Jul 1st, 2009
Indianapolis Adult Entertainment: Johnny Depp Turns Gangster in ‘Public Enemies’
… The Godfather’ is a family drama, but it’s about power and capitalism, the dark side of capitalism. Here’s a shadow version of the accepted system, and the ‘Godfather’ movies touch on this notion of how similar are the accepted system and its shadow version.”
But the “Godfather” films also represented the end of the classic gangster era. With the demise of the real mob as an urban power, and the rise of drug lords and inner-city gangs, recent bad-guy flicks are as much about gunplay and bling as anything else (although the sociological underpinnings of “American Gangster” hearken back to Depression-era gangster films). And oddly enough, the most intriguing, and groundbreaking, recent view of mob life came not from a movie but from a TV show, “The Sopranos,” which gave the genre an entirely new tweak _ a sociopathic mob boss and harried, middle-class family guy who runs his business out of a sleazy strip club. Not exactly Don Corleone territory.