Hey, I Finally Saw…ROUNDERS

Now, when I’ve added to this feature in the past it was usually because I caught up with a classic, like the original TRUE GRIT or ERASERHEAD. But this time out, I’m just catching up with a movie that I’d been meaning to see since it came out fifteen years ago, I just never got around to it.

So now, mainly because I noticed that it’s just about to expire on Netflix Instant, I finally watched John Dahl’s 1998 poker-driven crime drama ROUNDERS.

But hold on, maybe it’s more than just a movie I missed - the A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias wrote an entry for it in their New Cult Canon series back in 2008.



Tobias argues convincingly that ROUNDERS is an extremely influential film that “lit the fuse on a multi-billion-dollar industry.” He points to the plethora of online poker sites that have endless usernames and/or avatars referencing the film as proof of its huge popularity among players.

For my first time watching it though, it felt less like an iconic celebration of the underworld of high-stakes gambling, and more like a slightly better than average late ‘90s crime drama that effectively maximizes on the then budding stardom of Matt Damon and Edward Norton. Both were fresh faced 20-somethings at the time, who had both gotten acclaim and in the case of Damon an Academy Award (shared with Ben Affleck for the GOOD WILL HUNTING screenplay).

In ROUNDERS, which is defined by the Urban Dictionary as “a player who knows all the angles and earns his living at the poker table,” there’s a familiar dynamic at work as Damon is, in a role similar to his working class but brilliant minded character in GOOD WILL HUNTING, the good guy trying to go straight, and Norton is the bad influence who wants Damon to get back in the game.

Damon, whose voice-over narration is overly prominent, has good reasons for turning his back on the lifestyle – he lost his entire life savings of $30,000 to a ridiculously accented Russian gangster played by a very hammy John Malkovich, and he promised he wouldn’t go near a card game again to his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol), who he is now in law school with.

Still, you know that he won’t be able to resist the lure of the game. Otherwise they’d be no movie, right? The basic premise boils down to the slimy Norton, who is actually nicknamed “Worm,” being heavily in debt, and his old partner Damon dusting off his mad poker skills to help his friend. This makes for some great gaming scenes, particularly one with the duo trying to hoodwink a room full of hard ass New Jersey State Troopers.

The second hour of ROUNDERS which begins with the nagging Mol leaving Damon to his gambling devices, is consumed by these tense gaming scenarios yet despite its predictable plotting, it still pulled me in.

I wasn’t interested as much in Damon’s predicament of choosing the proper father figure - Martin Landau as a muddled but wise professor and John Turturro as a somewhat beat down old-time rounder have hazy scenes in which they somewhat compete for the part, I think - than I was into the bad friend who manipulates his good friend basics this film nails.

Fanke Janssen is on the sidelines as a possible new love interest for Damon, but the movie doesn't seem too interested in that. The poker-powered bromance is what gets the spotlight.

In retrospect, the film foreshadows the relationship between Norton and Brad Pitt in FIGHT CLUB, which would be on Norton’s roster after his turn in AMERICAN HISTORY X (the era was busy for the actor). But if you’ve seen FIGHT CLUB you know what that relationship turned out to be.

ROUNDERS’ had a palpable impact on waves of impressionable poker players, many of who are no longer lulling about casinos or sleazy backrooms, but now playing high or low stake games comfortably at home in thousands of rooms online. For all you cyber-gamers out there, here are some of the better rooms available if you want to try your hand at some virtual Texas Hold’em, so you can sample the game yourself that provides the bookend scenes in which Damon goes up against Malkovich.

It may overly glorify the rush that makes a talented player like Damon’s character unable to quit the game, but it captures that pure excitement (Damon even regrettably tells Mol that he felt alive for the first time in 9 months when he sat back down at the table) so well that ROUNDERS may be the ultimate double edged sword of gambling movies.

ROUNDERS, which I’m glad I finally saw, is available for one more day on Netflix Instant (it expires at the end of February 1st).

More later…

Hard To Get On Board With Bourne Without Bourne

Opening today at nearly every multiplex in Raleigh and the Triangle area:

THE BOURNE LEGACY (Dir. Tony Gilroy, 2012)

In retrospect, maybe it was a mistake for me to re-watch all of the Bourne movies recently in preparation for the new one.

To have those three fine fast-paced films so fresh in my brain, hurt more than helped for me to buy into a fourth film featuring neither star Matt Damon, nor director Paul Greengrass.

Especially when the connective tissue is that THE BOURNE LEGACY takes place during the events of the previous film, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (2007), with return appearances by David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney, and Joan Allen, all wrapped up in the vast conspiracy that’s a lot more confusing this time around.

“Jason Bourne was just the tip of the iceberg,” says series newcomer Edward Norton, as the corrupt CIA bigwig in charge of, well, everything, to enforce the continuity, but it rings hollow as it was a line said in the last movie.

It’s the justification that co-writer and director Tony Gilroy, who was the screen-writer of the other Bournes, and his brother Dan, give us to expand the series’ narrative, that the network of entangled secret government programs has various agents in the field, and here’s another one who is in confused conflict with his superiors. And his adventures are just as exciting so let's put up the Bourne banner for him too!

Jeremy Renner, racking up his third franchise after MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and THE AVENGERS, is that other agent, who has been genetically enhanced by a regimen of little green and blue pills prescribed by a top-security scientist played by Rachel Weisz, who also doesn’t know the full scope of what’s going on.

Count me with her - despite the fact that this is by far the talkiest Bourne, a lot of the exposition about the clusterf*** of evil operations just goes in one ear and out the other, as it’s obvious the film is more about its fight scenes and ginormous motorcycle chase climax through the streets of Manila, Philippines than its perplexing plot mechanics.

The stoic Renner, who is just as indestructible as his predecessor, has some impressive moves - one unbroken shot of him running/climbing up the side of a house, jumping through a window and shooting somebody might be the physical highlight of the movie.

Trouble is the film is too drawn out - it takes a while to get going as it cuts back and forth between Renner training in the arctic, and the well-groomed evil old men in the corridors of power trying to get a handle on what Bourne brought down on them. Then when some momentum is built, the film stalls then starts again, then stalls…

Renner and Weisz on the run does amount to a few thrills, the slick stylish look of the film (provided by master cinematographer Robert Elswit) is attractive, and the fiercely focused performance by Norton as the stop-at-nothing antagonist certainly has its merits, but Bourne without Bourne just doesn’t cut it.

This errant adaptation of the first of Eric Van Lustbader's continuation of the late Robert Ludlum's Bourne novels doesn't have enough action to satisfy action fans, and the project never quite gels plot-wise.

THE BOURNE LEGACY isn’t a boring or bad movie, it’s just not inspired enough to get it up to par with the rest of the series.

Although Damon and Greengrass wanted to make another Bourne, maybe they should be glad they got out when they did. The Gilroy brothers - a third brother, John Gilroy, edited the film - seem to be tapped out on this material.

After watching all four films in the last week, I know I am.

More later...

Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM Is Twee-rific

MOONRISE KINGDOM (Dir. Wes Anderson, 2012)

There are times during this film, Wes Anderson’s seventh as director, that I felt like I was paging through an old slightly faded and yellowed picture book of Rhode Island landscapes and settings.

The world that Anderson creates here will be familiar in its tone and eccentricity to those who’ve seen his previous movies, but his usual hallmarks - actors positioned in dead center frame, extreme shots of handwriting on notebook paper, a bold primary color scheme, kids who are too smart for their own good, and very formal dialogue - all come together much more naturally than before.

As whimsically titled as it is executed, MOONRISE KINGDOM concerns Jared Gillman and Kara Hayward, as a couple of kids in the summer of 1965 who don’t fit in their respective lives - he in his “Khaki” Scout troup; she in her dysfunctional family. They run off together across the fictitious island of New Penzance, off the coast of New England, in the days before a storm of “historic proportions” hits (as Bob Balaban, our onscreen narrator tells us).

This triggers the Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), the local police Captain (Bruce Willis), and the girl’s lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), to form a search party to find the missing children.

Although he was the most unpopular scout in his troup, Gillman has mad camping skills so the kids are able to survive just fine in the woods. Hayward helps pass the time reading aloud from a stack of unreturned library books (all fictitious children’s titles with authentic period aesthetics).

The pair reach a secluded cove protected by steep cliffs where they dance on the beach to Françoise Hardy’s “Le Temps de l’Amour” on a battery-powered record player. They kiss and fall in love, but the search party soon swoops in to separate them.

Meanwhile there is a palpable chill in the air around Murray and McDormand as she is having an affair with Willis. There’s no real time to flesh this out so it’s on a back burner as Tilda Swinton as Social Services (that’s actually how she’s credited) shows up to take away Gillman and place him in a “juvenile refuge.” 

Gillman’s scout troup decides to help the love-smitten kids escape again, and with the help of Anderson regular Jason Scwartzman, as a Khaki scout leader, a makeshift marriage ceremony goes down. Then there’s that pesky violent storm to deal with.

Sure there’s a preciousness to the precision that some may find pretentious, and maybe it is a bit. But it’s touching how faithful Anderson is to that little inner kid of his.

We don’t learn much about these people as the characterizations don’t go very deep, and some details seem a bit too quirky (McDormand using a megaphone to order around her family - and I know that comes from co-screenwriter Roman Coppola’s real life), but the overriding sweetness and colorful aura casts too big a spell for that to matter.

Despite that it's set in the mid '60s, there surprisingly isn't any British invasion pop present. Apart from the Françoise Hardy tune and some Hank Williams, classical music dominates the soundtrack by way of a 7 part suite by noted composerAlexandre Desplat, some apt Leonard Bernsteinselections, and Benjamin Britten's “The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.”

Of Anderson’s films, I was most reminded of THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS in such elements as the yellow tent aesthetics, Murray’s wife having an affair, a dog getting accidentally killed, and the ancient turntable, among some other more subtle similarities. Maybe it’s true that every film maker is essentially making the same movie over and over until they get it right.

Well, Anderson’s MOONRISE KINGDOM is a twee-rific try.

More later...