Sawicky says: "Another fearless forecast: the next great gangster epic will be about Russians." Certainly I hope so. La Cosa Nostra has been the subject of a ton of great American popular culture, but now I think it may be time to start moving on to more contemporary gangster stylings.
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Predictions I Hope Come True
11 Jun 2007 02:17 pm
Comments (57)
I doubt it will qualify as a Great Epic, but Guy Ritchie's next movie is supposed to be about Russian gangsters.
It's funny because I thought Russian neo-fascists and child molesters were the only permissible villians left.
Don't be surprised when the R.M.A.A.D. (Russian Mafia Alliance Against Defamation) effectively lobbies studios and TV networks to stop portraying them in such a negative light.
"Layer Cake"
And why? That sounds like an invitation to ennui.
Or Albanians. Here in NYC, the Albanians seem to be on the cutting edge of organized crime -- setting up fake ATMs to steal people's account info, breaking into jewelry-store vaults through the ceilings, gunning down bouncers at strip clubs...
A great race war does approaches. Each race will fight brave. Each race will fight for own survival. But in the end only one race will survive.
The white man had day in sun. Its now Age of the Brown Man.
By 2110 either from war or intermarriage not a single baby will be born with blond hair and blue eyes.
The Russian mob has figured in a number of 'Law and Order' episodes.
What about the Vietnamese gangs? Or a retro epic about the Jewish mobsters of Prohibition. I can never get enough Meyer Lansky.
What about MS-13 and the Latin Kings?
I can never get enough Meyer Lansky.
Agreed. More Lansky, more Dutch Schultz.
Better yet, HBO spins off a series featuring the one-legged cousin of Tony's old mistress and other Russian characters from the Sopranos.
Better yet, HBO spins off a series featuring the one-legged cousin of Tony's old mistress and other Russian characters from the Sopranos.
She was teh awesome, too.
Plus, the ongoing royalties coming in to Chase from this new source could allay any desires down the road to actually make a Sopranos movie. The guy from "The Pine Barrens" could be this offscreen bogeyman, like Vera or Maris from the Cheers-Frasier juggernaut.
I am agreeing with the MS 13 theory but right now they are in the Moustache Pete phase and it will be a decade or so before they are suitable for Godfather style treatment.
Well, The Departed was about Irish.
Would the ADL balk at an epic about Murder Inc?
Gosh, small kwibble but I wish I knew that link was to spoiler-ish stuff. I'm in London and we don't get the finale yet.
The news here is about the transition of pot supplies to urban farming by Vietnamese gangs, youngish. They are flying over London with heatseeking helicopters, also electrical usage gives them away.
This is weird given there's little sign of a vietnamese community, and we don't have more decent Viet food like DC and many other US cities. Just the dope I guess.
The trad Brit hard man gangster has been well covered, and they are getting locked up all over the place. The irish provisionals transition to gangsterism, Jamacians, Nigerians all work it.
But the Albanians are the worst, apparently completely control the redlight district (soho and virtual) of London. Thats over a hell of a lot of competition.
There's a great story about the guy who set up the KLA from NY, he was virtually just a gangster operating out of the Bronx. I used to see their activity all over the Little Italy up there.
And the russians, of course. In the 90s I considered doing a doc on their emergence in Brighton Beach and the Committee FOr The Protection of Journalists East Euro person distinctly put me off the idea very quickly. I guess it was at times even no go for cops.
The Chinese immigration gangs are pretty tough too.
Turks, from their military's control of the heroin trade all the way west to retail level in London are not to be sneezed at, they own it in the UK. Stoke Newington ground zero. Hard men.
I think organized crime takes root in the invisible immigrant communities below the gaze of straight life. Now the irish and italians are mainstreamed, its the communities we don't notice that nurture it.
well, duh. And it will be called GTA IV.
There are lots of Russian Mafia movies in Russian though I can't say I'm really crazy about any of them. (I'm not so keen on most of the American Italian mafia movies, either, though.) You might look at Brat (brother) and Brat II, the second set partly in the US. The main star, a huge star in Russia, died a few years ago in an avalanch on a glacier. Albania seems too pathetic to make good movie mobsters even if they are in fact good criminals. In that sense the Russians are better even if a bit 1990's.
The curious thing is the absence of African-American organized crime.
I was at a lecture by Sudhir Venkatesh a few years ago where he said a major factor in perpetuating poverty in black neighborhoods was the extreme difficulty successful black criminals had in transitioning into legitimate businesses, compared with immigrants. One of the many self-defeating aspects of the war on drugs -- aggressively going after the assets of drug dealers ensures that they can't ever go legit.
What about MS-13 and the Latin Kings?
Eh. I've been living in MS-13ish areas for a while now, and they don't seem very interesting.
Also see Little Odessa, 1994, which is more along the lines of "decent little crime drama" than "great gangster epic."
The better OC epic on HBO is THE WIRE, and it's already about African-American criminal enterprises.
Note that CBS tried to do Mexican-American drug cartels as a corporation, with Bravo showing more uncensored episodes, but it didn't really work as the writing wasn't very good.
I immediately thought of Running Scared and Lord of War.
For other ethnicities, the Pusher trilogy from Denmark covers Macedonians. The Shield probably has the corner on Armenians.
You're talking about a fictional genre - it doesn't much matter what the real facts on the ground are, rather than what structural role in the art something plays. The focus on the Italian-American mafia wasn't only because that was actually the leading organized crime organization at the time. It was also because the American Mafia allowed artists to explore issues like corporatization, bureaucratization, urban / suburban divides, modern anonymity in the modern urban environment, labor racketeering, issues of assimilation and immigration and so on.
It doesn't matter if the Italian-American Mafia doesn't even exist anymore (which is close enough to the truth today) as long as it serves it's artistic purpose.
Artistic use of the Russian mafia will expand if that allows artists to say things they can't by using La Cosa Nostra. It's probably true enough that the Russian mafia allows artists to depict globalization, media manipulation and global-scale corruption simply because the Russian mafia (in Russia) operated out of a lawless environment (Russia before Putin) where they did take on many governance-like tasks, whereas the American LCN was not really faced with doing that on national / international scales (i.e. in the end, the LCN was suppressed by the American Establishment, which turned out to be much stronger than the American LCN thought).
There's been, of course, attempts to portray the American LCN as being on that level (Underworld USA, the Godfather series, Crime Story, etc.) but it's simply never been very effective because the reality is that the LCN never even really contemplated supplanting the government entirely (except perhaps in the very worst days of Prohibition) because the American Establishment was always much too much strong for them to even think about doing so. The LCN's power base was always in having large urban ethnic neighborhoods where many of the residents could work in mind-to-large manufacturing enterprises (which meant that the LCN could build their nexus of loan sharking, labor racketeering, government corruption and protection shakedowns). Once that disappeared, the LCN's power was clearly over.
Surprisingly, it's quite possible for Italians in Italy to depict Italian organized crime as powerful as the Russian mob, since Berlusconi (and much of the Italian establishment) are, in fact, closely and fairly openly allied with organized crime.
The cops in The Shield are so tough, they stole millions from the Albanian mob.
The novel, The Russian Debutantes Ball, includes a satirical look at Russian mobsters in a city like Prague.
oops... Armenians, in The Shield. And Mexicans, and Salvadorans,,,
Italian mobsters have always been the most compelling because of the tension between the baroque codes of honor and family they supposedly live by and the violent thugs they actually are. Russian mobsters are mostly just thugs, hence not so interesting. Also Italian gangster stories became popular right when Italian-Americans had pretty much fully assimilated, so the nostalgia element has always been vitally important to Italian mob stories - there is no sepia past for the Russian mob and probably never will be since the "Russians" are really a disparate crowd of various ex Soviet types, with actual Russians probably a minority. Hence there will not be a single Russian American group in the US looking back with nostalgia on their grandparent struggles. My personal prediction is that the Chinese are best positioned to fill the space that Chase has just cleared away.they have the traditions, the good food, and soon an affluent assimilated population that will be in love with the "more authentic" past.
"there is no sepia past for the Russian mob and probably never will be since the "Russians" are really a disparate crowd of various ex Soviet types"
Moscow has long been a faux Rome.
So there should always be a Russian mob, but it should always be a pale imitation of the Italian variety.
You might look at Brat (brother) and Brat II, the second set partly in the US. The main star, a huge star in Russia, died a few years ago in an avalanch on a glacier.
I don't think they ever released "Brat II" for the American market. If you know where I can get a North American format DVD of the movie, please tell me. "Brat" was a pretty nice little crime drama.
I'm glad somebody showed up to lecture Yglesias on the artistic merits of The Wire. It appears we have come full circle, or something.
You're talking about a fictional genre - it doesn't much matter what the real facts on the ground are, rather than what structural role in the art something plays.
I vaguely remember John Leguizamo appearing in a movie back in the '90s that involved the Scottish Mafia. That's probably not what you're talking about though.
"The curious thing is the absence of African-American organized crime."
Why is that so curious? Blacks lack the infrastructure for serious organized crime: they lack the cohesive families, and a merchant class to exploit. How are you going to have a crime family when most black guys don't even know who their fathers are? For any profitable attempts at graft, enterprising black crooks need to go into government (e.g., Sharpe James, William Jefferson).
Dirty Pretty Things?
Constant exposure to the racist trolls on this blog has had an effect on me. I've been leaning Edwards in the primary thus far, but now I'm wondering if it would be better to shove a President Obama right down these assholes' throats. Maybe being forced to watch a black man who's so much smarter and more talented than any of them on the news every evening will make their heads explode and we'll finally be rid of them.
Wow, some lovely racism on this thread. Charming, the trolls.
My favorite line regarding any mafia boss was an episode of law and order when some russian don had pulled off an incredibly complex scheme which demonstrated a deep mastery of nyc's arcane bureaucraces.
The ADA said something like "you're kidding me.This guy can barely speak English and he's pulling something like this off? I moved to New York 15 years ago, and I still can't figure out alternate side parking."
"Dirty Pretty Things" is a great, great movie. A gangster movie from the outside looking in, if that. It's more about how gov't+immigration makes criminals out of innocents.
"Also Italian gangster stories became popular right when Italian-Americans had pretty much fully assimilated"
Scarface and Little Caesar came out in the early Thirties. The reason why the Italian-American aspects of organized crime was downplayed in the 50s and 60s was for artistic reasons - artists wanted to portray organized crime as similar to the modern corporation, which paid much less attention to ethnicity after WWII. See Force of Evil, I Walk Alone, House of Strangers, Point Blank, Underworld USA and so on.
Italian mobsters have always been the most compelling because of the tension between the baroque codes of honor and family they supposedly live by and the violent thugs they actually are. Russian mobsters are mostly just thugs, hence not so interesting.
That's a pretty insightful point.
My personal prediction is that the Chinese are best positioned to fill the space that Chase has just cleared away.
You overestimate America's willingness to root for an Asian male protagonist. Asian men will continue to be portrayed solely as bad guys or buffoons in any movie not related to spirituality, for at least another generation to come.
One of my favorite organized crime movies is the last of the great Bill Forsyth flicks, "Comfort and Joy". It's about ice cream wars and it's set at Christmas.
"Italian mobsters have always been the most compelling because of the tension between the baroque codes of honor and family they supposedly live by and the violent thugs they actually are. Russian mobsters are mostly just thugs, hence not so interesting."
You've never heard of the Thieves in Law, the Thief's Code, Thief's Court or the Suka War? Of course, the Thief's Code demands that the Thief (traditional russian criminal) renounce all family ties, never marry and never have children.
Many Russian folk and pop songs and literature celebrate the pre-Revolution criminal milieu. It's by no means arrid territory.
Brat II might not be out in the US. I mostly watched it over and over again on the train between Moscow and Ryazan, where I was living at the time. That and Barber of Siberia were played over and over. The later was often described as "The Russian _Titanic_" in a way that I, at least, didn't take to be a complement. Brat II is comparable to Brat in quality, though, so if you can find it do watch.
"Would the ADL balk at an epic about Murder Inc?"
Huh? There are already two movies overtly about Murder Inc: The Enforcer from 1951 and Murder Inc from 1960. Jewish-American gangsters are well represented in popular culture:
Meyer Lansky:
Manny Weisbord in Crime Story
Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II
David Aaronson in Once Upon a Time in America
Bugsy Siegel:
Bugsy
Moe Greene in The Godfather
Lepke:
Lepke
The Untouchables
Dutch Schultz:
Billy Bathgate
The Cotton Club
Hoodlum
Arnold Rothstein:
Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby
Mobsters
King of the Roaring Twenties
Eight Men Out
Hollywood quickly began using post-Soviet gangsters as bad guys in the 1990s. Indeed, Hollywood action movies were more accurate at depicting how power was wielded in Yeltsin's Russia than the prestige press or the Harvard Economics Dept., which saw it as a high-minded ideological struggle between free-market "reformers" and ex-Communist "conservatives."
However, going into more Sopranos-like depth about Russian gangsters would have run into a major problem -- it would have exposed that a big fraction of the Russian mobsters in the U.S. were Jewish, which neither Hollywood, nor the ADL, was enthusiastic about doing. In another generation or two, Hollywood producers and NYU film school graduate screenwriters will look back nostalgically on grandpa's Brighton Beach mob, but it's too close for comfort now.
"I've been leaning Edwards in the primary thus far, but now I'm wondering if it would be better to shove a President Obama right down these assholes' throats. Maybe being forced to watch a black man who's so much smarter and more talented than any of them on the news every evening will make their heads explode"
LOL. I love it: deciding to elect a man with zero executive experience to the presidency out of spite.
Electing one intelligent black man president (or Pope, for that matter) won't change the reality that blacks on average are 15 IQ points less intelligent than whites and that two thirds of black babies are illegitimate. Electing Obama won't turn blacks into Koreans, don't delude yourself: you'll still be watching the same depressing local news stories about black girls throwing their babies in dumpsters, black men being perp-walked; you'll still read the occasional NY Times article where perplexed reporters try to figure out why blacks are four grade levels behind whites despite the latest educational reform, etc.
Blacks will still be blacks, even if the half-white, half-Kenyan Obama were President, and that means they will never be able to have the sort of mafia portrayed in The Sopranos -- they can't even control the liquor stores and bodegas in their own neighborhoods.
Also, keep in mind that the ascent of the Italian mob movie to the artistic heights in the 1970s was largely the work of Italian-Americans -- e.g., Coppola, Scorsese, Pacino, De Niro, etc. You had a large ethnic group with perhaps the world's strongest artistic heritage and ethos achieving prospertity after a few decades in America.
So, which immigrants groups are similarly positioned today?
Certainly the Chinese in China are doing some amazing stuff in movies, often with a gangster theme, but Chinese-Americans have a fairly minor history of organized crime in this country and haven't yet made much progress in American movies.
My predicition: Armenians
- They are deeply involved in organized crime in Russia.
- They have a long, prosperous history in California, and on a per capita basis are probably second only to Jews in holding producer-agent-mogul type jobs in Hollywood.
- They have the kind of intense family ties that film well.
- There's a continual arrival in California of new Armenians from the dicier parts of the world, including from that training ground in bloodymindedness, Beirut. So, there are both a lot of law-abiding, affluent, eminently respectable Armenian-Americans (e.g., former California governor George Deukmejian) and a lot of not very respectable Armenian newcomers. Take a look at the LAPD's most wanted list pictures at
http://www.lapdonline.org/images/mostwanted/mw_020713044.jpg
and count all the names ending in "ian" or "yan."
So, this is the kind of melange out of which good gangster movies could come.
On the topic of Italian vs. black gangsters discussed above, I covered the differences in my review of the tremendous Brazilian gangster movie "City of God" in The American Conservative:
"Gangsters make popular movie subjects all over the world because they lead Hobbesian lives full of interest. Some sociological differences between Italian-American mob movies and this Brazilian imitator are apparent, though.
"Most of the characters in "Goodfellas," for example, have survived to middle age, while the "City of Angels" punks are dead before they turn 21. The suspicious and calculating Sicilians don't have as much fun as the spontaneous Brazilians, but do live longer.
"Organized crime in New Jersey is simply more organized than in Rio's favelas. The Mafia crime families follow the Mediterranean patriarchal principle where the sons patiently wait for the old man to die and leave them the family business. In the Brazilian slums, though, fathers don't stick around much, so gangs are mostly ephemeral coalitions of pubescent pals.
"At the chilling end of "City of God," the arch-villain crime lord is finally gunned down, only to be immediately replaced by the next generation of killers, "The Runts," a gang of even more vicious twelve year olds."
http://www.isteve.com/Film_City_of_God.htm
"it would have exposed that a big fraction of the Russian mobsters in the U.S. were Jewish, which neither Hollywood, nor the ADL, was enthusiastic about doing. In another generation or two, Hollywood producers and NYU film school graduate screenwriters will look back nostalgically on grandpa's Brighton Beach mob, but it's too close for comfort now."
I know I shouldn't respond to the racist asshole Sailer, but this is just too much to take. I'm a Jewish-American and was born in the old Soviet Union. We're quite well aware of the small number of dirtbags in our community. It's neither a secret nor something most of us want other communities to ignore. Most Jewish-Americans, of course, are not recently arrived from the former Soviet Union and have no reason to be particularly very offended by depiction of some recently arrived Russian-Jewish-Americans as criminals.
Beyond that, the very large Russian-Jewish-American communities in Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston have very little criminal activity. Why I, who've never even been to Brighton Beach and grew up in San Francisco, would be upset by a depiction of criminals there, is beyond me. Most of my landsmen I know are far more interested in imitating Sergei Brin or Gary Shteyngart than some criminal type.
"I know I shouldn't respond to the racist asshole Sailer... I'm a Jewish-American and was born in the old Soviet Union."
I have to ask, as a landsman myself, if you see the irony of a former resident of the Soviet Union calling Steve Sailer a racist. Sailer is called a racist by the ideological kommissars here not because he expresses hatred toward members of other races or throws around vile epithets, but because he has the temerity to talk about race with something close to objectivity, rather than being cowed by the reigning politically correct diktats.
You must have come here young and be fully Americanized to call him a "racist asshole". Most recent immigrants I've met from the former Soviet Union see through America's political correctness on race right away.
I have to ask, as a landsman myself, if you see the irony of a former resident of the Soviet Union calling Steve Sailer a racist. Sailer is called a racist by the ideological kommissars here not because he expresses hatred toward members of other races or throws around vile epithets, but because he has the temerity to talk about race with something close to objectivity, rather than being cowed by the reigning politically correct diktats.
Jesus, here we go again. Okay, I'll ask it once more: what twisted definition of racism doesn't include a person who feels that black and Hispanic people are inherently stupid and criminal? That is the very definition of racism. You can argue that racism isn't a bad thing, you can argue that a racist worldview is a correct worldview, but you can't argue that you aren't a racist when you unapologetically assert-- again and again and again-- that one race is inherently inferior to another.
It just goes to show once again what shrinking violets hide in the hearts of these wanna-be iconoclasts. For all of the posturing as truth tellers and speakers of unspeakable things, you really can't stand being forced to live with the consequences of your hateful rhetoric. Waaaah, baby, waaaah.
The curious thing is the absence of African-American organized crime.
What about the Crips and the Bloods?
"What about the Crips and the Bloods?"
Lots of organization there: one group of stupid blacks dresses in blue, the other dresses in red; both get driven out of L.A. neighborhoods by Mexicans.
Crips and Bloods are just brand names. There is probably no connection between numerous local gangs calling themselves those names.
"Okay, I'll ask it once more: what twisted definition of racism doesn't include a person who feels that black and Hispanic people are inherently stupid and criminal?"
Nice strawman. Have fun playing with it.
Nice strawman. Have fun playing with it.
Sailer has insisted over and over and over again that black people are less intelligent and more prone to criminality. So what strawman?
Well, I apologize to the general Matthew Yglesias community. I started the whole "why no black Sopranos" thing, and I shouldn't have. My point wasn't that African-Americans are any less capable of building mafias than anyone else, but that they have been prevented from doing so -- a non-obvious but interesting and possibly important aspect of America's institutional racism. But two minutes after posting it, I realized that the subject would be catnip for Sailer and the other racist assh*les and trolls. Sorry.
Don't forget 25th Hour.
"So what strawman?"
Go back and look at your previous post. You use the word "stupid" which is pejorative, you use "blacks" and "Hispanics" without qualification (e.g., "on average", or "most"), and you use "inherent", without qualification. It's unclear that any tendency toward criminality is "inherent", and although intelligence is likely partially or mostly determined by genetics (thus, partially inherent), it isn't entirely determined this way. Exogenous factors (e.g., nutrition, education) obviously play a role.
Also, since there are obvious examples of highly intelligent blacks and Hispanics (e.g., Stan O'Neil and Hector Ruiz), it's obviously false to make a blanket statement that blacks or Hispanics are less intelligent.
It isn't false or racist to say that, blacks, on average, have significantly lower IQs than whites. Every major IQ test study demonstrates that. It also isn't false or racist to say that Korean-Americans, on average, have higher IQs than whites. Numerous studies show that as well.
Similarly, it isn't false or racist to point out that there are significant differences in criminal behavior among members of various races, for example that black Americans are about 7 times more likely than whites to be incarcerated, or that Hispanics are almost 3 times more likely than whites to be incarcerated.
It is prudent to consider the average characteristics of different groups when discussing issues like immigration or other social policy, not racist.
there is no sepia past for the Russian mob and probably never will be since the "Russians" are really a disparate crowd of various ex Soviet types, with actual Russians probably a minority. Hence there will not be a single Russian American group in the US looking back with nostalgia on their grandparent struggles.
but that's not such a big deal unless the writer is trying to make a Russian version of the Godfather. the first movie to really brings the Russian mob to the mainstream will just have to find a different way to humanize people who should really be behind bars.
Comments closed June 25, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
This movie from last year started to scratch the surface there. Not exactly a great gangster epic, but it was OK.
Posted by JP | June 11, 2007 2:43 PM