BEFORE: It's really Tuesday, and I'm just back from two days in Connecticut, where we stayed at one of the two casinos, hit the outlet malls, and enjoyed some fine meals. Maybe a little too fine, because my stomach's all tied in a knot right now, I've got some digestive issues, so I'm just going to type up my two blog posts and sort of take it easy the rest of the day. I guess I can't eat at the buffets like I used to, I'm discovering that's something of a young man's game, and I may have aged out of the program. Or maybe I just ate something that didn't agree with me, it's possible I've got some mild food poisoning because I was served something bad at one of the restaurants (name withheld) - I did have a very greasy burger because the teen working there couldn't imagine that when I wanted fried onions and mushrooms on my burger, I didn't also want ALL of the grease that they were cooked in. And rather than make them cook the burger all over again, which would have taken 15-20 minutes, I just pulled the burger out of the grease pool it was swimming in, and transferred it to another plate.
I made a small profit gambling, when we left I was $43 up over where I started. Largely this was because I had watched "Owning Mahowny" two days before, and was paranoid about losing all of my money - but then, he was playing with millions, and I was only risking $100 to start. Still, the principle is the same, once you start trying to make up for your losses, you're going to be chasing bigger and bigger jackpots, until no win can possibly get you back where you started. So that's why I cash out whenever I get above the $20 I put into a slot machine, whether I'm a quarter over, or ten dollars over. If I can put together enough small wins, they sometimes add up to a bigger win - and I hit for $96 on the first day, but since it cost me $40 to get that, I only count that as a $56 win. Slowly I won a little here and a little there, and got my winnings up to $78.50, which I think is respectable. But since this was my total at the end of the first day, in order to keep all of that money, I would have had to stop playing completely, which is the difficult part.
Logically, (or rather "illogically"), it's easy to believe that if you win $78 in one day, you can win the same amount again the next day, but I've found that the opposite is usually true. But, since I was risking the house's money at that point, I played a little on Day 2, won a tiny bit but then lost half of it, so I ended up just $43 over, at which point I stopped. My wife, however, plays different, she doesn't keep track of her losses, so to her, a win is just a win. She's willing to risk more money than I am, so she plays more often, bets bigger, and when she wins, she wins bigger. I just don't have that playing style in me, so I mostly watched her play on Day 2, sure that if I bet my $43 purse, I'd lose it all. We'll never know for sure, but that's what I believe. I try to convince her that if she can stop after a moderate win she can walk away from the machines on top, because another win probably isn't coming. But she often persists, and in this case played some slots each morning before I woke up, and she won each time. So, at the end of the day, what do I really know? It's all random, anyway.
This is the third and final film with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who carries over again from "Owning Mahowny", and I've got a new track to follow with the next film.
THE PLOT: A blue-collar worker tries to cover things up when his stepson is killed in a suspicious accident, but a local reporter senses that something's amiss.
AFTER: There's a gambling storyline here, too - Hoffman's character, Mickey Scarpato, takes the money raised by the local bar to go toward his stepson's funeral costs, and bets them on a horse race, because he's got information about a "sure thing". Ha ha, we all know from movies about gambling that there is no such thing. His friend/cohort wants to follow his tip, but also has misgivings and ultimately switches his bet to another horse, setting up a situation where only one of them can be right, because they both refuse to bet the exacta. (Did I say that right?). Sure, they'd get less money for doing that, but they'd also each increase their odds of winning, assuming I understand betting right. But for the purposes of the film, one of them must win and the other must lose.
They're both residents of God's Pocket, a neighborhood with a lot of working-class families, based on the real section of Philadelphia called Devil's Pocket. Events constantly seem to conspire to keep them all down, and none of them can get ahead, at least where money is concerned. Each of these men needs to win big, one to pay for a funeral and the other to pay off his bookie. There's that situation again, where a gambler has built up his losses to the point where he needs a betting miracle to just break even again, but even if he gets it, you know in your heart that he's probably not going to stop.
As it is, both men are involved in some kind of meat-stealing scheme where they rob certain delivery trucks, and even though only one's in the meat business and the other owns a flower ship, the bookie's also involved, forcing the florist to assist with the theft of large sides of beef. This slowly becomes one of those movies where one bad thing happens, and then the repercussions of that event spiral out of control to the point where things seem extremely hopeless, which is worse than the usual state of hopelessness in that neighborhood. But the way the story plays out, it's obviously designed to set up this one situation that's so ridiculous that it seems "urban legend"-style unbelievable, unless you've seen all the steps that led to this very, very, unlikely situation.
It's hardly a "feel-good" film, quite the opposite. Mostly it's about people who are losing at the game of life, but they're unwilling to take the steps necessary to improve their game, and of course nobody wants to stop playing either, even though they're all gradually running out of money and time. Knowing that this was very nearly Hoffman's final film just adds that extra layer of sad irony.
Also starring Richard Jenkins (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Christina Hendricks (last seen in "Drive"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "Get Out"), John Turturro (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Domenick Lombardozzi (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Peter Gerety (last seen in "Syriana"), Eddie McGee, Molly Price (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Joyce Van Patten (last seen in "St. Elmo's Fire"), Glenn Fleshler, Jack O'Connell, Bill Buell, Lenny Venito (last seen in "Money Monster").
RATING: 4 out of 10 refrigerated trucks
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