The last Vegas movie I reviewed was Showgirls, which I casually said was so bad it was great. Much more difficult is Martin Scorsese's Casino, which is half great and half so-bad-it's-great. There were one or two moments like that in Apocalypse Now and The Shining, two of my all-time favorite movies. The only other one that comes close to that though is Oliver Stone's JFK, which had dialogue like "Oswald has as much use for a Russian as a cat has for pajamas" or my favorite, "This is Loozy-ana chief! Houyoo know who yo datty izz? Cause yo mamma TOLD YOU SO!" And that's just the dialogue. What about those coke parties where Tommy Lee Jones gets coated in gold and gets his nipples twisted by a beetle-browed Joe Pesci and Kevin Bacon dressed like Marie Antoinette? Or that tender moment where Kevin Costner explains to his kids how we can't let the bad men behind the military-industrial complex responsible for assassinating Kennedy win? I remember very fondly of the brilliant but extinct "Dana Carvey Show," where their parody of "Entertainment Tonight" showed us a sneak peak of Oliver's Stone's Lincoln which starred Morgan Freeman in the title role and had John Adams snorting a line while watching our 16th president on television and then cursing him out. Yeah, but you know what, I still find myself watching JFK over considerably "better" movies. Or at least movies that are consistently good and intelligent. Like a lot of Oliver Stone's work, JFK is a hell of a lot of fun. I don't know if I am sounding like I'm doing handstands trying to justify these movies.

The obvious thing that I'm getting at, I suppose, is that there is an extremely fine line between awesomely great and awesomely bad. These movies sometimes tip over from one side to another, but they are never simply mediocre. Pauline Kael once said, "The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself." Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick are brave cinematic geniuses who will gladly make complete asses of themselves. High art or high camp, there is a sense where it is difficult to make the distinction.

Critical opinion toward Casino has proved to be surprisingly positive, although it usually is not ranked as being among Scorsese's best work. The underlying perception that I had of the critics is that it was "Goodfellas redux." My initial reaction to that was, "So what? That's like saying that since you have already eaten ice cream before, there is no reason to ever eat it again." I mean, there is this sense where you can't really have too much of a good thing. One of Roger Ebert's major rules for film criticism is that no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough. Two and a half hours of Goodfellas is great, why not have three more? Comparing the two, Goodfellas is certainly the more complete and consistently good film, and certainly the most satisfying on a narrative level. But the narrative is hardly the greatest of Goodfellas charms. Or at least that is not really the endpoint; the narrative is at service to the filmmaking. Goodfellas is essentially great cinema, and great cinema ultimately comes before everything else. In a weird way, the substance that was relatively unimportant to Goodfellas has been boiled away in Casino and its more valuable cinematic qualities have been accentuated. Goodfellas is the better movie, I think, but in many ways Casino surpasses it. It's better filmmaking.

In my last couple of viewings of Goodfellas, there are two moments that really bother me. The first is when Karen Hill ambushes her husband's mistress. Scorsese uses a lot of jump cuts here. I hate the rhythm of it. I'm not sure that he had a very strong plan in trying to film it. She rings the bell to the apartment, tells other tenants and the landlord that the mistress is a whore. Et cetera. Are we to think that she is standing here for hours and hours? I also hate a moment when we see Marty the Hair King's commercial and then cut to De Niro watching it. It's so painfully jagged and crude!

In contrast let me describe two shots in Casino that are among the greatest I have ever seen. Joe Pesci's Nicky Santoro has just been put on a blacklist forbidding him to ever set foot on any Las Vegas casinos. In response, he decides to form a gang. In introducing this "new" Nicky, Scorsese does a long slow horizontal pan. It starts with a bleached cow skull, moves to cigar store wooden Indian, and then we see two of Santoro's associates standing behind the glass before we come to a close-up of Nicky looking directly at us. The second is near the end, when Sharon Stone has taken all of her husband's (Robert De Niro's Ace Rothstein) money and spent it on two months of a constant high. We hear her terrified screams (at something we never see) when the sequence begins. The camera crawls against a green wall until she comes out and then it backs away as she takes her last stumble and collapses dead.

Skipping through my DVD (which has next to nothing as far as extras go but really does look fantastic) to rewatch the shot, I've been reminded of some really terrific sequences involving the bosses trying to eliminate witnesses. A key scene has two old hitmen tracking down one old gangster shooting at him all around his home in Costa Rica. He's shot in the stomach and stumbles out of the house before falling down to his knees. "Where do you think you're going, jag-off?" they ask him. Then the hitmen push one into the top of his head. The blood comes spraying from out of his mouth. This is all done in one shot. Oh, and I just have to mention the beautiful gliding shot of the desert in the first few moments. This, apparently, is where all the bodies are buried.

On the level of pure filmmaking, Casino is fantastically playful and exhilarating. It's some kind of masterpiece even. Aspiring filmmakers should take several looks at this film and plunder the shit out of it. But it does commit a number of sins pushing it away from high art to high camp. To be specific, Joe Pesci's voice is first heard in voiceover talking over some mournful opera music. "But in the end, we fucked it all up. It could have been so sweet too, but it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fucking valuable again." This is very funny. It's very literally a jagged juxtaposition of the sacred and profane, the problem of Scorsese's Raging Bull incarnate. Pesci drops the F-bomb twice in that weaselly Italian-American whine over this beautiful gut-deep aria. I was taken back in Goodfellas when we hear Henry Hill moisten his lips during his voiceover narration. Pesci does that ALL THE TIME here. He's always sneaking "you knows" and the like, and in the end we hear him gasp out in shock on the narration track when he's hit with a baseball bat!

For a long time the most inexcusable thing about Casino for me was the last three words spoken. "And that's that." It's very much the same ending as Goodfellas. Like Henry Hill, Ace Rothstein doesn't die for his sins; much worse, he's reduced to the level of a common schlub. Academically, I suppose we could argue that they differ in that Rothstein is happy to be alive and Hill seems to rather be dead. But come on. "And that's that"? Goodfellas had a snap at the end. Scorsese did that Great Train Robbery homage there with Pesci shooting at the camera, and Sid Vicious' version of "My Way" blistered on the soundtrack. What kind of fuckwit ends their movie with the words "And that's that"? We can probably laugh at this too; Scorsese has thrown his hands up in the air and given up. (Another thing I really need to bitch about. Goodfellas had a great soundtrack; Casino is really absolute shit. It even employs Devo's "Whip It" of all things. Scorsese was napping on this one.)

I got a very hearty laugh when the Internet Movie Database announced that Casino's sex scene between Pesci and Stone was voted the number one worst by readers of Film magazine. As one reader described it, "Could there be a more repulsive combination then these two? It's like one of the munchkins got a shot at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz." In my experience, this development lost a good deal of first-time viewers. They sort of felt that the credibility of the story was being sorely stretched, that they were spicing things up with soap opera conventions and just plain ugliness. This may be Scorsese's most violent film, at the very least his most violent before Gangs of New York. The baseball bat scene and the head vice scene have gained the most infamy, but something ought to be said about a sequence where a man is shot and a bag is put over his head for him to suffocate in. The bag then becomes smeared with blood. During the head vice scene you may wince when you're told that they had put icepicks in the guy's balls and he still didn't talk. (Scorsese relates a very funny anecdote about how the studio lawyers didn't think this was realistic as when you put an icepick to a guy's balls he will definitely talk. They then expressed surprise that screenwriter and author Nick Pileggi didn't already know this.) I've grown into quite a violence buff, but yes, the gore of the film certainly pushes it into the realms of wretched excess.

I have got a theory about Casino. I think that after Goodfellas was a modest hit, Scorsese was given a lot more money to do it all over again. (Indeed, I checked this out. Casino cost twice as much to make as Goodfellas, but it made pretty much exactly the same. {Goodfellas cost twenty million and grossed about fifty million}). The "bad" filmmaking that I described in Goodfellas was clearly a result of a short schedule, the great filmmaking I described here one of a longer timetable. I mean, those kind of shots take time. Scorsese is resourceful and doesn't pass up the chance to invest the money into a quality film. You see every penny in the picture. I can sense that he was very excited to do this, but soon found out while making the film that Goodfellas was already out of his system and he didn't really care that much about the material; he couldn't put his soul into it. The poor fuck. And so we get Casino, a film with all of Scorsese's talent and little of his heart or soul. During my last viewing, I began to wonder if this was Scorsese's send-off to the sort of cinema that made him famous. That he was sick of it and so he decided to 1) make this the GREATEST most OPERATIC gangster picture that he possibly could and 2) slyly satirize Scorsese-ian cinema through the hyperbole of the approach.

In addition to the seemingly unintentional awesomely bad moments, Scorsese gives us a few moments where he really does seem to be in on the joke: when Nicky talks about "back home years ago" we see the flashback subtitled as exactly that. Scorsese's mom Catherine has a great and very funny role where she tries to keep her son from cursing and rolls her eyes in desperation when he arrogantly disobeys her. Mind you that Casino has Goodfellas-levels of f-word saturation at this point, and trying to keep anybody's mouth clean would be hopelessly idealistic. I also liked the development of the bosses putting on medical equipment so they could look like they may die in the courtroom and/or get light sentences. This idea was later appropriated for use in The Sopranos where it was drawn out, made into a major plot point, and had the heat dissipated from it; but in 1995 this was a great laugh.

Scorsese's next film would be Kundun, about the Dali Lama. He hasn't worked with Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent or most significantly Robert De Niro since, and I don't see any way in which he could do so again. Scorsese is in his Leonardo DiCaprio period right now, and at this point only he knows what that means. In order to further bury his past, he even took a role in the DreamWorks production Shark Tale. If you are going out with a bang, I suppose, Vegas is the place to do it. As I have said before, the city is the capital of artifice, excess and superficial friendliness. Like Showgirls, the baroque and ironic Casino probably could have found a place to flounder anywhere else.

I don't think that Casino is completely just an excuse for Scorsese to jerk off or make fun of himself. There is a higher satirical purpose at work here. The joke behind the movie (and it's not at all subtle about it) is that these tough guys from out east, genuine old-school gangsters, come out west where there is nobody remotely as tough as them in existence. And they get eaten alive out there. The gangsters have balls and a sense of integrity. Of core values. The westerners have neither balls nor core values. They cower and cry when you beat on them, but they won't think twice about fucking you over. They have no ties to their family or their community; family and community basically mean next to nothing to them. The gangsters are very bright and they understand this, but they sincerely don't want to believe it and they'll work themselves stupid trying not to believe it. The polite and civil backstabbing of these shit-kicking good old boys and country club WASPs doesn't have a proper place in the "goodfella" lexicon. It's beyond belief really.

I remember reading an interview in Terry O'Gross' compilation "All I Did Was Ask." I think it was with Maurice Sendak or maybe Mickey Spillane, both of which were included in the book, but I'm not quite sure. Anyway, this interviewee was saying that he grew up in Hell's Kitchen and thought he had seen it all; but it wasn't until he went to Hollywood that he understood how horrible people could be. That's basically exactly what Casino is about. Their fall-down is basically that they romanticize what does not lend itself to romanticization. Having no core values is ultimately more important than having the balls and the will.

Nicky Santoro is our prototypical tough guy. He curses all though the film and is behind that infamous head vice scene. Rothstein describes him early in the film: "No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead." Yeah, but we also see that he loves his son. Genuinely loves his son. Rothstein tells us how he is always home in the morning to cook his son breakfast, no matter what else he is doing. Earlier in the film we see him at his son's baseball game talking with another dad. He says that the other dad was a spook, a metro intelligence cop, but that it was all OK because it was about the kids. Yeah, he's a tough guy; but take his little boy and put an icepick to HIS balls and you got him. Do that to one of Santoro's "degenerate gamblers" that he loans to, and there is no way that it would have the same effect. One of the degenerate gamblers uses the money that Santora gives him to pay off the heat bill and gambles it away. He clearly doesn't give half a shit about his wife and kids.

Then there is Ginger, who marries Rothstein and soaks up his money and affection while remaining faithful to her old pimp boyfriend Lester Diamond (played by James Woods, who should probably avoid playing pimps for the same reason that Harrison Ford should avoid playing lawyers: he's a little too good at it). Ginger cries constantly, but it's almost always because she's afraid that Ace will have her killed. She has curiously little concern for her daughter Amy. Ginger likes her, but her motherly love seems to be something that she picked up from studying soap operas. She kidnaps Amy with Lester and plans to hold her for ransom, but Nicky talks her into coming home. Later in the film, Ginger ties her down to her bed while she sleeps and then goes out for dinner. Ginger's relationship with Lester has a sort of functionality. He uses her and she doesn't mind being used. Her love of him does not inform any real system of ethics; it's just another drug that she puts into her body. Another comfort. Again, Ace understands this very clearly, but he really doesn't want to understand it. Time and time again he continues to take her back and let her leech off of him. Ginger is the worst possible person for Ace to fall in love with. Early in the film he tells her that he has to trust her with his life, and all that he gives her is meaningless without trust. She smiles and nods her head. It's like watching a car wreck.

I remember that something, at least, was written about how Ginger is basically Jodie Foster's Iris (Taxi Driver) all grown up. We learn that she was with Lester since she was 14, and a phone call between the two echoes the slow dance sequence in Taxi Driver. The connection is cemented when Ginger confides to Nicky that she should have never married Ace. He's a Libra. As an embodiment of West Coast values, she suggests that Las Vegas is literally being run by four-year-olds: largely incapable of genuine physical violence, but with insatiable appetites toward gratification and immune to even the most fundamental stirrings of moral consciousness. The only way that you can get through to these people are through violence and in select circumstances humiliation. They don't listen to reason or decency. (The arguments between Ace and Ginger often resemble a father yelling at his teenage daughter.) This can seriously tire out the wiseguys: At the end we're told that even Nicky is getting exhausted; he has to hit a guy three times before he'll go down. Before he could do it only once.

The tough guys getting swallowed whole by the bottomless void of Vegas/Hollywood is hilarious. From a sociological perspective it's interesting to me that the gesellschaft (I'll stop using it one of these days, I promise), or cold social distance, is represented by the Western Nevada town, and gemeinschaft, or community, is represented by the big city gangsters. It makes sense, and in my experience comes closer to reality, but goes explicitly against our popular preconceptions. As was the case in Die Hard where a New York City cop is trapped in a skyscraper and has to fight off a group of German terrorists that look like Eurotrash fashion models, the industrial smoggy city is seen as the training ground for the hyper-masculine superhero and guard of democracy. The West, on the other hand, breeds true corruption, catering to your every whim and even legitimizing them. At the end of the film we see the new Vegas, how it has since been kiddie-ized once the teamsters were pushed out and the corporations moved in. The difference between the mob-run casino and the corporately run casino is largely that the gangsters openly dealt in sin. The corporates deal in lifestyles. The gangsters were self-conscious bad guys. The corporations? Well, what do the words good and bad mean anyway? They don't have a responsibility to the public good; they have a responsibility to the shareholders who invested their savings in their company. Who cares if that one guy gambles away his family's heat funds? That's his fault, and his responsibility.

Scorsese may wince a little if we were to label these guys as genuine good fellas, as the guys that we sympathize with. He has said previously that that is why he feels he has to show violence in all of its nastiness. I agree, especially in this film where the ruthless and extremely sadistic violence gives the film a sense of sticky moral relativity. Who would have known that we would get so burned out by the "Me-ism" of the seventies and eighties, that we would be nostalgic for the formalist fascism of the gangsters of the '40s and '50s, where you would at least be fucked over and exploited to your face?