Nixed's Top 5 Gambling Movies of All-Time

It's really difficult to make an interesting film about someone else gambling. When this blog was suggested to me by a friend, I wondered if I could come up with five gambling movies I could recommend. It was a chore but here goes. At # 5 "A Big Hand for the Little Lady" starts off the list. It's a very witty con-artist film with a heavyweight cast. Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Jason Robards, Burgess Meredith are featured in the film. Each year in Laredo, Texas five prominent businessmen and assorted professionals gather for a high stakes poker game. Nothing stops this annual rite. We see a lawyer leaving a case before his final arguments have been made. A wealthy cattleman(Robards)postpones his daughters' wedding to make the game. Henry Fonda's character drifts into town. He's supposedly just "passing through" on his way with a handful of cash to spend on his new homestead. He's accompanied by his wife and son. To tell anymore would be spoiling this nice little caper film. Number 4 is "Rounders", about a law student(Matt Damon)who was taken for everything he had in a poker game, and now works a graveyard shift and hits the books at the behest of his girlfriend(Gretchen Mol). He stumbles onto an office poker game during a early morning delivery attended by his law professors. He astounds them with his ability to discern their "tells". His diligence to staying away from the tables is lost the minute his best friend(Ed Norton) is released from prison. They are soon on a quest to hit every private game in the Tri-State area to build up enough capital to pay off "Worm's"(Norton)gambling debt. Damon and Norton are quite good together, but John Malkovich steals the show as Russian mob boss Teddy "KGB". At # 3 is certainly the funniest gambling movie ever. "Let It Ride" starring a manic Richard Drefuss as Trotter, a small time horse player, is hilarious from beginning to end. After pledging to his wife to quit betting horses, he is given a "tip" that an upcoming race may be "fixed". This leads Dreyfuss and his pal Looney(David Johannsen) to the track to make an easy buck. Trotter soon has one mystical experience after another, and he turns his initial win into tens of thousands, hitting winners on race after race. This movie has a Damon Runyanesque feel to it. The director Joe Pytka perfectly captures the race track milieu and all of the seedy and colorful characters that inhabit the track. Dreyfuss, Johannson, Jennifer Tilly, Allen Garfield all score huge laughs. Teri Garr is very funny as Trotter's wife, who arrives at the jockey club in the middle of his hot streak and proclaims, "I don't understand why you can't just enjoy the horse races without betting on them." It's not a great movie, but it is a great comedy. "The Color of Money" is at # 2. Fast Eddie Felson(Paul Newman) is getting old. He can no longer play pool like he used to. He finds a remarkably talented pool player in Vincent(Tom Cruise in maybe his best performance ever)that, with the help of Vincent's girlfriend, he plans to use to make money "hustling" other players. Martin Scorsese brings his frenetic camera work and quick-fire editing to the proceedings. Newman and Cruise play off each other well, and are supported by good bits from Forrest Whitaker and John Tuturro. The top gambling movie of all time? "The Gambler"(1974). No, not the Kenny Rogers TV movie. This film stars James Caan and is a gritty character study about compulsive gambling. Caan has never been better. He stars as Axel Freed, a NY City college professor of literature with a penchant for playing table games of chance. Sooner than the credits stop rolling he has incurred a debt of 44,000 and change. One character says "That's six El Dorado's". In today's economy maybe one El Dorado. He asks his mother for the money and she relents. She asks what they'd do to him if he couldn't pay. "For ten grand they break your arm, for twenty grand they break your leg." Does Axel go immediately to pay back his 44 grand? No, he bets three Ncaa basketball games at "fifteen dimes" each, and heads to Las Vegas with his girlfriend. He goes on the mother of all wins streaks at the crap tables, roulette wheels, and finally is seen hitting an 18 at the blackjack table. When the dealer turns over a three, he says "that's it, it's over." The film is the one accurate depiction of a gambler who really doesn't feel good until he loses. Written by James Toback and directed by Karel Reisz, it's a lost gem from the golden age of film, and Nixed's Pick as the best gambling movie of all-time.

DVD Review: Walk Hard:The Dewey Cox Story

Comedy, more so than any other film genre, is subjective. No matter how many people say they laughed all the way through "Superbad", "Knocked Up", or "Talladega Nights", you'll find hordes that say they didn't. The following is only and opinion and not a recommendation. I learned to not recommend comedies years ago when I sent my parents to see Woody Allen's "Manhattan". Here is another comedy from the Judd Apatow assembly line. He served as co-writer on this project. I laughed consistently throughout this mostly dead-on parody of Musician Biography films. "Walk the Line" is the most obvious target here, and John C. Reily and Jenna Fischer mine comedic gold from their scenes together. Look closer and you'll see films such as "Ray", and "That Thing You Do", skewered with good results. Jake Kasdan directs in an almost "Airplane"-eque style, peppering the screen with quick fire visual humor, and milking each scene for every laugh available. He takes all the obvious route choices for humor, but also gets harder laughs by allowing his actors to develop their characters just a bit longer than most comedies of this ilk. About 65% of the jokes in this film "hit", making the clunkers easier to digest. Remember, by no means am I saying YOU will find this movie funny.

DVD Review: 30 Days of Night

It's rare when a horror film delivers legitimate R-rated suspense and thrills. Director David Slade, fresh off his critical success "Hard Candy", has delivered. This movie has a fairly quick set up. Barrow, Alaska is the northernmost city in Alaska. We see most of the townsfolk leaving the town before the impending thirty days of darkness that covers the town each year. A skeleton crew of a sheriff and disparate business owners prepare to hunker down. Into town creeps an outsider who is soon arrested for, well, being a creep. While in lockup he starts hinting that something is coming. This warning is more convincing because the creep is portrayed by the eccentric actor Ben Foster. The sheriff is soon dealing with dead dogs, vandalism, and power outages. What follows is a modern-day vampire tale in the mode of at least a half-dozen classic films ranging from "Night of the Living Dead" to "The Birds." Despite being extremely derivative of the vampire film catalog, as well as the Hollywood action flick, it triumphs. This is due to taking some time to build character development, and then not holding back one iota when the vampires start feeding. Another welcome absence is the smug one-liners that often follow a "big kill" by the hero in such genre films. The acting is competent, with one standout performance turned in by Tony Huston as the lead vampire. Minor quibbles include the use of too many CGI effects, and a lack of a reasonable back story to explain who/what/where in regards to the vampires. We get one scene early on of what seems like the Ben Foster character walking into town after getting off a ship some hundreds of miles from the city of Barrow. Did he serve as some sort of Igor to the vampires and transport them here on the ship? For more answers check out the graphic novel that was the source material. Otherwise just enjoy a well-made suspenseful vampire film.

Top 5 Director-Actor Collaborations

With the DVD release of "Sweeney Todd" this week I started to think of great Director-Actor teams throughout the history of cinema. Certainly the films of Tim Burton-Johnny Depp, now six in all, deserve consideration. Inventive visually and fantastic in nature, they may lack the "weight" associated with the film collaborations Nixed Picks as his Top 5 of all time. There's also only one film in their six together Nixed considers a classic, 1994's "Ed Wood". Honorable mention also goes to Bob Rafelson- Jack Nicholson for their five films together as director and star. That union produced an all-time classic in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces" and one near-classic, 1972's "King of the Marvin Gardens". At # 5 Nixed has the combo of Alfred Hitchcock-James Stewart. From 1948's "Rope" to 1958's "Vertigo" they made four films together. They paired on one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, "Rear Window", in 1954. Stewart was the perfect everyman for Hitch. An Average Joe involved with nefarious circumstances and platinum blondes. At # 4 is the team of John Ford-John Wayne. They elevated the Western to new heights through their nine films in the genre. They worked together at least 14 times as director and star on major films, with Wayne featured in cameos and walk-ons in several others before hitting it big in 1939's "Stagecoach". Interestingly it was Ford, not Wayne, who enlisted in the military during WW2, and was considered an enormous Patriot. 1956 saw the release of "The Searchers", one of the best Westerns ever made. At # 3 stands Akira Kurosawa-Toshiro Mifune. Where John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock garnered accolades and awards away from their alter egos, it would seem impossible for one of these artists to exist without the other. The fact that they worked together sixteen times supports this observation. From 1948-1965 the two re-invented Japanese cinema with ground-breaking films including "Roshomon" and "Seven Samurai". These films' themes and approaches have been copied in countless American films. Ingmar Bergman-Max von Sydow are my # 2 pick.Max von Sydow imbodied the angst-ridden guilty soul of Bergman's riffs on Man's desires, and the related consequences.They worked together eleven times. Most notable in their canon are "The Virgin Spring" and "The Seventh Seal". Nixed also considered Bergman and Liv Ullmann for this spot for their ten films together. The Bergman films of the late 50's and early 60's though were less contemplative.They also seemed more important and less self-important than the Ullmann films in the late 60's and beyond. The number one collaboration between director and actor? Easy. Martin Scorsese-Robert DeNiro. Through eight films spanning 1973-1995, this is the perfect marriage of director and actor. The best of the bunch was 1976's "Taxi Driver", followed closely by "Raging Bull", and "Goodfellas". All three belong an anyone's list of top 100 films, maybe top 25. "The King of Comedy", "Cape Fear", and "Casino" are second rung Scorsese with many moments of brilliance sprinkled in. Nixed needs to see "Mean Streets" and "New York, New York" again before proclaiming either a classic or a flop.