Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO (1995)

Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling, which is almost meta to begin with, since moviemaking is an intensely expensive venture (CASINO cost $50 million, enough to build a casino or two all its own) and no one knows for sure when they lay down big cash like that the film won't bomb and they'll lose it all, baby. It's a roll of the dice. And the mob's been associated one way or another with Hollywood since the beginning, from Al Capone's boys acting as technical advisors on the 1932 original SCARFACE to "this is the girl" in MULHOLLAND DR. Wherever there's big money and trade unions, the mob is there, and Hollywood has both, so rolling the dice on a film about rolling dice is so meta it can't fail.

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as casino sites like http://www.jackpotcity.co.uk let you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. Robbery of a casino meant as a lark is far less, somehow, evil than the actual operation of one. But Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling, to  keep your tells in check and your sense of the odds present without resorting to card counting or cheating, you must be unlucky at love. And what in the end, is a priority? The smart gambler may deliberately sabotage his chances at a happy love life. Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO, in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes it's not just that he's too stupid to succeed.

I've already covered the delights of the here-and-gone beauty that is Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here). But what about 1995's overseen CASINO? A fine metaphor for the allure of gambling, and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys in suits smoking big cigars, who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers, and glitzy lights are the height of elegance. Their Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, or life. Who wouldn't want that kind of rush? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia, then the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds, grateful to not be lucky at cards after all?

Giddy rushes aside, CASINO is fraught with problems, none more glaring than the curse of its predecessor, GOODFELLAS. From the punchy wiseguy narration to the long tracking shots packed with period rock music and beautifully craggy old Italian faces, the Scorsese aesthetic we all fell in love with is back, but there's been so many imitations in the interim it seems like Scorsese is just imitating himself.  Joe Pesci is now so typecast the only he can escape his legendary role as Joey (see one of my very first-ever posts on Acidemic, 'That Joey, he's a wild one) is to up the ante. He doesn't drop the ball so much as hold it so tight it deflates. He looks older and stockier, his make-up oranger, belly paunchier, sneer frozen, and when he throws massive tantrums he's not scary-fun like he was in GOODFELLAS, just alarming, as trapped by the irresistible momentum of Scorsese's period gangster rhythm as a fly on an express train, the gravity seems to weigh him down, broaden him around the edges as he sinks into self parody's disheartening mire.

Sharon Stone, critics dutifully adoring her all the while, falls into the same hole in the desert, turning a sad vixen's marriage into a brilliant if overly shrill and humorless bid for Oscar respectability. Do you think Barbara Stanwyck ever 'tried' to blow us away with her raw force? She merely released what was always inside her, the tigress. Stone just wants us to see how Joan Crawfordianly hard she's trying to be a sad vixen Stanwyck knew that before you get to the raw tigeress force you need modulation, dynamics, some laugh. Hardness without softness, darkness without lightness, what is that? Whatever it is, it doesn't deserve the acres of tantrum space Scorsese carves out for it in the final act of CASINO. Verhoeven in BASIC INSTINCT, and TOTAL RECALL, knew how to use Stone's Bette Davis imperiousness and Jane Fonda insecurity combo as part of a comic book tapestry, a delicious villainess rather than an 'identifiable' heroine. A director like Sidney Lumet or Nicholas Ray, or George Cukor might have helped Stone to reign in some of her less successful ideas and enable her to win an Oscar, but without a genius who loves and can direct powerful women and knows how to get them to retract their claws and let down their hair, she falls into the same morass that snared Annette Bening in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the morass wherein female rage against the patriarchal machine comes out as abrasive, ineffectual spite, all while the infantile, unconsciously misogynistic director smiles and nods.

But everyone knows romance and female characters (ALICE aside) aren't Scorsese's strong point. He lives and breathes cigar smoke from the boys in the back room. His films about dangerous hoods work because he truly 'feels' the threat of violence, knows the streets, hires actual Little Italy characters (including his own mother) and makes effective, occasionally sickening use of cattle prods, spittle, baseball bats ("lots of holes in the desert") and beatings over owed vigs. Don Rickles, for example, as the pit boss, is like a bouncer from hell, his insult comic genius held in check like a pit bull on a leash. In the scenes where De Niro's narration takes us through the process of the skim, the film takes off into the blissful realm of pure cinema, and a solid hour of running time evaporates like crack.

But by the home stretch of the film, the tantrums of Sharon Stone in her Big Oscar Bid bogs it all down. Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen). We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy, then collapsing into tantrums. De Niro wouldn't seem such an unmitigated fool then. Instead he doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she can't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start-- bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't, even after having a kid. The only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.

While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for at least a good hour of CASINO, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him to a gunfight in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.

That's why CASINO is De Niro's last brilliant film, as well as the first of his bad ones. You can feel the gambler's luck turning halfway through, right around the time De Niro fires Joe Bob Briggs, nephew of a Nevada gaming commission bigwig, and refuses to even hire him back "somewhere farther down the trough," though the politician makes it clear De Niro's going to wind up losing his license if he doesn't comply.  How did someone so smart get suddenly so stupid... twice? Why would De Niro fuck up a good thing with the gaming commission just by insisting on firing a dopey relative of a high end Nevada politician? De Niro then seems surprised when he loses his license appeal, just as he's surprised when Ginger tries to run away.

By the same token, why did Marty think his next project after GOODFELLAS (and before CASINO) should be AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)? I'm not saying one should never wander from one's own back yard, but if you can't find anything new to talk about within it, maybe your just not looking hard enough. If a man can find Shakespeare within the language of a Brooklyn gangster movie, does he really need to do actual Shakespeare to prove himself? It's like with 'these' you don't know how to kill the bunny! 

For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and drive for petit-bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their mix of boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING.

Sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. His house is packed with freeloader wannabes like BLOW, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice), and everything by Guy Ritchie.

And that's that.

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A Star-Spangled Salute to America's most Acidemic Cinematic Women

My whole life changed--from nerdy punk to liberated hippy--sophomore year, 1986, when I met Sabrina and Kelly (not their real names), two gorgeous blond, LSD-quaffng, dope smoking, rock star-chasing maniacs who were (me coming from central NJ) the most beautiful and non-stuck-up-about-it girls I'd ever seen. I fell madly in love with both of them, platonically, which was good since they ruined soccer players right and left and a steady stream of hot guys paraded through our lives, looking sad and dejected and sitting in a table across the bar from our long back row at Chuck's (in Syracuse, NY), while I always sat in the center of their universe, never paying for a single pitcher. But I learned so very much from them and had my feminine ideals jacked to the moon.

For instance: watching Kelly wake up in my friend Max's bed in the dorms (for we would congregate in his room for morning/afternoon bong hits). She would stretch and yawn like a cat and, and as the morning sun streamed through the windows, take a massive cannonball (huge gravity bong hit / slam a funnel of cold Becks / then exhale), smile sweetly, and pick up her acoustic guitar and purr out a gorgeous suite of Joni Mitchell songs, as relaxed and gently focused as if she'd merely had a nibble of honey-covered toast and a sip of herbal tea, not even a single belch...the morning sun shining through her golden locks, her voice sweet and high singing "I want to shampoo you / I want to renew you again and again." Yes my mountain flower, yes I will...thought I, feeling, for the first time in my life, connected and accepted by people I actually wanted to be accepted by... the star children Eloi. Connecticut were raising my soul up out of Morlock, New Jersey. 

I love these girls still, though both have since both have married with kids and all that stuff and I see them only once every few years. But I've found mirrors of these girls in cinema, and for the July 4th holiday, what could be better than to salute cinema's most acidemic American gals?! If not for them, this blog wouldn't exist, at least not in this form.

The definition of an acidemic woman: she never judges or condemns, but seeks a good time with tenacity, rolls with life's punches; she lives on the edge of her own forward momentum, never stopping to 'settle down' according to bourgeoisie mandates. These women have limited but undeniable telepathic ability. They've assumed an archetypal resonance that makes them transcend duality. They're afraid of nothing, not even of dying young or winding up in rehab. They may destroy themselves on the altar of decadence, or sell-out to the suburban exhaust pipe dream, but who am I to judge? They once burned so very brightly, and sometimes once is enough.

In originally doing this list I noticed more than 3/4 of the most obviously acidemic women were from Europe--especially Germany and England. Since it's the Fourth of July, I tailored the list back to just being aus der Amerikanische fraulienin und Filmen!  I had to disqualify Anita Pallenberg. I also disqualified femme fatale types who kill or seduce men into killing mainly for revenge or profit, as this counters the basic benevolence of the true acidemic lady. A femme fatale schemes to get somewhere at the cost of those around her - an acidemic woman is already somewhere, and brings us along if we ask real nice.

Here we go,
STAR SPANGLED SALUTE TO AMERICA'S
TOP TEN ACIDEMIC WOMEN!

Sharon Stone as Catherine Trammell in BASIC INSTINCT (1992)
 

 We all remembered and dug Sharon Stone as Arnold's hot murderous wife in TOTAL RECALL, and our suspicions of her genius were confirmed for Verhoeven's follow-up, this kinky explosion of noir and late night Cinemax trappings into the realms that dwells above camp, high art. Stone's Trammell is apparently Lecter-level smart thanks to a "Bachelor's in Psychology," so you know this is the liberal arts major's version of Fantasia. Stone even manages a straight face telling the cops lines like "I enjoyed fucking him," and smiles beautifully to herself at all the things she's not saying to Michael Douglas, no doubt even more cutting than her ice pick, because she likes "jagged edges." What could be more American than a ballsy character like Trammell? If she was French, you wouldn't even notice how cool she is, but as an American, she's "cracked it wide open." She derails the whole film and then snorts the rails. 

Angelina Jolie as Lisa Rowe in GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999)
 

That she rides her own strait-jacket insanity like a surfer too cool to admit that being sucked under half the time is slowly choking the soul right out of her is part of what makes Jolie's character not only cool and tragic, but realistic. I dated a chick just like that and though she almost killed me, I still wish her well. In a 2008 entry I compared Jolie's character to Johnny Boy (De Niro) in MEAN STREETS about whom Pauline Kael wrote:

His madness isn't explained (fortunately, since explaining madness is the most limiting and generally least convincing thing a movie can do). When you're growing up, if you know someone crazy daring and half-admirable (and most of us do), you don't wonder how the beautiful nut got that way; he seems to spring up full-blown and whirling, and you watch the fireworks and feel crummily cautious in your sanity." (08)

Crummily cautious, man. Pauline Kael knew the score... and Jolie, Jolie Jolie, Please don't take yourself away from our pop movie screens just to have kids and Oscars. 

Edie Sedgwick as herself in CIAO, MANHATTAN! (1972)

You could argue she's kind of tragic here, but just look at Edie, slamming vodka with her cute rabbit headphones on, living in the bottom of an empty pool, for Christ's sakes! Why should she bother to be coherent when she's already 'made it' to the other side? The film itself is kind of a mishmash between this new footage in the pool and earlier black and white stuff of Sedgwick and her friend waking up in some strange guy's apartment, stealing his stash of cocaine ("Look at all these drugs!") and hitting the streets, heading to the factory for random footage of Brigit Polk babbling about how her fat thighs just right for popping speed. Sedgwick is beautiful, strung-out, and occasionally hilarious throughout, but the rest of the non-factory 'connecting' footage can pretty tepid, so step strong.

Lori Williams in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL! (1967)

Of the three strip club motorists in Russ Meyer's ingenious (strangely nudity-free) sexploitation "car club" film, Lori Williams is the one you most want to bring home to mom. The other two --Tura Satana and Haji--are kind of creepy Goth butch (and I mean that as a high compliment, as you know), and anyway you step between those two coded lesbians and you get a tire chain across your back, so for fantasies of driving off into the sunset to the Bostweeds, Lori is your girl.

The other two girls are bad, "like a velvet glove cast in iron, and like the gas chamber." Lori on the other hand is just out looking for kicks. She rolls with Varla (Satana) and Rosie (Haji) because they're the most dangerous company in town but she's not really evil. Once she finds a big muscly moron and his Cutty Sark-swilling pappy "sitting on piles of loot," she promptly begins seducing the one ("I don't know what you're trainin' for, but as far as I'm concerned... you're ready.") and guzzling the liquor of the other ("Let's drink to trains!"), concluding her one-girl party with the immortal lines, addressed to her terrified kidnapee: "You know what Tiny Tim? When I have too much of this stuff, it's been known to be passin' out time. And it's just about passin' out time!" Come on son, let's take her in the house.

Natasha Henstridge as Lt. Melanie Ballard in GHOSTS OF MARS (2000)

She's got legs - she knows how to use them, like kicking your big leather boy KISS-bodyguard face in if you try and stop her from catchin' the ghost train. As I once wrote back in 2003: 

In pre-modern cultures, the approximate age of motherhood would be the age of the babysitter today, and just as (SPOILER ALERT) Michael Meyers is revealed to be Jamie Lee Curtis' brother in the TV extended version of Carpenter's Halloween, just as Norman Bates turns out to be his own mother in Psycho, or Ripley gives birth to herself in the Alien series, surely if there was time in a theatrical-release Carpenter film for big psychological twists,  Melanie would realize she is the mother of the Martian spores she rejects, probably via another flashback. As it is, we must hunt for clues, such as when Big Daddy Mars is able to sense Melanie watching him from beyond a hill with binoculars. He stops, turns to look in her direction with a sudden sneaking recognition, and then leads his gang towards her with all the ferocity of a rejected child can muster.

Another clue is when she actually does become possessed by a Martian spore and is left outside to turn into a ghost of Mars by Desolation and Jericho (note that they can't kill her outright, instead this becomes their non-dwarf version of putting Snow White in a glass case.) Jericho doses her with a hit of clear (a psychedelic drug on Mars) from her stash to "fuck with anything that's in there," i.e. the rock and roll Aldous Huxleyan last rite. With the help of this "spirit guide," rather than become possessed by the Martian intelligences, she has a vision of ancient Martian civilization, where Big Daddy Mars is conducting a massive rally of his army, generating cheers and hooplah. The drugged Melanie witnessing all this from outside their time, becomes their holy virgin "Big Other" for whom such ceremonies and rallies are conducted (perhaps Big Daddy Mars 'remembers' the feeling of this Big [m]Other's gaze from the aeons ago when he held that rally, which is why he can sense her looking at him?). ( Acidemic 2003 )  

 

Fay Adler as Miss "Pygmy" Allen - in MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
 

My buddy Max and I did a lot of drinking to WC Fields movies in the 90s. CHICKADEE isn't the best by a long shot of Fields' oeuvre (or co-star Mae West's for that matter) but it has its moments, such as a barroom scene wherein Fields runs into a pint-sized drunk billed in the credits as Miss "Pygmy" Allen. She only has one scene with Fields--who is tending bar, wherein she asks, slurring, if her husband had been in. Fields replies he doesn't know who he is and she cuts him off, slurring out: "ah, I don't care.." then launches into a drunken speech about how the worst woman is too good for the best of men, knocking over some drinks in the process. Fields orders her to a table (an old rule from the days when free-roaming prostitutes would try and steal johns from the bar's in-house girls) and she finally says "okay, you big tomboy!" Then Fields' perma-frowned old man co-bartender walks up during all this and asks, "Where's the funnel?" Max and I loved that --- so random -- a question we asked ourselves all the time in college, when funneling was the only way to drink enough cheap beer (all we could afford) to get a proper buzz. Somehow or other this amazing chick Fay Adler was only in one other film, Fields' next picture, The BANK DICK. But Fields should have married her instead of Mae West in CHICKADEE and they would be like a lot the happily dysfunctionally drunken parents of people I know!

Pamela Sue Martin in THE LADY IN RED (1979)
 

I love you, Pamela Sue Martin! I discovered this Roger Corman's New World gem randomly on late night cable and never stopped loving it. Martin plays the girl who was with Dillinger the night of the Biograph assassination, but who didn't rat him out, goddamnit. Thanks to a witty, feminist-communist-anarchist script by John Sayles, Martin makes all the Corman/depression-era gangland stops--from exploited farmgirl to sweatshop rioter to women's prison inmate to prostitute to bankrobber, and rolls with the punches every step of the way. And man, is she cute, and tough.

Myrna Loy as Nora Charles in THE THIN MAN (1933)
 

Seventeen words: "All right, will you please bring me five more martinis, Leo? and line them up right here." Yeah, throughout the marriage-embattled Hollywood years of 1929-2009, there was  one woman any man would knock off a bank to wed: Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN. As the series progressed, the code frilled her out a bit, but in this first film she's just a sexy, indulgent, compassionate, witty, never jealous or judgmental, heiress, with a brilliant dog, Asta and the willingness to match her alcoholic husband drink for drink, until the ends of time. Yes, they wake up in the middle of the night to have drinks; yes they drink in the morning and yes they drink in between but you're only immortal once, so make it count, and they did.

Catherine Keener as Maxine Lund in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)

 Much as I love the ingenious scripts of Hollywood's misanthrope "it"-boy, Charle Kaufman, I wish he'd make his lead male characters just a hair less despicable. A rare example of how great his characters could be when such less a hair is found in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. As the foxy new employee at hairy puppeteer-slacker John Cusak's new half-floor office, Keener blazes through the dimness in a shockingly cool white dress, calls Cusak "Craiggy" and treats him like a cat treats a drunken, amorous mouse. Keener manages to get everyone in the cast in love with her while never committing to anyone or anything, just coasting on a groove, wittily presuming everyone wants to sleep with her (and they do)... and drinking at the Stuck Pig with a sense of comfort in her own merriment that's seldom been seen since.

Clara Bow as Nasa Springer in CALL HER SAVAGE (1933)

The weird trippy energy of Bow is ahead of even our time today -- she moves from emotion to emotion in the same “totally there” way as someone would on psychedelics, but she’s like that all the time. She’s one of those in-the-moment bad influence trouble girls who you meet and within five minutes are broke but ready follow her penniless and barefoot into the desert, and come weeks back later, even broker, drug addicted, insane from syphilis and announce: “I regret nothing!” Don’t you regret either, pilgrim!

Clara’s grandfather is a wildcat mountain man who sleeps with a load of lassies as he leads a wagon train west through Indian-covered Texas; one of his ill-begotten daughters marries an absentee rancher and grows up “comforted” by a stoic Native American with whom she doth beget Clara Bow. The rancher doesn’t realize that’s why a daughter presumably from his own boring loins could ever be so wild. And wild? She goes around acting like John Belushi–she can smash a good guitar–in Animal House, but even sexier! Just seeing her wrestle with a big dog or whip a half-breed (above) is enough to change your life forever, but when she tussles with Thelma Todd? You will want to gouge out your eyes and keep them on the mantle, cuz you know it will never be that good again. (BLAD/09)

So that's the list. Happy Fourth! xoxoxo

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