werkz advice: only for die hard daniel day-lewis and scorsese fans.

Gangs of New York bills itself as an epic covering one of New York City's most turbulent periods. With an all-star cast, plenty of chaos and violence, a famous director and a boat-load of witty one-liners from Daniel Day-Lewis (playing a character called "The Butcher"), you'd think the movie would rock. It did not, for several reasons.

Although parts of the movie are quite good, and The Butcher himself is a complex villain who gets all the best lines and provokes the most thought afterwards, most of the film is simply tedious. Shots are thrown in for no reason, and given the amount of production nightmares the film went through, it's possible that the deletion of some scenes simply made others make no sense. When Leo DiCaprio's character (let's face it...it's easier to remember the actors as actors than as characters in this film, whether it's Cameron Diaz as a short prostitute or Jim Broadbent as the overly effeminate Boss Tweed) arranges to kill the Butcher with poison...why later does he try to knife him? Why do we need to see a two-second scene with the Butcher and several prosititutes, nestled between two shots of DiCaprio in bed with Diaz? What do the riots have to do with the gangs themselves, and are the rioters immigrants or New Yorkers or simple segregationists?

I've heard the book is quite good, and I can imagine it weaves the narrative flow far better than Scorsese, who seems to delight in scenes of violence with little purpose intermixed with long protracted scenes of people being frustrated. At the end, one is left wondering what the purpose, if any, was, other than to advance Day-Lewis's stalled career. And, to be sure, he gets all the best scenes, all the best lines, and all the craziest outfits. GONY actually looks at points like a bad music video, with entire armies of men outfitted in plaid pants and top hats arrayed against a rabble of neanderthals clutching dead rabbits and giant crosses. Perhaps this was historical accuracy, yet it still seemed over-the-top to have such a clear divide between each group. It reminds me of how a high-schooler might dress the different factions at school, with goths wearing leather outfits designed by Marilyn Manson, preppies dressed as if they walked out of J Crew and slackers all wearing Vans, baggy shorts and long chains to their wallets. In reality, no group can ever be so uniform, yet in charicature, each person becomes like the others in the pack.

In the end, it was a spectacle to see. But over the course of three hours, I'd need a better spectacle (Lord of the Rings, anyone?) to hold my interest. Some reviewers lauded the end of the film (which shows a series of still images of New York over the years, ending with a shot including the World Trade Center towers still standing) as a neat way of connecting the violence of the two times together. This is absurd: in the film the Butcher murders people in plain daylight with an axe and plenty of onlookers and is warned by Boss Tweed that he shouldn't do such things. Violence then, at least, was commonplace. Now, we view such things as an anomaly. Much like this film, which set against other historical epics might seem average, yet when compared to its current competition seems positively mediocre.

I just had a perverse thought: if Bill Frist first becomes majority leader and then runs for President in 2008, would he keep Dick Cheney on as Veep? That way, if Cheney's ticker ran down, there'd be a qualified cardiologist in the house to get it going again. And he might get a discount at any HCA hospitals!

No, there hasn't been an unfortunate smelting accident. I was just super busy, I suppose, with work and all. And the other members of the deadly triumvirate have been silent of late. It was during my reading of Choke that I realized my principle problem with the author, Chuck Palahniuk, is his greatest strength as well: his characters seem to inhabit their respective universes with perfect knowledge of how things work. Really work. Whether it's knowing which household items can be used to make napalm, or what codeword means "there's a shoplifter in aisle seven" in shopping stores, Palahniuk seems to have tapped a secret source of knowledge that revels how this modern life actually operates. When he mentions "Planet Starbucks" or any sort of corporate tie, it's clear that despite his knowledge of the system, there's a certain love/hate relationship to the entire globalization project. What They Don't Tell You is a central tenet to his characters, and although there's no vast conspiracy tying everything together, it feels almost rebellious to fight against the omnipresent commercialization of everything.

In this universe, everything works. Even the poor can game the system if they know how to. It's like those commercials promising "the American dream" and promoting a mid-level pyramid marketing scheme. The idea that people are out there who have gotten ahead through knowledge of how the system works rather than skill or simple nepotism is the Horatio Alger tale of our time. We all want to be this person, whether it's day-trading stocks or "that tip my friend told me" or the prevalance of the Nigerian Letter scam. Seeing wealth, we want it, and wanting it, we feel that there must be a way to achieve it without work. Or hard work, at least.

While nice to live in, though, there's relatively little of the "real" world that intrudes into this universe. While not being a utopian vision, the commercialization of the world, and even of America, isn't as uniform as Palahniuk suggests. I can drive thirty minutes outside DC and find a sleepy community which has remained, fairly static, without a connection to the internet, or a starbucks or a super-walmart. They might have an Exxon gas station, but it could have been originally built in the 1940s. In this area, in the rural America that's far larger than people realize, things aren't so corporate. Translated into the world, America becomes the urban metropolis and most other countries become the sleepy town with no stop lights. People don't seem to realize that we haven't moved fully into the next century. This is where his characters would presumably break down. As a reader, I don't get the sense that if the characters in Fight Club were actually skinning and eating deer, living among the ruins of a once-great city, that they'd either enjoy it, or be good at it. The desire, then, to get back to a simpler time, is a disingenuous one. The fact that I can walk from my house to any number of eating or entertainment establishments, that I can order gifts and clothes from all over the world from my computer at home, is a pleasant one. I can earn enough in a few hours of work a week to actually live off of. The rest, it appears, is fluff. It's money to eat out, or buy useless items, or go to the movies. If I actually knuckled down and stayed at home eating ramen every night, wearing simple clothes and living in the suburbs, I'd have a great deal more money. Granted, I wouldn't be as happy, but even though I don't have a disposeable income, I do earn enough to save a little.

Chuck touches on this a bit in Fight Club with references to the workers that prepare food, clean dishes, etc. But there's still no real connection between the workers and people who have very little. If the workers are uninspired automatons who seek solace in kicking the stuffing out of one another, they can't be too worried about their next paycheck, right? I'd suggest that most people in the service industry aren't so eager to lose their jobs, or to rock the boat. Instead, most appreciate the money. Granted, college kids and those on the Hill may work there for awhile, but they're not supporting a family of five.

And neither are Palahniuk's characters.

They can eschew the ordinary life and embrace risk because they aren't tied down. They can game the system because they know how it works. But they don't strike me as adaptable. Drop them in another age, country or region and they might not be able to hack it.