Gangs of New York

According to Martin Scorsese, the idea for Gangs of New York came when the director first realized that the first real wave of immigrants to come to New York wasn't full of Italians at the dawn of the twentieth century, but of Irishmen a good fifty years earlier. I'll admit, I didn't really consider this either, given all the Italian culture (and stereotypes) in New York, and given that when you think of Irish immigrants you're more apt to think of Boston. Anyway, yeah, New York was totally crawling with Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, and this is a movie more or less about the conflicts between those immigrants and the "native" New Yorkers whose families had been there for centuries.

It was a movie set during and informed by the American Civil War, yet in no way was it a Civil War movie. I liked that. It seems like the Civil War is at the absolute center of American history in the 1800s - what led up to it, how it played out, and what the aftermath was like - but there was obviously way more going on all over the country than a North-South conflict or an abolitionist movement. This movie explores part of that "way more" and it educated me on a period and a conflict I knew very little about.

Also, you've got Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, John C. Reilly, and (briefly) Liam Neeson here. Just excellent work. Cameron Diaz? She is also an actor and was also in this.

This wasn't my favorite movie, as it did drag a bit in the middle and never fully captivated me, but it had my attention and it did almost everything very well and it held up 12 years later. The ending montage was one of the coolest parts. All movie long I had been thinking, "this just doesn't feel like New York." But of course, New York only really became New York once all that infrastructure popped up in the 20th century. The movie ends with a lingering shot on two graves in a cemetery as, through the years, the modern New York skyline begins to pop into view off in the distance.