Product Description

This motion picture event from acclaimed director Martin Scorsese earned 10 Academy Award(R) nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, along with 5 Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Song! Leonardo DiCaprio (TITANIC), Cameron Diaz (CHARLIE'S ANGELS), and Daniel Day-Lewis (THE BOXER) star in this epic tale of vengeance and survival! As waves of immigrants swell the population of New York, lawlessness and corruption thrive in lower Manhattan's Five Points section. After years of incarceration, young Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) returns seeking revenge against the rival gang leader (Day-Lewis) who killed his father. But Amsterdam's personal vendetta becomes part of the gang warfare that erupts as he and his fellow Irishmen fight to carve a place for themselves in their newly adopted homeland!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1607 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 2003-07-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 167 minutes

Amazon.com
Gangs of New York may achieve greatness with the passage of time. Mixed reviews were inevitable for a production this grand (and this troubled behind the scenes), but it's as distinguished as any of director Martin Scorsese's more celebrated New York stories. From its astonishing 1846 prologue to the city's infernal draft riots of 1863, the film aspires to erase the decorum of textbooks and chronicle 19th-century New York as a cauldron of street warfare. The hostility is embodied in a tale of primal vengeance between Irish American son Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his father's ruthless killer and "Nativist" gang leader Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, brutally inspired), so named for his lethal talent with knives. Vallon's vengeance is only marginally compelling; DiCaprio is arguably miscast, and Cameron Diaz (as Vallon's pickpocket lover) is adrift in a film with little use for women. Despite these weaknesses, Scorsese's mastery blossoms in his expert melding of personal and political trajectories; this is American history written in blood, unflinching, authentic, and utterly spectacular. --Jeff Shannon

DVD features
The plethora of extras on this two-disc set are worth your time. There are several well-produced segments on the physical aspects of the film highlighted by a tour of the vast Cinecittà Studio sets with director Martin Scorsese and production designer Dante Ferretti (with a 360-degree-view feature to boot). Historian Luc Sante introduces you to the Five Corners area in New York circa the mid-19th century, and there's a vintage vocabulary guide (from the 1859 edition of The Rogue's Lexicon). Even though it was made as a "puff piece" for the movie, the Discovery Channel show "Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York" is an informative half-hour on the film's historical background. There's another espresso double-shot from a Scorsese commentary track. Not recorded traditionally as he watches the movie, the track pieces together thoughts from the director including some recorded in an NPR interview. This allows Scorsese to be even more focused, dealing with the history of the time and his own 30-year struggle to make the film. One serious demerit for stretching the feature film over both discs, which most likely had to be done with having both Dolby 5.1 and DTS tracks along with the commentary on the long film. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
Daniel Day-Lewis, returning to movies after a spell of shoemaking in Florence, disports himself with royal assurance as the voluble thug William Cutting (Bill the Butcher) in Martin Scorsese's generally unsuccessful epic about nineteenth-century gang life in New York. Wielding knife and cleaver, this vengeful brawler makes spectacles of blood that he knows are gratifying to others. He's a self-amused monster, and Day-Lewis does what he can to give this semi-coherent production some theatrical panache. Scorsese and his screenwriters (Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan) never succeed in linking together the intimate personal dramas and the endless gang war between the nativist Yankees (i.e., Protestants) and the new waves of Irish immigrants. The movie isn't boring, but it's heavy-spirited, obvious, and grisly, with an emphasis on knives and blood that borders on the fetishistic. Scorsese shot "Gangs" in Rome's Cinecittˆ, and the picture has some of the depressive feverishness of "Fellini Satyricon," which was also shot there-the jeering spectators mounted in multitiered sets, the furtive life of the crime-ridden metropolis, with its hapless poverty, its barbaric entertainments, its obscure and unredeemed suffering. The movie also stars a sullen, stolid Leonardo DiCaprio as a young Irish immigrant eager to avenge the death of his father, Cameron Diaz as a prostitute and pickpocket, Liam Neeson as a fallen Irish leader, and Jim Broadbent as the corrupt political boss William Tweed. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Godawful Blu Ray disk
Disney just slapped the old transfer made for the DVD on this BD disk. The DVD was notorious for bad image quality with grotesquely overdone digital sharpening and noise filtering. The Blu Ray is the same, justh with additional resolution to see all the uglyness with enhanced clarity.
This is a crap transfer that should be withdrawn immediately or it will damage Disney's reputation of releasing high quality HD disks. Yes, it is this bad compared to the state of the art from Disney and other studios.

Where is the director's cut?!?!
One of the big controversies surrounding this film was that Martin Scorcese was forced to cut nearly an hour of footage from his final vision in order to get the studio to release it. That's understandable, as not many people will be willing to sit through a 4 hour movie in theatres. So with the release of it on DVD, we should get the complete version, right? Well... it doesn't seem so.

The details on this DVD mention nothing about extra footage. Isn't one of the benefits of the DVD format that we get to see what the director intended before politics and marketing step in? I for one would like to see the COMPLETE movie, the movie that Scorcese wanted to make, rather than the movie which was released, even though that movie was quite good.

I have a feeling that the studio is just doing the usual DVD scam of releasing the theatrical version as soon as possible to catch people while they are still hyped on this movie from the theatrical release and post-Oscar boost. After a few months, hopefully they will release a director's cut, causing many people to go back and buy the DVD a second time. I, for one, will wait as long as it takes until the full version comes out. I'm sick of getting scammed by these studios into buying one version, and then seeing a "special edition" with all sorts of extras come out a few months later. Not gonna happen this time, buddy-boy.

Scorsese's compromised epic
Gangs of New York has a lot of problems. (1) Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio are miscast. They have no chemistry, Diaz' role is confusing, and DiCaprio appears to be stoned in almost every scene. (2) Their love affair is a needless distraction from the revenge plot. (3) The set design is amazing, but it seems to take up too much of the screen. It's anything but subtle. In Scorsese's other films, he creates a world to surround the characters, but he doesn't call attention to it. (4) The movie is split over two DVDs. There's no reason for it. I have other films of the same length on a single disc. The extras could have been placed on the second disc, and the entire film on the first. (5) There was a lot of controversy about the production of this film, including cost overruns and fights with the producer. That story is not mentioned anywhere on the two DVDs. It's a whitewash.

And then there are the good things. (1) Jim Broadbent and Daniel Day-Lewis are great. I could watch those two guys all day. They work the scenery, they work the costumes, and they know when to overdo it to keep the story fun and colorful. (2) All of the historical moments are well-done. Scorsese has a knack for cutting away from the plot, giving you background, and then getting back to his characters. The best example is Casino, whre he spent the first 45 minutes teaching you about Las Vegas. Here, he shows you everything from immigration to racism to corrupt politics and draft fees. (3) The movie is packed with stunning shots, such as the moment at the beginning when Bill's gang silently emerges from between the houses to form a mob in the snow. Or the climax, with cannons firing into the city and looters storming the mansions. (4) Scorsese's audio track is worth listening to.

Overall, Gangs of New York is a "chocolate cheeseburger" --- a movie that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one. Scorsese should have edited it mercilessly, cutting out the romance (as much as possible) and paring it down to an ultra-violent 2-hour epic. He would have lost a few casual viewers, but they ended up offended or bored anyway. I recommend this to anyone who likes Scorsese movies, simply because its an important part of his body of work. But for those of you who stayed away because you thought you wouldn't like it --- well, you probably made the right choice.