BEFORE: It occured to me yesterday that I watched "The Stanford Prison Experiment" on Thursday, and the next day was the opening of the "Dark Phoenix" movie, which originally had been part of my June line-up, before I changed things around and scheduled my review of that film for October, to help bring about a "perfect year". So it's weird to think that if I had stuck with the original plan, I could have seen the new "X-Men" film on opening day, and the link would have been RIGHT THERE. I feel like Robert De Niro's character at the end of "Midnight Run" when he realized there was still some time left before his deadline - damn, I would have made it. That would have been a nice coffee shop.
BUT, I'm looking at the big picture here, and even though I could have linked to "Dark Phoenix", my outro probably would have been a film with Jessica Chastain in it, and I'm going to get to those films next week anyway, but now I've got an extra three or films in between, and that's going to help with my count. Anyway, my wife wants to see "Dark Phoenix" with me, but she doesn't want to fight the crowds on opening weekend, so we'll probably see it in about two or three weekends from now. I'm not that worried about spoilers, because I've probably read the comics they're basing the story on, so nothing would really surprise me about the plot. (I think it's a difficult story to tell, no matter which way they want to go with the story, and I think all X-Men fans probably know what I'm talking about.)
And knowing that an unbroken path to the end of the year is possible, that's motivating my decisions right now, I want to stay on that path if I can and make the perfect year happen - so to do that, I have to do a number of things, like go to see "Dark Phoenix" and "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" in theaters, and sit on the reviews for a couple of months, because I don't think those films will necessarily be available for streaming in October, and if they are, that could be expensive. So I've got to sneak a couple extra films into my schedule and mess with the timeline JUST a little bit, I just hope in the end it will all be worth it. 142 films to go to make it all work out - a lot can go wrong between now and Christmas.
I'm going all the way back to 1990 for this one - I sort of half-feel like I must have seen this one at some point, but I can't honestly tell you one thing that happens in this film, and that's usually a sign that I have NOT seen it, or at least not all the way through, or maybe didn't pay very close attention. I'm going to chance it tonight and watch the film, if it starts to feel very familiar I can always skip over it and I've got a couple extra films to choose from if I need to drop in a replacement later on.
Annette Bening carries over from "20th Century Women".
THE PLOT: A small-time conman has torn loyalties between his estranged mother and new girlfriend - both of whom are high-stakes grifters with their own angles to play.
AFTER: I don't know why I never watched this whole film before - the only thing I can imagine is that I was young and horny and only interested in a certain few scenes with Ms. Bening in them - and if you've seen this film, you probably can guess which ones those are. This wasn't exactly her first film, but it was very early in her career (she was 32) and I guess when you're just starting, you can't really refuse a couple of nude scenes. Or who knows, maybe she was proud of her body and wanted to show it off - but of course now we know, looking back, that nudity is like a form of currency in Hollywood and most actresses did it because they felt it was necessary to advance their careers, or because they didn't have the power to refuse. Most will stop doing that after making a name for themselves, but others (like Nicole Kidman and Maggie Gyllenhaal) just kept going with it, to the point where it's not shocking any more, it's almost boring to see them naked.
I was quite the collector of such scenes, back in the days before the internet collected them for everyeone, which wasn't easy - but now of course, I'm finally interested in the story around the nude scenes, and I hope in some way that atones for my movie sins. Since I didn't recall anything about this movie's plot outside of those two scenes, I'm going to say I never really watched this one before, but now I'm finally crossing it off the list.
This is the story of three "grifters", which is just a more artful term for con artists - but there are three different kinds of con artists here. There's Roy, who works small cons like winning bar bets and palming twenties after showing them to bartenders, and the flashbacks seem to imply that he's probably learned a bunch of card tricks and could run something like a three-card monte scam. His girlfriend Myra has been working longer cons, we eventually find out, the kind that get people to invest a lot of money in what they think is an illegal stock trading venture, then just before paying out they'd get some fake FBI agents to come in and shut the operation down, forcing the mark to run off without getting his money back.
Roy's mother, Lilly, works a different kind of operation, she visits racetracks on behalf of mobsters and places very large bets that change the odds in the race, and this somehow benefits somebody somewhere, but I'm not exactly sure who. I guess this keeps the racetrack from paying out too much money when the longshot wins? But then how did they know there was a danger of the longshot paying out, I mean, it's a longshot so aren't the odds against that happening? And why does the betting affect the odds anyway, I mean, aren't the odds of THAT horse winning based on his ability to run, the jockey, the track conditions, and other factors? I'm no horse-racing expert, which is clear if I didn't know that the odds, and therefore the payouts, could change based on how much money people bet on that horse. See, this is why I don't bet on sports, I have very little idea how it works.
(Ah, a little research tells me there are two types of betting, fixed-odds betting and pari-mutuel. With fixed odds, the track has already calculated the odds of each horse winning and therefore the potential payouts, and they aren't going to change, no matter how much people bet on each horse. But under pari-mutuel, the odds change as more people make their wagers, because if the payouts become too great, then the track may not make enough money to cover their expenses and also turn a profit. So a big enough bet will sway the odds just to lower the payout. Lilly bet $5,000 to win at 70 to 1 odds, so if that horse wins, the track owes her a lot of money, and they need to reduce the odds to make sure that others who bet later don't also cash in like her. Umm, I think. Most people at the track probably don't make these huge bets that change the odds, I guess.)
It's not even really that important to the plot to understand how horse racing bets work, but it's enough to know that Lilly is getting paid for her efforts, and also apparently skimming a bit of the money she's supposed to be betting with. And when she's late for a race because of L.A. traffic, because after re-connecting with her son she realized he was injured and needed medical attention, that puts her in trouble with her boss, Bobo. I had a little bit of trouble following the confrontation scene between her and Bobo, he was nice to her, he threatened her, he injured her, then he paid her. That's a pretty messed-up and complicated business relationship. Or maybe it's just his unique management style, some version of "the carrot and the stick" or "who moved my cheese?"
I couldn't really tell what year this story was supposed to be taking place, either - was it set in 1990, or in some non-descript year in timeless California, when people still used payphones and placed bets at the track and conned sailors out of their money with loaded dice? You know, that could be the late 1950's or the pastel-coated 1980's, it's a bit tough to say. The novel this is based on was published in 1963, that's very possible too, there's nothing about it that really screams "This is happening now, put down that Rubik's Cube and put some En Vogue on the walkman..." There are certain settings, like parking garages, seedy L.A. hotels and smoky bars that feel sort of stuck in time. And black velvet sad clown paintings - what year were they in style? Were they ever? Or does Roy have them hanging on his wall ironically? Maybe if I knew more about cars or fashion I could place the timeline a little better.
There are more twists to the relationships between these three different scammers - like Myra accuses Roy of having an attraction to his mother during an argument, falling just short of saying that they've been sleeping together, and I'm not sure where this came from. Was she just grasping at straws, or did she somehow know this was true, or perhaps she just felt like she was competing with Roy's mother for his affections, or felt that Lilly was influencing Roy's decision to not work future long cons with her. It's a bit tough to say, or maybe it's one of those things I mentioned and it's not so tough after all. But it's still complicated, and there are more twists that follow that I won't disclose here. But if you're like me and you waited almost 30 years to watch this, it might be worth giving it a look, even if it doesn't have the big action and special effects of a modern major Hollywood thriller.
I don't know if this film has really aged all that well, but then again, it still has that timeless feel to it, so perhaps it doesn't matter. This is going to bring my neat little "California trilogy", which has taken me from Stanford to Santa Barbara and now tonight from Los Angeles to La Jolla, to a close.
And with that, I'm off to Atlantic City later this morning (after a few hours of sleep), to do a little gambling of my own. I don't play the horses, just the slot machines, but we're also going to hit a buffet or two and see a Pentatonix concert at the Hard Rock. I'm taking Monday off from watching a movie, but I'll be back here on Wednesday to post a review of Tuesday's movie.
Also starring John Cusack (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Anjelica Huston (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Pat Hingle (last seen in "Shaft"), Henry Jones (last seen in "Support Your Local Gunfighter"), Gailard Sartain (last seen in "Nashville"), J.T. Walsh (last seen in "The Big Picture"), Charles Napier (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Stephen Tobolowsky (ditto), Noelle Harling, Paul Adelstein, Jeremy Piven (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "North Country"), Frances Bay (last seen in "The Wedding Planner"), Sandy Baron (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Lou Hancock, with a cameo from Steve Buscemi (last seen in "The Death of Stalin") and the voice of Martin Scorsese.
RATING: 5 out of 10 oranges in a towel
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