Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/19/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, November 19, 2023

21 (Robert Luketic, 2008)

Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess in 21

Cast: Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Laurence Fishburne, Jack McGee, Josh Gad, Sam Golzari, Helen Carey, Bob Phillips. Screenplay: Peter Steinfeld, Allan Loeb, based on a book by Ben Mezrich. Cinematography: Russell Carpenter. Production design: Missy Stewart. Film editing: Elliot Graham. Music: David Sardy.

Harvard has a very fine medical school, no doubt. But so do NYU, Penn, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, and the University of Washington, to name a few. And 21 asks us to believe that its protagonist, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), is so set on going to Harvard's, and only Harvard's, that he will betray his friends, lie to his mother, and put his life in jeopardy to raise the money he needs to attend. He's already been admitted, of course. He has straight A's at MIT and a genius IQ. Moreover, he's an ideal candidate for financial support: He has a single mother and has to work part time. But according to the screenplay, there's only one scholarship available and it has scores of other applicants. So Ben will find himself roped into a card-counting system devised by a rather shady MIT professor of statistics, Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), who takes a group of hand-picked students and trains them in a foolproof system of beating the odds at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. The premise is valid: Ben Mezrich reported on an actual MIT Blackjack Team in his 2003 book Bringing Down the House. But the makers of 21 aren't interested in the actuality of Mezrich's book, maybe because it involves a lot of boring stuff like mathematics. So they cobbled it into a routine con-game drama, with some Vegas glamour, a little romance, some snaky double-crossing, a little violence, and a moderately happy ending. The actual MIT team was mostly Asian, so there are some token Asians in the cast, but the movie's story centers on the good-looking white guy and the dishy blonde. That the Vegas casinos wouldn't spot this gang of pretty people as phonies defies belief. At best, 21 is a passable time-waster.