Al Capone lived out his final years on a grand estate in Palm Island, Florida, with his wife, Mae, by his side and grandchildren running around the property. It sounds like a pretty nice end for the notorious Chicago gangster, until you realize that he spent those post Alcatraz years suffering from declining health, dementia and the long-term effects of a syphilis infection from when he was just a teenager that went untreated. Also? He was likely broke. Then he died of a heart attack on Jan. 25, 1947. He was only 48.
It’s this chapter that gets the focus in Capone, a hallucinatory and messy (in all respects) film starring Tom Hardy as the once great crime boss who is now hardly recognizable to himself or his family and in a state of rapid decline. With ashen skin, blood-red eyes and a voice that is so raspy as to be almost unintelligible, Hardy’s Capone looks like a drawing of a comic book gangster that’s gone too far.
“Fonse” (the name Al is not to be uttered on the property) totters around his well-groomed and cliche Floridian mansion in an open robe with a cigar (and, later, a carrot) hanging out of his mouth. When he’s not shouting at his wife (Linda Cardellini) or gardeners, he can often be found with a thousand-yard stare, which either means he’s about to go into a flashback sequence or is soiling himself — he does both quite frequently. His decay is cartoonish, as though all of his past sins are oozing out of his brain and body. They are laid out just as chaotically and unpleasantly in Capone for audiences to make sense of.
photo: AP
Capone is the work of filmmaker Josh Trank, who, you may recall, is the blockbuster wunderkind who became a bit of a pariah in under four years. His film Chronicle made him, at 27, a precious box office superstar who earned comparisons to Spielberg and Cameron. But his decline started before he could make good on the assumption that he was the next big thing. He was then hired, and fired, from a Star Wars film. But perhaps his most infamous moment was when he distanced himself from his expensive Fantastic Four reboot a day before it opened (and bombed) with a tweet implying that studio interference ruined his once great film.
Although we’ll never get to see what he might have done left to his own devices with Fantastic Four, for better or worse Capone is fully a Josh Trank product. He wrote, edited and directed. And although Capone has interesting elements and a strong style, it is also deeply flawed and a bit of a slog to get through.
Hardy’s go-for-broke performance is certainly jaw-dropping, but not exactly effective in drawing you in to care about his story or his regrets. There are threads that are introduced with little resolve: The possible US$10 million that he’s hidden and lost, the FBI agent (a compelling Jack Lowden) who has to convince his own boss that Capone is worth continuing to investigate and the out-of-wedlock son who keeps calling and appearing to him. The supporting cast is wasted (it’s not just Cardellini). Matt Dillon pops up for a bit. And Kyle MacLachlan plays the physician who suggests the family give him a carrot instead of a cigar, since he won’t notice anyway. It’s also numbingly violent.
Al Capone’s last year could make for an interesting film, but there is little poetry or transcendence in Capone, and nothing even remotely close to the quietly devastating third act of The Irishman. Although maybe Trank wanted something more garish and horrifying and surreal for Capone, like a carrot cigar, a droopy diaper and a golden Tommy Gun. At the very least, it’s hard to look away.
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
As mega K-pop group BTS returns to the stage after a hiatus of more than three years, one major market is conspicuously missing from its 12-month world tour: China. The omission of one of the group’s biggest fan bases comes as no surprise. In fact, just the opposite would have been huge news. China has blocked most South Korean entertainment since 2016 under an unofficial ban that also restricts movies and the country’s popular TV dramas. For some Chinese, that means flying to Seoul to see their favorite groups perform — as many were expected to do for three shows opening
RSS