa 1965) would have been better as the "soiled dove" than Cameron Diaz was.

On top of that, the movie had a gratuitous "token Negro," class warfare nonsense, and blatant Protestant bashing. FReepers, save your money by avoiding this horrid movie and contribute to the latest fund drive for this Web site!

[martin_fierro]

Ditto all that. This movie sucked, and hard.

[Buckeye Bomber]

I thought the movie was really well shot and the story was decent. Daniel Day Lewis's performance was fantastic, although Cameron Diaz and Leo left something to be desired.

You complain about there being class warfare, but that's what happened. The draft riots actually did happen, roughly in the manner they were depicted. If you tell the truth, is that bad? I'd rather see the hard truth than the comforting falsehood. I think it's valuable to see how far we've come, and how far we will continue to go if we let the Capitalist system do its work.

And honestly, Protestants didn't want Catholics in New York. Are you denying that? Al Smith was defeated for president largely due to his Catholicism. I ask once again, is the hard truth worse than the soft comfort of myth?

[discostu]

I'm a big Scorcese fan, I like his visual style and I love his use of music. And I was looking forward to this movie until I saw a preview that included a scene with a bunch of people wearing stovetop hats squaring off for a rumble, almost fell out of my chair laughing. That might be historically accurate but it just looks damn silly, I would expect a director of Scorcese's calliber to know when to ditch accuracy for the sake of the movie.