Gangs of New York/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: There's a book?
  • Award Snub: Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, won none.
  • Awesome Ego: There are two occasions when Bill responds to a cheering crowd with a dismissive, even bored, royal wave. Rather than coming off as pretentious or pompous, his arrogance comes across as so totally justified that the moments appear on the C Mo A page.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: Amsterdam looks out across the lake where there are people dancing in front of a fire. The scene shifts immediately after. What?
  • Draco In A Pimping Top-Hat: Bill Cutting. Not that anyone else in the movie is a good person, but for some reason Bill gets lionized above others due to his Badass factor.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: A lot of the anti-immigrant viewpoints of Bill's gang and the Know-Nothing Party are eerily similar to anti-immigration rhetoric in America today.
    • Nothing new under the sun. America has gone through repeated periods of anti-immigration extremism. Usually the previous major immigrant group is at the forefront of opposing the newcomers.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Daniel Day-Lewis will be playing Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's upcoming Lincoln biopic. Extremely hilarious when you think about Bill the Butcher shouting "Down with the Union!" during a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin and throwing a knife through a picture of Lincoln earlier in the film.
    • also, Bill's rival in this movie was played by Liam Neeson, who not only was the original choice for the role of Lincoln, but gave a notorious Take That against Day-Lewis and his Method Actor style in an interview, claiming that he could rely on his own acting talent for a role and didn't need to "live like the part" the way Day-Lewis is famous for.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Bill the Butcher, who else?
    • Particularly remarkable because Bill does not display the flawless complex planning or subtle manipulation that are normally associated with magnificent bastards. In fact, it is quite clear that he knows he's fighting a losing battle, and will go down fighting anyway for his principles, but is also a hypocrite with some of those same principles. Despite these significant failings, he is such an electrifyingly charismatic character that he manages to inspire awe rather than disgust. All kudos to Daniel Day-Lewis for managing to pull this off so gloriously.
  • Romantic Plot Tumour