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| - A touching, heartbreaking coming of age story... with gangsters. Bear with me, it's way better than it sounds from that first line. The story begins in the Bronx, (a borough of New York City) in 1960. The main character is Calogero Anello, the nine year old son of Lorenzo Anello, (played by Robert De Niro) a poor Italian immigrant who drives a bus in New York's mass transit system for a living. This lets the Anello family scratch out a living, but although Calogero loves his father and is treated to sermons from his father about both how to live an honest life and how "the saddest thing in life is wasted talent," the man Calogero really admires is Sonny LoSpecchio, the tough and intelligent mobster who runs the neighborhood and is rapidly shooting up the ranks of The Mafia.
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| abstract
| - A touching, heartbreaking coming of age story... with gangsters. Bear with me, it's way better than it sounds from that first line. The story begins in the Bronx, (a borough of New York City) in 1960. The main character is Calogero Anello, the nine year old son of Lorenzo Anello, (played by Robert De Niro) a poor Italian immigrant who drives a bus in New York's mass transit system for a living. This lets the Anello family scratch out a living, but although Calogero loves his father and is treated to sermons from his father about both how to live an honest life and how "the saddest thing in life is wasted talent," the man Calogero really admires is Sonny LoSpecchio, the tough and intelligent mobster who runs the neighborhood and is rapidly shooting up the ranks of The Mafia. Naturally, both of Calogero's parents disapprove of this, (especially his painfully honest, straight living father) but nothing they do can stop Calogero's fascination with Sonny, the other neighborhood mobsters, or their hangout bar, which is just a couple of places down the street from his own house. Still, Sonny never notices Calogero or the other neighborhood boys that imitate the gangster... until the day when two men pulling into a parking space at the same time get into a fight, one of them pulls out a bat and attacks the other with it, and Sonny shoots the bat wielding assailant... right in front of young Calogero. Following the street ethics of his neighborhood, Calogero lies to the police and refuses to identify Sonny as the shooter. A grateful Sonny asks to meet Calogero, and quickly takes a liking to the kid, and soon begins to take him under his wing and treat Calogero like a son, including giving him the nickname C. It isn't long before Sonny and Lorenzo have a tense confrontation about C's time hanging out with Sonny, as Lorenzo fears that it will influence C into embracing the mob lifestyle. Following this a wary truce begins, with both Lorenzo and Sonny influencing and guiding C into adulthood. Fast forward 8 years. Lorenzo is still driving a bus for the city, Sonny is now a boss, and C is 17 and has spent nearly half his life reaping the benefits of being, for all intents and purposes, like an adopted son to Sonny. In the meantime C's relationship with his father is growing ever more strained, especially as C continues to admire Sonny and soak up input from his friends that have formed their own "social club" and act like a minor league mafia. What's more, C's friends are in the middle of starting a mini race war with the black teenagers from the next neighborhood over. This is something C wants no part of, since 1) both his father and Sonny are fairly tolerant people and have passed that along to him (although Lorenzo, like many conservative immigrants, takes a somewhat dim view of marrying or having a relationship with members of other ethnic groups) and 2) C is in the middle of falling for a black classmate, Jane Williams. Soon events are racing to a head. Jane's brother Willie is one of a group of black kids assaulted by C's friends just for riding through the Italian neighborhood on their bikes, and although C doesn't take any part in the beating, Willie identifies him from the scene. C's relationship with his father is unraveling fast, and strange little things are happening around Sonny, making him increasingly paranoid about attempts on his life, including finding something on the engine of his car after C borrowed it, which leaves him suspecting C is part of an assassination attempt. As all these threads come together and the film heads for a climax, Calogero must start making some tough choices about his life, and try to deal with events that will leave most of the characters changed, and more than a few dead...
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