[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

The script, formerly titled Bagman, has been retitled Casino Jack, perhaps in candor or maybe hope, as the structure echoes Martin Scorsese’s masterwork Casino.  That film’s narrative structure, the film noir plot which begins near the end, with voice over by the protagonist in an ambiguous time warp, then rewinds to skip around in the plot back to the earlier scene, is replicated in Casino Jack.  Such imitation is revealing, as Scorsese’s Casino gives us nothing less than the essence of an era, the golden age of Las Vegas, before it is destroyed by the characters we follow, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, Nicky Santoro, Ginger, and the old-time mob, through failures of limits, trust, growth, and awareness, to be overtaken by corporate ownership.  

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Casino Jack harbors similar aspirations, the essence of an era, in this case ostensibly the Bush II era.  But it is the “Republican Revolution” that Casino Jack targets, and after beginning with the Washington Post exposure and bust of the fictional “Jack Abramoff” and the murder of “Gus Boulis,” we discover the 21 year old Jack rooted in 1980, a college Republican riding in a campaign limo with “Ronald Reagan” himself, who counsels Jack: never surrender; there are no constraints on the human mind; no walls around the human spirit; no barriers to our progress except those we erect ourselves; the family is everything; all great changes in America begins around the dinner table.  This is Casino Jack’s foundational Reaganite wisdom, though Reagan will return and give Jack a cryptic warning, too late, about idealism. 

This Jack is an agent of smashmouth capitalism. Early on we see him busted in his Gulfstream wearing a $1000 Armani suit.  He is the son of a “Rat Pack” former Diners Club president now retired to Palm Springs, raised in Beverly Hills, and has become a superstar Washington lobbyist representing Indian tribes’ gambling interests.  Jack also invests, through homeboy “Adam Kidan” (think Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro) in Florida offshore gambling boats and owns a fancy restaurant in DC.  He represents the Northern Mariana Islands, where his Congressman friend vacations, entertained by a “nubile young Asian woman,”  and which manufactures “in the rag trade” under “Made in USA” labels, not subject to US labor law.  It is an increasingly murky, tragic saga of greedy Republican financial chicanery.  When things unravel, a partner at Jack’s firm compares the whole debacle to Enron.     (more…)

While you youngsters picture the 1980’s as that glorious feast of spectacular action/adventure blockbusters that it was, it’s worth noting that when the critics eventually voted on the best film of the decade, they chose one made back in 1980, “Raging Bull.”  Why?  Perhaps in reverence for something that was already passing away.  Though many of its key filmmakers, like Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, and even Scorsese, would yet make great films, “Raging Bull” marks the culmination of the Hollywood Renaissance. 

The American film industry was in bad shape in the 60’s, crippled by the breakup of the studios, the arrival of TV, and the fragmentation of the audience.  It was rescued by a new generation of filmmakers we call the Hollywood Renaissance, mostly graduates of film schools who brought along new generational attitudes and aesthetics.  Their aesthetics were much influenced by what they had watched in film school: lots of European films, especially the French New Wave, notably “Breathless,” steeped in the aesthetics of modernism (fragmentation, formalism, difficulty, self-reference, distancing, the license of authorship).  The breakout films of the Hollywood Renaissance (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “2001,” “The Wild Bunch,” etc.) were full of modernist aesthetics. “Raging Bull” is their fruition.        

In taking the life of 1940’s middleweight champ Jake LaMotta as its material, “Raging Bull” gained access to multiple layers of self-referencing history; the entire post-WWII era, its films, even personal histories.  As film history, it invokes the prizefight film, a sub-genre of film noir (“Golden Boy,” “Body and Soul,” “Champion,” “The Harder They Fall”) as melodramas of struggle and betrayal, but much more seriously, the gangster genre itself, which through Coppola’s landmark “The Godfather” had become the dominant genre mythology of the 70’s.  Scorsese counters Coppola’s family epic cum pagan opera with a world of busted families and predatory crooks, through which the solitary Jake must pass in his lonely spiritual quest, a thrilling dispute that Coppola would take up in “The Godfather Part III.”  This self-referencing history oscillates, from the deep background of the film medium itself, which signals the arrivals of color film and TV, to a place where Jake stands in for the solitary film artist in the independent production era, to a foreground nod to Scorsese’s family photos, his father as gangster, even himself in the last scene.  (more…)

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks described a 1975 Bruce Springsteen concert as the start of his “other education,” not the intellectual one from schooling but the “emotional education” from the popular culture. 

Brooks is a superstar pundit.  A featured journalist at The Weekly Standard, in 2000 Brooks was author of “Bobos in Paradise,” a smart look at “bourgeois bohemians,” the educated, “counterculture” crowd that had become America’s new blue state power elite.  Brooks went on to occupy the house conservative Op Ed position at the liberal mainstay New York Times and the equivalent chair on PBS NewsHour’s version of crossfire, with ever-apologetic Brooks pitted against the always garrulous lefty Mark Shields.  These two roles established Brooks as the left’s favorite conservative, a position he solidified as one of the Obamacons, prominent conservatives who supported Obama, believing him to be a moderate centrist, or in Brooks’ case, even a closet Burkean conservative. 

Last week Brooks went with his 15-year-old daughter to see a Springsteen concert in Baltimore and witnessed her joyous astonishment.  Her arrival at utter abandon echoed the exhilaration, the emotional learning, Springsteen had long ago imparted to Brooks, the depiction of a world of “teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law,” tales told with a jolt for “10,000 people in a state of utter abandon.”   

Brooks fondly describes the artistry and stories of Springsteen’s universe, “a distinct map of reality” seen on an epic and anthemic scale, in which “losers” always retain dignity and their choices have immense moral consequences, with emotions like stoicism, seen through veils of exaltation and nostalgia.  (more…)

The Democrats, after getting their butts kicked all through July, are trying to change the momentum by raising the bloody flag of class warfare. Last Friday the House of Representatives voted 237-185 along party lines to enable financial regulators to limit Wall Street pay and bonus packages they deem inappropriate. The new regulation would affect firms worth over $1 billion, whether or not they got government bailout funds. The Washington Post and AP both asserted the House was responding to looming “populist anger,” although polls suggest recent public concern has been over spending and health care. 

Class warfare rests on the assumption, usually well disguised and used very selectively, that capitalist profits are a rip-off, a heist, “unearned.” In his recent health-care pitch, President Obama declared insurance companies are “making record profits,” a questionable claim but presumably identifying both the evil enemy and the room for government to save money, if you buy that the government can deliver something as good for the same cost.   (more…)

Well after its phenomenal success of eight Oscars, four Golden Globes, seven BAFTA’s, and $350 million at the boxoffice, “Slumdog Millionaire” has managed to stay alive. As much an amazing longshot victor as its hero, an urchin from the Mumbai slums cum tea server at a phone call center who wins a fortune in an Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” “Slumdog” has kept making news in ways deeply rooted in its own depiction of the world.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies. (more…)