The appearance of law must be upheld, especially when it's being broken.

Over the weekend, on an incredibly lazy Sunday, I finally got around to watching Gangs of New York. I thought the movie was fun, had colorful characters, was a great peek into the cities of the 1800's (more on this later), but all of that was soft of overridden by it being too damn long.

I don't know. Maybe they needed the length to give the characters the right emotional development, with faster pacing perhaps they would have lost some of their flavor. Maybe they really needed to let the whole story simmer. It's tough to tell. This isn't the kind of movie where there's a clear case about what they should have left out or changed to shorten things up. But for me, it was a clear case that extended beyond my interest level in the movie. By the last 30 minutes or so I had moved on in my head. I was off thinking about other things like what I would do after the movie instead of being swept up with the climaxes of the film. That right there is the best measure of whether a movie is too long or not. Of course, it's kind of imprecise, since it's different for every person - and even different for each person depending on their mood.

My other key observation is when this movie did have me hooked I was not hooked by the characters or the plot. I was hooked by the city. Gangs of New York takes place in New York during the timeframe of the Civil War. I just went to New York for the first time last year and marveled at the size and density of the city. Since I've only seen it once I think of New York as a static thing, something that is huge, majestic, and complicated - but not continually changing. This movie reminded me that New York looked like a totally different place 150 years ago. That in itself isn't surprising, the hard part for my brain is connecting the dots. What kind of crazy process led New York from the chaos it was then to the chaos it is now. That's a lot of building and development and people and money and work. It reminds me of how New Yorker's talk about the city having a fabric and a soul. Something that's been made out of centuries of these unplanned changed. What's really interesting about it is how this is different from large European cities. I believe New York is so modern precisely because it's history has mostly occurred in the fast moving modern age. By the time technological change started picking up old European cities had a huge amount of history to be respected and kept around. New York not so much, they were free to develop at will. I think that's why when I visit New York I'm not reminded that there's a ton of history there, or there was a city there before the era of modern cities. I get a completely different feeling in London, Berlin or Prague.

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