Ian On The Red Dot

I watched ‘American Gangster’ on Saturday. ‘Godfather’ it is not, but the movie was still awesome with Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas. I walked out of the movie being seduced instead of repelled.

The New York Times has an article that provides some background for the movie and a movie review that captures the problem with the movie.

I like this description of the movie from the review:

The America in this film isn’t a melting or even a boiling pot; it’s a bitter object lesson about the logic of market-driven radical individualism, wherein a self-styled Horatio Alger type, thwarted by racial prejudice and born into poverty in North Carolina, grows up to become a powerful captain of the illegal-drug industry. Lucas pulls himself up by his bootstraps, a gun tucked into his belt, and becomes a folk hero (and a pop culture idol) who doles out free turkeys to the very community he helps enslave with narcotics, fear and despair.

If you want to know more about the real Frank Lucas, this 2000 New York Magazine feature on him would be a good place to start.

I like how the movie used the following quote from him except in the movie it was said by the Frank Lucas’ mom to Frank Lucas instead of him to a reporter:

You know, if I’d been a preacher, they would have been preachers. If I’d been a cop, they’d have been cops. But I was a dope dealer, so they became dope dealers . . . I don’t know . . . if I’d done right.

A trailer for American Gangster:

A trailer for a documentary on Nicky Barnes which was the character played by Cuba Gooding Jr in ‘American Gangster’.