Tony Scott, dead at 68 (ABC)

This morning we reported on the tragic, seemingly senseless suicide of Top Gun director Tony Scott, who jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles after leaving detailed notes in both his car and his office of loved ones that he wanted notified of his death. (Among them, one can only assume, was Mr. Scott's brother and creative partner, Ridley Scott.)

New information emerged about this case this afternoon, shedding some light on this sad turn of events.

A source revealed to to ABC that Mr. Scott had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer; a fact that, if true, would go a long way to explain the premeditated and methodical nature of the suicide of a man who was in the middle of producing several high-profile projects, including a sequel to Prometheus and the A&E mini-series Coma.

Mr. Scott was heavily involved in cancer charities; a cause he picked up after his older brother Frank died of skin cancer in 1980.

Robin Hood

What's the story: Think of it as Batman Begins but with Robin Hood. Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott team up for the fifth time (!) in the past decade for Robin Hood, a prequel of sorts to the classic tale of merry men. But lest you think this is your grandfather's Robin Hood (or even your own—Kevin Costner for life!), Messrs. Crowe and Scott eschewed the fluffier aspects of the legend in favor of a gritty realism. Which is code for "this won't have as much action and humor as you think it should." The reviews confirm as much—apparently, all the action from the trailer takes place in the final 20 minutes—and it makes you wonder: Will summer audiences want to spend two and a half hours with something so drab, especially without the promise of a theme by Bryan Adams?

Who should see it: Kevin Costner.

Letters to Juliet

What's the story: Because it's been about six weeks since Amanda Seyfried had a movie in theaters—we still remember you, Chloe—here comes Letters to Juliet, a Nicholas Sparks–like romance without the heartbreak. Ms. Seyfried stars as a young and hopeful journalist (is there any other kind?) on holiday in Verona, Italy, who uses her obsession with Romeo & Juliet to help an old grandmother (Vanessa Redgrave) find a long-lost love. There's an inattentive boyfriend and a grandson, too, and based on those descriptions, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out which guy winds up kissing Ms. Seyfried at the end. (Hint: Not the boyfriend.) Critics have been unkind—our Rex Reed calls Letters to Juliet "maddeningly predictable"—but considering Ms. Seyfried was able to turn Dear John into a box office success, does it matter?

Who should see it: Nicholas Sparks.

Just Wright

What's the story: What kind of movie is Just Wright? The kind where the Wright in the title refers to Queen Latifah's character, Leslie Wright, a physical therapist who helps an NBA player (Common) recover from a knee injury. Naturally, she becomes smitten, but since her best friend is busy going on Basketball Wives with him, there are some problems. NBA players Dwight Howard, Rajon Rondo and Dwayne Wade make appearances, so if you're a girl trying to talk your boyfriend into seeing this, drop their names and see if that works. But be forewarned: The reviews are gaseous.

Who should see it: Lebron James.

Also opening this weekend: The DIY drama Touching Home; Ken Loach's latest, Looking for Eric.

Body of Lies is yet another in a long, tiresome line of loud, violent, nauseating and incoherent riffs on how mercenary and inhuman the spooks in the C.I.A. are, even to each other. Pointless and plotless, it’s nothing more than a series of gut-blasting near-death experiences, with Leonardo DiCaprio sporting a goatee for gonads. The idea is that a little facial fur might make him look a little less like a Boy Scout. Wrong. Action director Ridley Scott actually expects us to buy Leo as the toughest secret U.S. intelligence operative in Iraq, a man whose preposterous desert missions make 007 and John Wayne look like the Bobbsey Twins at the beach.

Back home in Langley, his porky, overweight, white-haired boss (played by porky, overweight, white-haired Ridley Scott alumnus Russell Crowe) sends Leo to track down a major terrorist. (Aren’t they all?) Cut to Manchester, England, where suicide bombers blow up an entire street, and they’re not even Irish. Leo is on the case. Cut to Samarra, Iraq. Leo offers an informant asylum in the U.S. It’s a lie. Russell calls from his cell phone, tells him to forget it and orders the guy’s execution. Cut to Amman, Jordan. “I need to take a shit. I need a shower and an Internet connection,” grouses Leo, nursing his bruises from narrowly missing being blown into stew meat. Machine-gunned again while visiting a “towelhead monarchy” in Jordan, he pulls bone fragments out of his wounds and gets viciously attacked by diseased attack dogs, and the Boss back home takes his kids to school and shouts into his Verizon mobile, “Whatever.” Cut to Amsterdam, where a crowded market is blown to hell, giving hundreds of potheads a contact high. “I need a low-key Al Qaeda somewhere between Osama and Oprah,” roars the super-agent dialogue. Cut to the skyscrapers of Dubai, where Leo peroxides his hair and looks like a Brady Bunch rerun. While Leo’s hacking into an Al Qaeda laptop in Dubai, the Boss is stuffing himself with Pepperidge Farm goldfish at a backyard cookout. Cut to Turkey, where Leo dictates messages in English that translate to Arabic on an Arabic computer keyboard. Boy, those secret agents. They think of everything. And you wonder why we’re in a panic about national security?

Here they are again, mechanically manipulated without a shred of logic, in another of those typical Ridley Scott global-espionage comic books that never bother to develop characters, construct a plot or even pretend to prioritize basic elements like narrative coherence. Beyond the assertion that everyone in the C.I.A. is as bad as the people they track, stalk and kill (big news!), the movie offers no ramifications or meaning beyond the specifics of individual acts of violence, and it’s indifferently filmed, with flat visuals and listless pacing. Cynicism reigns and you can’t trust anybody. Unfortunately, Leo makes the mistake of falling for the nurse who gives him painful rabies shots. Predictably, she gets kidnapped by Al Qaeda to lure Leo out of hiding. Cut to Syria, where he offers to trade himself for the girl. Are you still following this? Cut to Leo in an underground cell, where his torturers start chopping off his fingers, one by one, leaving bloody stumps. Cut to Leo, saying, “I quit,” and the Boss, saying, “He’s on his own now.” Cut to the emergency exit, where I’m the first one through the door. No wonder America needs a massive bailout if this is the way we’re wasting billions in the Middle East, saving the world (or destroying what’s left of it) by cell phone. I shudder to think about the roaming charges.

rreed@observer.com

Mr. DiCaprio fielded questions about his personal life (still no comment as to whether he plans to settle down with Israeli model Bar Rafaeli). Mr. Crowe and his long pony tail were feeling moody. Mr. Scott explained why his film will fare better than the glut of films about the Iraq war and terrorism that have thus far failed to resonate with audiences.

“It was never anything I really thought about,” said Mr. Dicaprio of the film’s seemingly tired subject matter. “To me, it is a political film, but we tried not to bring any of our own politics into it and I think it gives the audience the negative and positive view of the U.S. foreign policy. If you get a chance to do a film that is topical and deals with an issue that everyone in the world is thinking about, combined with a Ridley Scott espionage thriller, you just do it and you worry about those things later."

Unfortunately for the hopeful director and his leading man, reviews for the film have already been cruel.

From Variety: “Neither the location-based verisimilitude of Ridley Scott's shooting style nor the estimable Middle East expertise of source-material author David Ignatius can disguise Body of Lies as anything other than the contrived phony-baloney it is.”

But at least the cast and crew had a good time while shooting in Morocco.

“There wasn’t much to do there, but we all had a great time going to the sea, playing volleyball, and jet skiing,” recalled the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.

Mr. Scott said he tried to get a game of tennis in every Sunday morning with a local tennis pro before heading in to work. “I was only there for a few days so I didn’t get to see that much, and I had shot there before, actually, for Gladiator,” Mr. Crowe told the Daily Transom. But when we asked Mr. Crowe if he had any time at all to frolic by the sea with Ms. Farahani and the cast, he seemed to get a little annoyed.

 “I just went through that twice now,” he said testily. “No. I didn’t go out, and I didn’t do anything else. I just shot there a few days.” (Our apologies, Mr. Crowe!)

As the actor moved on to the next interviewer, he noticed a “Press” sticker stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Examining the word “Press” carefully, with a look of mild offense, Mr. Crowe proceeded to stick it onto the cameraman who was in the process of shooting him for his next interview. (The cameraman was surely relieved that that was a paper sticker at the bottom of Mr. Crowe’s fancy shoe and not a more unpleasant substance.)

When asked why he thought this movie would succeed above other films dealing with similar subject matter, Mr. Crowe replied: “Because it’s just so much better.”  

Our fellow blog, The Culture Czar, reported earlier today that the storied Gucci dynasty will be the subject of a new film by blood-and-guts director Ridley Scott. (Yes, the same guy who made Gladiator and G.I. Jane.) What’s more, as Fashionista reminded us this afternoon, Mr. Scott is not altogether ill-prepared to take on such a stylish subject, however much blood gets spilled. He shot a short for Prada last winter, in which Canadian model Daria Werbowy dons several archived outfits made by the Italian clothier. Apparently, the theme of the mini-film came from a poem the director’s daughter, Jordan, stumbled across. We’re on pins and needles to see if Mr. Ford will be played by Blow Out’s Jonathan Antin or Entourage’s Jeremy Piven.

"The Gucci family, as everyone knows, accomplished something far more magical than turning the proverbial sow's ear into the proverbial silk purse," wrote Francine Prose in the Observer. "They transformed the sow's ear–or presumably some more tender part of the pig epidermis–into the leather handbag, and subsequently converted the handbag (with help from some loafers and flowered scarves) into a global retailing gold mine. But, as everyone also knows, the humbly porcine origins of even the most stylish fashion accessory can be tough to eradicate. And so, while the passing years enhanced the splendor of the Gucci reputation and its fabulous real estate, penthouses, showrooms and boutiques, you could hear the faint echo of a disquieting sound: an initially plaintive and progressively more enraged and greedy … oinking. Eventually, the Guccis allowed their animal passions to trump their business acumen. Profits plummeted, family infighting escalated into accusations and cabals, lawsuits and physical violence. The family lost control of the empire that still bears its name, and–on a more personal note–Patrizia Gucci was accused and convicted of masterminding the 1995 Milan murder of her husband, Maurizio."

It’s not to be confused with the soundtrack of the film, which falls short of the movie’s Godfather-ish ambitions.

Unlike Denzel Washington’s fearsome, enigmatic, charming depiction of Frank Lucas, the soundtrack of period hits feels like a Saturday picnic drive with the oldies station on or a hip spinning class. There’s a nice single by Anthony Hamilton, decent period tunes like “Across 110th Street” by Bobby Womack, and fine but unimaginatively chosen smash hits of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s like Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Comin’” to the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.”

Hank Shocklee, the producer of Bomb Squad fame, offers some stellar instrumentals on the soundtrack too, but it is one of Mr. Shocklee’s former producing credits that rings loud with danger just as the movie is fading to black: Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It.”

With its whinnying horn sample and mechanical beats, the song sees Chuck D recalling the horrors of the Middle Passage and warning Black America not to let down its guard an inch. It’s a bizarre closing message to the film, since Chuck D’s lyrics always deprecated the drug trade; insurrectionism was always political, never purely criminal. Frank Lucas was no Angela Davis, these lyrics seem to say.

But Jay-Z, whose career was gearing up just as Public Enemy’s moon was on the wane, has made a career out of crime narratives. His album is not just the back story to the story; it’s the soundtrack that should have been, delivering on the film’s nostalgia for everything from Superfly to Serpico in an idiom that is raw, triumphant, furious and dolorous, but never tame. If base nostalgia is a sort of compromise with the past, Jay Z’s “American Gangster” is not nostalgic because it’s not compromised.

More than a decade (and one rescinded retirement) into his career, Jay-Z is in a unique position to make this album. His debut "Reasonable Doubt" was a delirious paean to the drug game. As more releases followed, Jay scaled back his complex double-time rhymes and struck gold with party jams. “The Black Album” was heralded as his final album. It was not, but it was his finest achievement. Then came "Kingdom Come." It was, despite a few bright spots and competent lyrical work, an uneasy transition from the utter mastery of "The Black Album" to a hip-hop mostly devoid of guns and grams, a sophisticated take on the genre that no one has really invented yet. So while he’s tinkering with the formula, along comes the perfect diversion, where Jay is allowed to play once more with crime stories and street dreams, and infuse it all with the perspective of the elder statesman, of the master.

The album opens with a gravelly definition of what it means to be a gangster. The voice belongs to Idris Elba who not only plays Frank Lucas’s overbrash rival Tango in the movie, but played calculating kingpin Stringer Bell on HBO’s cult hit The Wire.

Elba seems like the perfect entrée into an album that seeks to provide a definitive explanation of what it means to be a drug dealer, and what it means to craft the image of a drug dealer, whether through film or through song. Midway through the album, on “Ignorant Sh*t,” (actually a recycled tune from "Black Album" sessions), Jay lays it out quite clearly: “Actually believe half of what you see, none of what you hear, even if it’s spit by me,” and then goes on to document the ways he will murder and double-murder all comers.

The opening track, “Pray,” makes good use of a breathy Beyonce, as Jay relates a youth spent witnessing crime and learning how “the rules is blurred.” “American Dream” sees the album begin to blossom around a terrific Marvin Gaye sampling track where, amid weepy strings, Hova wonders whether he ought to be considering college instead of eyeing his entry into the game. “We need a place to pitch, we need a mound,” he says, as if the American dream were really just that easy, a piece of land from which to build a fortune. At one point he offers the benediction, one dealer to another, “survive the draughts, I wish you well,” then repeats the line with a twinge of disbelief, saying next “How sick am I? I wish you health, I wish you wheels, I wish you wealth, I wish you insight so you can see for yourself.” It’s a rare moment where the dream is finally for the wisdom to simply survive. “No Hook,” offers a rueful double meaning and a walking tempo. The song has no hook, no chorus, and Jay yelps that he doesn’t need one, but early on it’s clear the hook represents his absent father, a presence replaced by the criminal code.

“Roc Boys,” with its incredibly boisterous staccato horns (and a little help from Kanye West on the hook), offers an all-out celebration of the drug game, of the money, of buying the bar: “Oh what a feelin’, I’m feelin’ life!” “I Know” is a standard Neptunes-produced love song, all Nintendo-style slow jam, only in this case the love being professed is to an addict from the addiction, with clever reversals like “91/2 weeks is better than 12 steps.” On “Success,” Jay laments the lack of comforts in wealth, fancy things, fancy places to go: “How many times can I go to Mr. Chow’s?” The B-3 organ boil-up alongside a thunderous beat provides a perfectly doom-laden backdrop for such musings and threats, while Nas steals at least part of the show with his unreal guest verse. By the final track, “Fallen,” the arc of the narrative is complete: the mighty kingpin comes down, and the people come from all around to take pleasure from the fall; really the same pleasure they took from his rise. It's tragedy: early success always has downfall secreted within itself.

“Blue Magic” and the title track, are bonus tracks, but also two of the best tracks here. “Blue Magic” refers to the brand name on Frank Lucas’s heroin, but it is self-branding that Jay achieves on the track, deepening his timbre but increasing his speed, boasting of his prowess as a crack dealer in a style both effortless and inimitable. For the title track, Just Blaze provides a beat built on a Curtis Mayfield sample, bringing us full circle to Superfly. It’s a tremendous sample, a tremendous beat, and a tremendously solid turn at the mic from Jay, a righteous way to end a mostly righteous, and perhaps more importantly, a smartly conceived, album. Jay may or may not be up to his full potential, and tongues will continue to wag through the coming weeks debating just that point. What’s beyond debate is that he has told the story behind the story, and continues to amaze.

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, from a screenplay by Steve Zaillian, is based on an 2000 New York magazine article titled “The Return of Superfly,” by Mark Jacobson. The title of the article was derived from one of the last and best manifestations of the short-lived black-controlled-and-directed drug-crime genres, Ron O’Neal’s Superfly (1973), a genre which had been launched only two years earlier by Gordon Park’s Shaft (1971). I say short-lived because black-power advocates of the period denounced the genre out of existence for tarnishing the image of blacks by suggesting that they were implicated in Harlem’s heroin trade. I can still recall being assailed, along with Roger Greenspun of The Times, by black power activist LeRoi Jones for finding delicious humor and hearty drama in black drug dealers. There seems to be no comparable degree of agitation in the 21st century over the screen image of African-Americans. This may be because so many African-American actors, like the stellar Oscar winner Denzel Washington, play both sides of the law for an ever-increasing African-American share of the ever-shrinking number of moviegoers. Besides, the never-ending racial-image game has shifted to the more widely watched television screen.

In any event, the real-life saga of Frank Lucas has taken several years to reach the screen from the time that the film’s eventual executive producer Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplays for Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) with director Martin Scorsese, introduced the legendary crime boss and then ex-con Lucas to journalist Jacobson. Producer Brian Grazer entered the scene by optioning the magazine article, and meeting with Mr. Pileggi and Mr. Lucas for a possible film version of the Harlem legend. The rest is now stop-start-start-stop Hollywood history as screenwriter Steven Zaillian and director Ridley Scott ended up as the final creative combo, with Denzel Washington taking on the role of Lucas and Oscar winner Russell Crowe cast as Richie Roberts, the determined narcotics detective who brings Lucas down—and with him, a small army of corrupt narcotics detectives and Mafia kingpins.

Mr. Washington and Mr. Crowe constitute a richly ironic study in contrasts as, respectively, the well-dressed churchgoing family man, community leader and casually homicidal crime boss Frank Lucas, and the usually unkempt, womanizing failed husband and father, but steadfastly honest narcotics detective, Richie Roberts, who has forfeited the trust of his crooked fellow cops by returning a million-dollar haul from a drug raid up to the evidence room where it belonged. The charisma projected by both Mr. Washington and Mr. Crowe makes American Gangster the most felicitously magnetic dual vehicle of the year. It is also perhaps the most damning account ever of the longest and most disastrous war in our history, the 80-year war on drugs, which has jailed so many of our citizens while, in effect, enriching the criminal gangs around the world and multiplying the menaces of addiction.

Even so, the conjoined stories of Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts and their contemporaries would have been hard to believe if these stories had been purely and completely fictional. To imagine that packets of pure heroin were smuggled into the United States from Vietnam in the false bottoms of coffins containing the bodies of American soldiers killed in a separate futile conflict would strain the credulity of the most heartless shlockmeister.

Yet, this is what apparently happened in real life, with the attendant bribery of Army and Air Force officers and pilots. I always suspected that there was something wrong in the Vietnam War after the troops there reportedly booed Bob Hope on one of his intended morale-boosting visits, but I never realized until now that so much of the Army (as well as so many in the peace movement) were so high on drugs. Or that so many narcotics detectives were on the take from drug dealers like Frank Lucas. Is the situation any better and cleaner today? I don’t expect any movie to tell me if it isn’t anytime soon, as they did before this 1968-1975 scandal hit the screen.

Also hard to believe is that Lucas could put a gun to the head of a rival mobster and shoot him in broad daylight on a crowded sidewalk in Harlem, and walk back at a leisurely pace to the luncheonette table where he had been eating with his gang of brothers, without the slightest concern that any witnesses would come forward to point a finger at him. Could it happen today? Well, there are any number of hip-hop songs with the message “don’t snitch.” And there seems to be a profusion of guns at large just about everywhere. So who knows?

As for the percentage of narcotics detectives on the take today, do we ever know immediately how many people in our capitalist system are taking bribes? Still, I was taken aback by the extent of the corruption in American Gangster. Josh Brolin as Detective Trupo, the most aggressive member of a Manhattan delinquent narcotics squad in protecting his turf for his own profit, adds to his laurels from No Country for Old Men as the most venturesome of the antiheroes arrayed against the superkiller played by potential Oscar winner Javier Bardem. Of course, the odds are still stacked against evil characters, though after Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, who can tell how depraved the Academy has become?

The long-esteemed actress and vibrant force for racial justice, Ruby Dee, now in her feisty 80’s, is alone worth the price of admission as no-nonsense Mama Lucas, who climactically slaps her by now fearsomely vengeful son, and directly diverts him from his utter destruction for killing even crooked cops. Right behind her is the gifted black British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Huey Lucas, Lucas’ main man and younger brother, and Puerto Rican beauty Lymari Nadal as Eva, Lucas’ one and only. Cuba Gooding Jr. as Nicky Barnes, another of Lucas’ drug lord antagonists, and Armand Assante as Lucas’ Mafia partner, do not even begin to round out the huge cast of idiosyncratic performers from many branches of showbiz.

By the very nature of the genre, the males outnumber the females by a ratio of about 10 to 1. Hence, aside from Ms. Dee and Ms. Nadal, the only other actresses with more than walk-ons are Carla Gugino as Roberts’ neglected wife and KaDee Strickland as Roberts’ attorney and sexual conquest. By contrast, the respective members of the Lucas and Roberts entourages involve more than a dozen actors with much more than walk-on parts. Still, in the end it is the combined star firepower of Mr. Washington and Mr. Crowe that drives the two eventually merging sagas to a salutary law-and-order finale.

The bristling cinematography of Harris Savides, the lavish production design by Arthur Max, and the perceptively accurate costume design by Janty Yates have greatly assisted Mr. Scott and Mr. Zaillian in concocting one of the most dramatically explosive gangster movies in years. An added dividend is provided with the score devised by composer Marc Streitenfeld and music supervisor Kathy Nelson, with additional source music written and produced by Hank Shocklee. The trick was to exploit the flip sides of hit records of the late 60’s and early 70’s, thereby approximating the sound of the period without drenching the soundtrack with the familiar strains of golden oldies.

Accordingly, one must applaud American Gangster as the kind of socko entertainment many people thought Hollywood filmmakers had become incapable of. It is not to be missed.