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: #3098 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.

May be Scorsese's greatest work.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Gangs Of New York would recieve such a cold shoulder from critics, the Academy, and the viewing public. Every time Martin Scorsese has presented us with one of his greatest, most personal films, he has been shot down, his vision dismissed as hogwash, only to be accepted as a great film years later.

Case in point: Raging Bull was widely panned by many upon its first release, and Scorsese was passed over for Robert Redford's Ordinary People, a good but far inferior film. Raging Bull is now recognized as one of the greatest of all American films. When Scorsese released his most personal film, The Last Temptation Of Christ, it was met with controversy and disdain. Again he was passed over come award time, and now his Jesus bio is seen as one of the greatest films to tackle the subject of Jesus Christ.

I felt that Gnags Of New York was a fantastic film, and upon seeing it, I walked out of the theatre feeling that I had seen a film that would immediately be accepted as one of Scorsese's greatest films. How wrong I was.

Yet I don't understand the cold shoulder in this case, because there is so much to like about Gangs Of New York. We've all said great things about the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis, but his great performance overshadowed Leonardo DiCaprio's, which wasn't all that bad. I personally think we all need to get over Titanic; this kid can act. Cameron Diaz is fine in her role; note the scene in which she and DiCaprio discuss her abortion. She shows that she is just as good a dramatic as she is a comic actress.

The costume design and art direction is impeccable. Scorsese and his crew perfectly captured the New York of the Civil War era. Reviewers have argued that New York couldn't look that bad. As a history student, I can assure you that it did.

Finally, no one has seemed to notice that Scorsese has made a picture that combines the greatest of his influences. Gangs Of New York captures the best of Italian neorealism and grand classic Hollywood spectacle. In combining the two, he has made what may be his greatest film: a melding of De Sica and Fellini, John Huston and D.W. Griffith, into a style that is uniquely Scorseseian. Gangs Of New York rushes along in its two hour, 45 minute running time. Never once did I find it boring or slow moving.

So to those who have said it is a bad picture, I pose this challenge: How would you change it? I've heard lots of criticism but few solutions. Perhaps there are so few solutions because Scorsese has made a picture so perfect that it is impossible for many of us to comprehend its depth.