The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #54947 Message #870480
Posted By: GUEST,an pluimeir ceolmhar on location
20-Jan-03 - 09:13 AM
Thread Name: Gangs of New York - music
Subject: RE: Gangs of New York - music , naah, but words?
GONY OTT? Never! There were several passages of a good 3 or 4 minutes each without a trace of haemoglobin.
Just saw it this weekend after it opened here. I feel that there's a story to be told - in fact several stories are touched upon - but it just doesn't happen in this movie. So all you folklorists, are there any songs that tell at least part of the tale, whether it be the gangs, the ethnic rivalry, the persistence of a very British class system after independence or a lack of total commitment to the Civil War in the North?
One of the film's merits is to show the closeness in time of several events that we tend to consider separately when thinking of history in discrete periods - such as a living memory of the war of Independence, the Civil War, the Irish Famine and the California gold-rush. One of the strongest scenes was at the end after the actors had departed, where successive time-lapse-style shots show the decay of the cemetery. It would have had more strength if it had at least begun to show the transition from mob violence to something approaching democratic politics, but it turned its back on this option.
On the music, I was proud of myself for identifying Finbar Furey's voice, even if I had to sit through ten minutes' credits for everyone from the tea lady to the guy who washes Weinstein's limo before seeing his name to confirm the identification. Missed Maura O'Connell whom I haven't heard for years, I would have guessed a Dolores Keane clone.
BTW, I don't like to slag Hollywood attempts at Irish accents too hard, but a minimum of consistency for each character would be appropriate, and there are now enough good dialogue coaches in the business, so when a single character does a dialectal tour of the thirty-two counties it's a bit hard to take. I love the cameo where Di Caprio's character recognises a fellow-Kerryman by his _Dublin_ accent.
And BTBW, Bill, there was a bodhran somewhere, not as one of the ethnomusicological local colour features but as a sound-track solo to set a very threatening tone for the following scene. But forgive me if I'm reluctant to sit through the whole thing again to say where it occurred.