Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York is a film that shows the squalor of the worst slum in New York City in the mid 1800's, Five Points. With ten Oscar nominations, it is arguably one of the greatest historical movies to date (Koban). But just how historically accurate is it? While some people think ...

At first glance, one would expect a movie titled "City of God" to show how poverty and marginalization would make criminals of frustrated people. Instead we see how, in an atmosphere of unsupervised chaos, a single charismatic psychopath can hold sway over an entire population with the force of his...

Life on The Southside In the southern United States cotton has been king for a couple of centuries. In the early days of the cotton plantations there were black slaves that tilled the land planted and raised the cotton until it was ready to be harvested by them. The practice of slavery was aboli...

Gangs have been a threat in a lot of our communities in the United States dating back to the early 1800s. There has however, been a few discrepancies when it comes to defining these groups. Sometimes city or town officials who do not want to be classified as having a gang problem will go to certai...

In the introductory scene, there is a chicken running through narrow hallways in a Brazilian slum called City of God. Chasing the chicken, there are dozens of thugs waving and shooting guns trying to kill it. At that point, the hero of the movie, Rocket, is presented as what seems to be just another...