BEFORE: What else can I say, last week's movies ran the gamut, from helpful nannies to cryptozoologist explorers to professional puppeteers. But look at the last couple of films - politicians in one, and reporters who faked a story in the next. And now here come poker players - it's almost like a direct connection between liars, liars and more liars.
This one's been bouncing around my watchlist for a long while - I think I had it next to "Whip It" for a time, based on the Drew Barrymore connection, but then I did an Ellen Page chain, and it had to get separated from that. So then it landed next to "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword", another Eric Bana film, and I was going to use it to transition into three or four King Arthur movies, but now that I've got a shot at a perfectly linked year, I'm going to try to not transition between ficitional characters, maybe only actors this year. In two weeks I'll hit my halfway point for the year, and I know my linking is good through mid-July, so I'm almost 3/4 of the way there, if my plans hold up. Calculating those last 75 links could be the toughest part, though. We'll see.
Eric Bana carries over from "Special Correspondents", and he'll be here tomorrow also.
THE PLOT: A hotshot poker player tries to win a tournament in Vegas, but is fighting a losing battle with his personal problems.
AFTER: A film about professional poker is much like any other sports-based film, like most of the boxing films I've watched over the years - by that I mean I don't follow "the sport", so I'm usually left in the dark when it comes to the technical nature of the game and also many of the rules. Some things might be easy to follow, like if the baseball team wins this last game, then they're going to the playoffs. But I've had to infer a lot of the rules of boxing from movies, and hope that Hollywood is getting it right. With poker I THINK I know a lot, like I know that a hand with "three of a kind" beats one with two pairs, a straight flush beats a straight or a flush - but I'm not 100% sure if a straight beats a flush, I think it does, but honestly I'd have to check.
Speaking of "check", that's one of the things I don't understand about poker - the ability to check, and that means when the bid comes to a player, he doesn't raise, or see, or fold or call, he just sort of taps the table or says "check", which means he's essentially doing NOTHING, right? I mean, it's his turn, he should have to do SOMETHING, put in another chip or reveal a card or take off an item of clothing, to not do anything on your turn seems to be against the concept of gameplay. Like if you're playing Monopoly and it's your turn to roll the dice, and you just say, "Nah, I'm good..." because you don't want to move down that last stretch of the board because someone has hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk. If it was a football game and it was fourth down with two yards to the goal line, would a team just say, "Forget it, why don't YOU guys play with the ball for a while?" But I guess a "check" in poker is sort of doing something, still it seems like doing something by doing nothing...
(See, this is why I stick to the slot machines when we go to Atlantic City. I understand them, and I'm probably going to lose, but maybe I might win now an then - and for sure, nobody is going to criticize the way I'm playing the game or point out that I don't fully understand the rules. Also, I do my best work at the all-you-can-eat buffets.)
The Texas Hold 'em style of poker is perfect for a movie, because all of the players are using the same five cards, which combined with the two cards in their hands, could shift in value and make many different combinations possible. So it could seem like one character is fated to win this hand, because he's holding a pair of kings and there's also another one in the flop, but then the last card could be the four of clubs, and another player could suddenly complete a flush. So, as I'm sure happens during the World Series of Poker, the scene is set for a number of come-from-behind, last second victories.
But before flipping over the last two cards (the "turn" and the "river"), the dealer is expected to "burn" a card before each one, meaning he takes the next card on the top of the deck and puts it aside, and instead flips over the 2nd card from the top for communal use. This also seems weird to me, like the next card is the next card, right? This is a plot point in one of the key games here, as Huck is trying to earn a seat in the World Series of Poker. This itself was also a bit confusing, like how, exactly, does one win a spot in this tournament? Is it JUST by raising the entry fee, or do you have to win specific games to get in? It seemed for a while like it was just about money, with Huck winning the entry fee and then losing it several times, for dramatic effect. (Here's a crazy idea, maybe as soon as you win the $10K, go and GIVE IT to the tournament organizers, because if you keep playing, you know you're gonna lose it...). But then there was a game he was playing late at night, where it seemed like if he won the game, he qualified for a spot in the WSOP, so which is it?
Drew Barrymore is cast as the girlfriend, which seemed like a very good idea, because she's got experience in playing dumb (like that film where she woke up every morning and somehow forgot she was in a relationship...) so it gave a good opportunity for the lead character to mansplain poker to her, and therefore the audience. But unfortunately, he didn't cover the things I needed to know, instead he told her what a "poker face" means (umm, thanks, but I already knew THAT) and that sometimes, people are lying about having good cards. Gee, do ya THINK?
Robert Downey Jr. is very wasted here - he plays some character who's answering several different cell phone hotlines at once, ranging from legal help to relationship advice, and I just didn't see the point, this added nothing to the story. I guess he was a friend of the lead character, who maybe visited him to get advice about the woman he was dating, or to tell him he was trying to get in to the WSOP, but then when he got there he sort of pretended to help with one of the phone calls, and seemed to forget why he went there in the first place. That was a strange thing to put into the film.
There are other side stories about life in Vegas that are worked into the plot, with varying degrees of success. Huck plays the "Golf marathon" wager to get the stake to enter the WSOP (after gaining and then losing the money several times over) which involves playing 18 holes of golf in under three hours, so basically at a full run. But the rules for this bet were also a bit unclear, like he had to do the 18 holes under a time limit AND also in a certain number of strokes? Wait, what exactly were the terms of the bet? And then there's a minor side character who seems to be based on that guy in real-life who got breast implants to win a bet, and this guy will apparently wager on anything. Because Vegas.
The "meaning" of it all is really sort of hokey here, Huck and his father are both Vegas residents (which here is synonymous with "compulsive, degenerate gambler") and contenders for the WSOP, so there's a lot of back and forth between them as their luck runs good and bad, and this (and the long-standing issues between them) is represented by Huck's deceased mother's wedding ring, which sort of travels between them as an item constantly being wagered. Back and forth it goes as they try to resolve things, and also push each other's buttons. It's not too hard to foresee some kind of showdown between them as the tournament draws near.
NITPICK POINT: The film made it very clear that this was the first year that the WSOP used close-up cameras for each player, so the audience at home would see what two cards each player was holding. So even though Huck never showed his cards to his opponents in the last round, everyone at home would see what he was holding. The tradition holds that if a player folds or wins the hand because everyone else folds, he could return those two cards to the dealer without flipping them over (thus not revealing if he'd been bluffing or not, which could be valuable information in the long run) BUT when the tournament aired, fans would know what cards he threw away, and eventually word of what he'd done would get back to his father, the tournament officials, and worse, the guy who was financially staking him. I don't know what the implications would be for this, but I'm guessing he could be banned from future tournaments for this.
Also starring Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Whip It"), Robert Duvall (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Debra Messing (last seen in "The Wedding Date"), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Charles Martin Smith (last seen in "Starman"), Horatio Sanz (last seen in "The Man"), Jean Smart (I Heart Huckabees"), Kelvin Han Yee, Michael Shannon (last seen in "12 Strong"), Danny Hoch, Evan Jones (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Phyllis Somerville, Saverio Guerra (also last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Richard Assad, Ken Davitian (last seen in "Holes"), Delia Sheppard (last seen in "What Happens in Vegas"), with cameos from Jack Binion, Matt Savage, Jennifer Harman, John Hennigan, David Oppenheim, Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Sam Farha, Erik Seidel, Johnny Chan, Mimi Tran, Chris Ferguson, Dan Harrington, Karina Jett, John Juanda, Mike Matusow, Marsha Waggoner, Robert Williamson III et al.
RATING: 5 out of 10 pawn shop tickets
No comments:
Post a Comment