BEFORE: Now it's Ed Norton's turn to get progressively younger, as tonight I've set the Wayback Machine for 1998. Ah, remember a simpler time, just before the end of the last century? Since I flipped a big part of my list around, it's sort of turned into the "Benjamin Button" year, with regards to each actor's career. "Primal Fear" will take me back another two years, but I've got to make a stop in the present day first.
You see the sort of dilemma I face, though, right? Most people would classify this as a Matt Damon film, so I had to make a choice - does it belong here, or with the other Matt Damon films? Do I use this opportunity to link to more Damon films, or do I stay the course? Well, I think my choice is clear. No more second-guessing the route I've chosen. The Matt Damon chain provides a link (I hope) later this year between the McConnaughey films and the Clooney films.
It's a holiday today, and TCM's running "Glory" and a Sidney Poitier marathon. Hollywood would probably prefer I go out to the theater and watch "Selma", but I've got other plans for a trip to the movies tomorrow. Jeez, I watched a Spike Lee film this weekend, isn't that enough?
THE PLOT: A young man is a reformed gambler who must return to playing big stakes poker to help a friend pay off loan sharks.
AFTER: When I watch a film about people playing poker, I get the same sort of feeling that I get from watching a boxing film. Namely, I wish I knew more about poker, and boxing for that matter. Sometimes the film explains the activity, sometimes it doesn't - I think the better ones do. I've been to Atlantic City twice in the last year, and I don't play the table games, I stick to the slot machines (and the buffets). I think I understand blackjack, but craps and poker, fuggeddabout it.
What I've trained myself to do at the slots is to walk away from a machine whenever I'm up. I could be up a quarter from where I started, I could be up $5, but it doesn't matter. If I'm up, I cash out from that machine, because I've determined that's the hardest thing to do when gambling - walking away. Because the machine may pay out a little, to make you THINK it's about to pay out a lot, but it's more likely that the opposite is true. That little win is probably all that machine is going to give me, so I pocket the ticket with the profit, and start the next machine with a fresh $20. If a machine isn't paying out, I'll let that whole $20 go down to nothing, and then I've still got the winning tickets in my pocket. Sometimes for the whole day I'm up, sometimes I'm down (either way, it's off to the buffet...) but the one thing I didn't do was stake my wins, however small, by leaving them in the machine.
Poker's a different game, obvi, in that you have to leave your winnings on the table, and everyone can see how you're doing by the size of your stack of chips. (I don't really understand poker chips, either - if you have to buy them with money, and then at the end, you cash your chips in for money, why not just play with money?) But at times, the main character here, Mike, faces the same dilemma, knowing when to walk away from the table. Should he take his small win and head home, or keep playing to try and turn the small win into a larger win, risking it all? I think you can probably guess where this is headed.
Mike's a "straight" player, meaning that he relies on the science of putting together winning hands, combined with what he knows about human nature - the ways people act when they have a great hand, and the ways people act when they have a terrible hand. Bluffing means that you should act elated when you have a terrible hand, and you should act disappointed when you have a great hand. But didn't people figure out a long time ago that bluffing is a thing? So, wouldn't a double-bluff be acting elated when you really have a good hand? Does it eventually become like that scene from "The Princess Bride" when the guy's trying to figure out which glass has the poison in it?
Movies like this, however, would have you believe that this problem is solved by the "tells" - the nervous or unconscious movements that people make when they're bluffing, allegedly turning them into open books, if you know what to look for. Under this set of, I'm assuming fictional, circumstances, knowing someone's tell is a shortcut to bankrupting them, and conversely, not having a readable tell of one's own is a similar road to victory.
But I just know there has to be more to it that the movie doesn't talk about. What about the science of probability? What about when you need a certain card to complete a hand, and you know the chances are (roughly) 1 in 13 to get it? What about calculating the chances of completing a straight against, umm, not doing that?
Norton's character, Worm, is a different kind of player - the kind that manipulates the deal to get what he wants. Sleight of hand, card tricks, you know, cheating. But it's got to be cheating that doesn't look like cheating, and again, I wish a film could somehow get into the mechanics of all that, rather than just taking it as a given. But it ends up just being a sort of con game, manipulating the events so that two players, allegedly strangers, are sitting at the same table and one is feeding the best cards to the other.
It's perhaps a little too convenient for the film to come full circle the way it does, for Mike to have to pass the same people on the way up, so to speak, as he did on the way down. But that's Hollywood - there could be 1,000 people playing poker in underground NYC clubs, but the dramatic situation demands that someone end up face to face with an old nemesis. But if I've got a NITPICK POINT, it's regarding a certain character's ties to the mob. Given this information, and the fact that we know that being indebted to a mobster is a bad thing, why would someone expect such a man to suddenly have respect for fair play, and stake his life on that man's ability to admit defeat gracefully?
Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "The Legend of Bagger Vance"), Gretchen Mol (last seen in "The Notorious Bettie Page"), John Malkovich (last seen in "RED 2"), Martin Landau (last seen in "North By Northwest"), John Turturro (last heard in "Summer of Sam"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "Snake Eyes"), Melina Kanakaredes (last seen in "The Long Kiss Goodnight"), with cameos from Lenny Clarke, Goran Visnjic, Tom Aldredge, Josh Mostel, Lenny Venito.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Bicycle decks
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