Webarnold.net

Kirsten has worked hard, well, throughout all of law school, but particularly hard leading up to this weekend.  She had a big interview with a law firm on Friday that lasted for several hours and included lunch with many of the partners.  Then today, Saturday, she had to take the ethics portion of the bar exam.  Needless to say, the past week she’s been a bit more stressed out than usual.

To celebrate the close of such a stressful period of the semester for her, we went on a date night tonight.  First stop was church, then dinner, then a movie.  What a great night!  Well, mostly.  The company was good, the food at dinner was fantastic (we at dinner at Biaggi’s in Cedar Rapids), and the movie, so so.

The movie we saw at Coral Ridge theaters was American Gangster starring Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe.  Kirsten and I both went into the movie expecting another god father-like movie.  That’s probably where we went wrong.  Frank Lucas, the character played by Denzel Washington, is nothing like Vito or Michael Corleone.  The big difference between the Lucas family in American Gangster and the Corelone family in The God Father is that the Lucas family’s business is drugs.  This disturbed me.  I mean, I know that America has a drug problem, but to see the effects of mass importation of the illegal substances in the movie like this was sobering.

The proposed “good guy” was Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe.  I put good guy in quotation marks because he was a paradox.  On the one hand he refused to pocket any of the unmarked bills (adding up to close to $1 million) in the beginning of the movie, instead, he turns them in to the department.  On the other hand, he is being divorced by his wife and losing custody of his little boy because he sleeps with random women, lies, and drinks.  It was interesting the way the movie played the two sleeze balls off of each other.

In any event, the movie wasn’t quite as entertaining as I had hoped.  Perhaps it’s worth a rent.

Tags: No Comments