mike-925

The movie was great. Sun never came out, drizzled nearly every day. A rainy Washington, a dazzling vampire from an interesting vamp family. Somebody named Bella Swan's father, Sheriff's Department deputy Charlie Swan. That's the name of Marcel Proust's hero in the first of his seven novels, Swann's Way. Now I've got to find out if that is something the screenwriter dreamed up, or if the author was responsible. At first it was surprising, but about a third of the way through, you could see plainly how the author was going to keep the antagonism between the two characters roiling: The Vampire loves the girl so much, there's an inner struggle to keep himself from killing her and draining the blood from her body. Naturally, she eats that s**t up, as the FBI guy in Thelma and Louise would say. Each time the vamp goes through this "I want so badly to fang you to death" routine, Bella becomes more bellicosely aggressive. Its startling to guys watching to see how she goes after him. Kristen Stewart who played the girl at the swap meet who has the brief love affair with the young kid in Into the Wild, is doing all the acting in this film. She is mostly submissive and passive but she is the audience's moral guide. She even tells her father to quit eating french fries at lunch, to have a salad like her. The vampire is having nothing, thank you. Stewart has Piper Laurie's chipmunk teeth from the fifties movies Laurie did with Tony Curtis. When you finally see that Bella has jumped on the side of the Family, you know the Studios have at least two sequels in mind, maybe three. Wonderful rainy Washington State exteriors. The look of the film is exquisite and effecting right through to the end of the film. They're leaving high school though, which means no more cheering for the Spartans. She hasn't graduated yet so its only fair that the family place her in Jacksonville High for her last two years. If she isn't in high school, the sequel is going to lose fire. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the under-rated Lords of Dogtown (2005), which I thought one of the best films that year, was production designer on Three Kings in 1999, as well as on Antitrust and Vanilla Sky. Her direction here may make her the first new major woman director in the Big Leagues in awhile. The movie did $70 million this weekend, $4 million more than the James Bond opener did last week. Its a very big hit. I was scheduled to see the movie early Friday morning at 12:10 a.m., slept through the start, but took the trouble to drive by and discover 30 cars at the Rogers Theater in Sparta at 1:40 a.m.. That one showing in a thousand theaters early Friday at the same time, brought in $7 million. My niece pointed out to me that the film made back its cost including advertising and the cost of negatives on its first weekend, a rare feat in Hollywood. She heard about Twilight from a colleague where she worked in Chicago, and has read one or more of the four books. She is raring to see it today. I'm really onto this not because its a teen film- most of those are nose-holders, but because this is the latest example of an emerging genre known as the Blockbuster Chick Flick. As recently as last year, they were considered risky by H'wood. The reason was that in couple situations which were assumed to be a guy and a girl before the Massachusetts Supremes acted, the guy would choose the flick and it would be Unforgiven or the Hulk or some other male clunker like Appaloosa. But now more than ever, young people are bowling alone. The Studios pulled out the stops for the movie version of Sex and the City. That film was loaded with anti-Male jabs designed to infuriate young guys but at the same time pluck at the strings of a girl's heart. Masochist that I am, I found myself loving those jabs. In the nearly all woman theater where I saw Sex and the City, selected couples were forging the beginnings of same sex marriages as I watched. uh, the film. My niece has since purloined my single copy of Sex and the City forcing me to return to Red Box for a fresh one to make a copy from. Its no fun to watch at home, though, without a bunch of frenzied women in the seats nearby. Since then I have been to every chick flick, even the bad ones like 27 Dresses and the rest of the Judd Apatow awfulness, which aren't just chick flicks but also wallow in male excess like f*rting. Before Sex and the City, women clung to their copies of the Notebook DVD and other Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers. Sparks' latest, Nights in Rondanthe, was a limited success, possibly because there wasn't enough male bashing in it. Its a great time to be alive even with the financial world melting. But parents need to cut back in their efforts at reviving Ophelia. Its young Hamlet who needs resuscitation most.

21 is a poor version of Ben Mezrich's best-selling 2002 Bringing Down the House. The original story is about five Asian MIT students who walked off with $3 million card counting at various casinos around the country, beginning in the early nineties.

The movie makers have constructed a half-baked love story that isn't actually in the book. With the romantic intrusion, the thriller aspect of the original is lost. The book may have been tricked up a little. But 21, the movie seems bent on helping casino security Bull Laurence Fishburne keep his image intact and that of the Vegas casinos unblemished. Because the characters appear to be playing in real Las Vegas casinos, at least at times, it looks as if producers may have cut a deal with Vegas to soften both Fishburne's tough guy image and minimize embarrassment the Casinos suffered at the hands of the merry MIT crew.

In the book, the casinos and their pit bosses and security people were clods who never caught onto a thing for over six years. The movie hasn't got time for that long a wait. Fishburne is suspicious of lead Ben Campbell almost instantly.

Here's a major myth that grew up in the seventies that the book explodes: Casinos spread the story that once multi-decks were placed in shoes, card counting wouldn't work anymore. In fact, multi-decks actually improved odds for counting players by lengthening the period of time that dealer's hands stayed hot for players and cold for dealers.

In the film the MIT crew does all its work in Vegas. In the book, the MIT gang went to riverboats around Chicago, to Louisiana and Missisippi Indian casinos and even overseas to Monte Carlo and Cannes.

In the film, Kevin Spacey is an MIT math prof who spearheads the Casino Con and enlists his own students to be his players. A college girl is in love with the hero Ben Campbell. In reality, all of the players were Asians who wore disguises and masqueraded as rich orientals out to blow big money at the tables. Mickey(Spacey), the crew leader and organizer is an MIT prof and a professional gambler too.

The movie constructs a fiction that Campbell only wants to make $300,000 to finance his education at Harvard as a doctor. The truth is the real Jeff Ma never went to Med School and never wanted to. Ma and the four orientals who took down Vegas, worked the various casinos for nearly ten years and only gave it up when most casinos in the country had identified them and they could no longer play.

Somewhere in the middle of the book Mickey and the Ben Campbell character modeled on Jeff Ma split, and begin running separate teams in the casinos. The movie has Mickey (Spacey) fingering Ben and his team to Casino Security. That would have exposed Mickey too. Its absurd. In fact, though there was some minor bad blood after the split, it was in the interests of both teams to keep quiet about one another. And that is what they did.

In the book, the players wore disguises always and changed them often so they wouldn't be recognized when they returned to the same casinos. The movie talked of disguises but Ben never actually wore won except once. It made no sense. He'd have been caught on the second visit without a disguise. In the film, one of the hand signals to tip the Ben to the 'hot' blackjack table, was so blatantly obvious, no pit manager or security bull could have missed it.

The movie left two nerdy friends of Ben Campbell's lurking around MIT clueless about Ben's weekend table action. Those characters and the plots around them were lame. The whole college crosscut was so weak they might just as well have eliminated it altogether. Trying to merge the college weekdays and weekend gambling simply didn't play. Campbell (Jim Sturges) was supposed to have been half-enticed into the ring by his yen for fellow student Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). But the romance seemed half-hearted once underway. The book knew better. The deceptions and nearly being caught by security time after time took up all the action and made the book a unique thriller.

Movie makers constructed a supposed collusion between Campbell and Security Bull Fishburne to get even with Mickey. The tacked on ending was so absurd anyone could see through it. In fact, Jeff Ma is not a WASP like the one Campbell portrayed, but an oriental. The four fellow Oriental MIT students worked the casinos for nearly ten years and were well into their thirties before they quit. Only near the end of that time were they thoroughly caught, identified and forced to stop. I'm not sure any of them ever graduated from MIT. Ma didn't.

Spacey and Fishburne give routine performances as if they couldn't take the film seriously. I wonder why? In the washroom afterward I told two twenty somethings what a pack of lies the film was and gave them the book title so they could read the true story. 21 could have been a remarkable film in the hands of a writer-director like Dave Mamet. The film was market designed as a cross between Wedding Crashers and a bad Adam Sandler movie. A few of the six college students behind me kept mistaking ordinary lines as American Pie easy laughs, but the rest of the audience stayed silent.

The Filmmakers, who are not worth mentioning, destroyed a perfectly wonderful story that could have been a great movie. They doubled down in duplicity.