This week in Netflix...

Two very different movies that have one thing in common: they both disappointed me.

First up is Ridley Scott's teaming of two of his favorite actors--Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington--in American Gangster. It's the story of real-life Harlem gangster Frank Lucas (Washington) and detective Richie Roberts (Crowe). Lucas is a driver for the man who runs Harlem, Bumpy Johnson, who dies of a heart attack and leaves Harlem's crime business wide open. Lucas steps into the heroin trade with a "big box store" mentality: eliminating the middle man and dealing direct with the manufacturer himself. Lucas comes up with a scheme to bring heroin in directly from Southeast Asia via the US military, thus insuring himself a private pipeline and an unending flow of merchandise. At least until the Vietnam War ends with a whimper in 1975.

It's an engrossing story, and Washington in particular is great in it; Crowe, well...not so much. He's all accent and attitude. The story itself is unnecessarily long. There was a moment in the film--when Roberts figures out how Lucas does it--that left me wondering why we didn't skip the previous 45 minutes of day-to-day life for the two protagonists and just cut to the chase. For a violent, action drama, there's very little action, just one climactic shoot-out during a drug raid, when Roberts finally tracks down an incoming shipment. The film is marred by an ending scene later in both Roberts' and Lucas' lives, when the latter is released from prison, that seems like something out of 60 Minutes: the two old enemies circle each other again, but now the world has changed and their kinder and gentler. I didn't buy it.

I think Scott wanted to make his own real-life Godfather film here, and he picked an interesting person, but it's just not as compelling as the fiction of Coppola's films. I never lost interest in American Gangster, but in the end, it was a bit of a letdown.

The Savages, the dark comedy of disagreeable siblings having to deal with the sudden decline of their father, is a letdown from the beginning. I know, I know...the optimum words here are "dark" and "comedy," but god, this movie is depressing. Despite great performances from Laura Linney (Oscar-nominated as Best Actress) and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the sister and brother, and Philip Bosco as their ailing dad, this examination of what it's like to put your parent into a nursing home isn't funny, or touching, or redeeming at all. It's just dark and depressing, despite a "six months later" ending that shows the brother and sister slowly healing and moving on--finally--with their lives. Unfortunately, that ending seems tacked on, like a half-dozen test screening audiences hung themselves, drank poison, or slit their wrists while sitting in the theater watching this film.