Gangs Of New York was one of the titles I was on the fence about when upgrading some of my DVD titles to Blu-ray this past fall. Boy, am I glad I waited. As it turns out, the quickie, original Blu-ray release of Gangs is a point of particular contention among A/V aficionados, considered one of Disney's true botch jobs in the hi-def market.
With little fanfare, Disney has re-released Gangs Of New York, and by most accounts, the disc lives up to the hopes of many fans (which is to say, it is apparently a solid transfer, true to the original film elements and not digitally overmanipulated). I got my disc yesterday, but I haven't taken it for a test drive.
As for the film itself, I like to think of it as a very good film completely overshadowed by a single stupendous performance. Bill The Butcher is probably the quintessential Daniel Day-Lewis performance, even in light of his remarkable turn in There Will Be Blood. The broad strokes that Martin Scorsese applies to Gangs are brought to life by Day-Lewis's volatile and grandiose performance. It seems that the film has aged well, and it probably helps that Leo DiCaprio is now taken seriously as a leading man. While he has since become Scorsese's go-to lead actor, back in 2002, Gangs was considered far too burdensome to rest on his young shoulders (which, in fact, it was). Consequently, actors like DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz often appear to be merely acting while Day-Lewis was pouring his very being into Bill The Butcher. Scorsese has made better films since then (The Departed), but he's made few epics in his career like Gangs Of New York. He uses the history of Five Points in New York City as an obvious metaphor for the settlement of America in general, and the film is often weighed down by that ambition. But it is also frequentely stunning and nearly always memorable, perhaps chiefly as the last Hollywood beast of its kind, filmed on expensive soundstages in Italy and plagued with post-production drama.
As Disney has just shuttered what's left of Miramax, it's worth remembering that Gangs Of New York was probably the most ambitious film the studio (stupidly, perhaps) ever undertook. I might go so far as to say that the film is arguably superior to all ten (count 'em!) of this year's Best Picture nominees. (It was cheaper to produce than at least one of those films.)
Anyway, you can now get your hands on a respectable version of Gangs Of New York in glorious high definition.
(Robert Harris over at Home Theater Forum has a fairly amusing take on Disney's use of the term "restoration" and their general silence on the issues with the original Blu-ray release.)
