"The next-best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing," a professional gambler once said. Yes, and the next-best thing to that is a movie about either gambling and winning or (more likely) gambling and losing. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that didn't instantly get better when one of the characters pulled out a deck of cards and started dealing poker hands, for instance. Why this is so I'm not exactly sure. I mean, poker would seem to be the least cinematic of subjects--a bunch of (usually) guys sitting around staring at their cards and each other. But the camera has a way of busting a poker game wide open, revealing just enough of each player's hand to make it interesting and studying their faces as if through a microscope. Think of all those Westerns with all those games of five-card stud--camera moves we've seen so many times it's like watching Kabuki theater. And yet something within us can't wait to see the next card turned over. John Dahl's Rounders, which stars Matt Damon as the Karate Kid of Texas Hold-'em, doesn't exactly hold its cards close to its chest. We always know exactly where the movie's going, thanks to all the movies that have gone there before--The Hustler, The Cincinnati Kid and, yes, The Karate Kid. Dahl has described the movie as "a character study with a classic sports-film structure," but I wonder about the "character study" part. In The Hustler, Paul Newman gave an unforgettable performance as a pool player so high on his own talent that he couldn't see the cue ball headed straight toward his forehead. And Steve McQueen at least brought a weary maturity to his similarly talented poker player in The Cincinnati Kid. But Damon seems closer to Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid--the boy next door, basically, and not the boy next door to an underground poker club where you have to pour an entire bucket of scuzz all over yourself just to be allowed through the door. Much of Rounders takes place on the goulash circuit--a network of greasy, grimy poker rooms flung across New York and New Jersey. And perhaps the movie's greatest strength is its fetid air of authenticity (despite cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier's Dutch-master lighting). What can I say about a movie the press packet for which includes a four-page "Poker Glossary" except that the glossary sure came in handy when I was trying to figure out what everybody was saying. (Rounder: "A player who knows all the angles and earns his living at the poker table. The absolute opposite of a sucker.") Only John Malkovich, as a cardsharp named Teddy KGB who has a Russian accent so thick you want to slice it with a scimitar, remained largely unintelligible to me after I'd learned all the terms. And yet Teddy is one of the most enjoyable characters in the movie--a cold-blooded killer with a fetishistic weakness for Oreo cookies, perhaps because they resemble poker chips. The movie opens and closes with Damon's Mike McDermott going mano a mano with Teddy, and you can feel the director's pleasure in the thrust and parry of poker--the way a player can be about to shout "Touché!" and then notice a single drop of blood on his shirt, right next to his heart. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is trapped in that classic sports-film structure that Dahl was talking about. McDermott, having been beaten badly by the Russian cookie monster, tries to leave poker behind--focus on law school and his law-school girlfriend, Jo (Gretchen Mol). Then, McDermott's old partner-in-crime, the symbolically named Worm (Edward Norton), gets out of prison, and before you can say "pair of queens, ace high," McDermott has been lured back to the card table, if only to cover Worm's poker debts, which are expanding by the hour. An expert technician who would gladly cheat in order to win, Worm is both a rounder and a sucker--his own worst enemy. He's also McDermott's worst enemy, not to mention his best friend. Scriptwriters David Levien and Brian Koppelman appear to have borrowed that friendship from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, where Harvey Keitel's Charlie was forever bailing Robert DeNiro's Johnny Boy out of trouble. I'd hoped that Norton, who pulled the wool over everybody's eyes in the did-he-or-didn't-he-do-it thriller Primal Fear, would be this movie's ace in the hole. But Norton quickly settles into a DeNiro/Johnny Boy impersonation--the walk, the talk, even the same dopey smile. A shame, because Worm's the only character in the movie who seems to get an actual charge out of gambling. McDermott's girlfriend, Jo, not only doesn't get a charge out of it, she doesn't want McDermott to get a charge out of it either. It's an underwritten cliché of a role that newcomer Mol does nothing with, as if she realized her real job is to stand there and look beautiful--a job well done. John Turturro and Martin Landau, two actors who seldom disappoint, have small roles as Joey Kinish, a small-stakes poker player who manages to grind out a living for his family, and Abe Petrovsky, McDermott's Talmud-quoting law professor. Both characters finally encourage McDermott to 1) follow his dream, 2) be all that he can be and 3) go for it, all of which sets up a final showdown with Teddy KGB so that McDermott can stash enough cash to make a run at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that is a decent goal in life, which is more than the movie does. In fact, that may be Rounders' great contribution to movies about gambling: It totally validates gambling-and-winning over gambling-and-losing. Whereas I don't really care what happens as long as the movie captures the sweaty, smoky stench of a good poker game. Whenever McDermott started wondering whether poker was the life for him, I just wanted to shout, "Shut up and deal." A few weeks ago, I mentioned that one of my fantasies is to live in Paris, where there are almost as many movie theaters as sidewalk cafes. James Kreul, one of the guiding forces behind the UW's Madison Film Forum, subsequently wrote in to remind me (and you) just how vibrant the campus movie scene has become. If Paris has its Cinémathèque Française, which is to film what the Louvre is to art, Madison has its own "Cinematheque"--an umbrella term covering the various UW departments and student groups that bring us free screenings of art films, foreign films, classic American films, etc., in 4070 Vilas Hall. (For details, see Isthmus' weekly Movie Times or the Film Forum's Web site at www.wisc.edu/commarts/events/cinema.htm.) The Cinematheque's fall programming is about to begin, and Madison cineastes might as well cancel all their plans between now and Thanksgiving. Most spectacularly, there's going to be a weeks-long retrospective of Andy Warhol films starting Sept. 25--not Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula, which only bear his name, but the '60s avant-garde films that secured Warhol his own I-am-a-camera niche in the history of cinema. I'll have more to say about Warhol next week. Right now, I'd like to mention an only slightly less spectacular series beginning Nov. 7: "Beijing Underground." These are movies that China's so-called Sixth Generation--young directors working outside the country's previously monolithic film industry--have produced in the wake of Tiananmen Square. Often banned in China (and smuggled out to international film festivals), these truly independent films will give many of us our first look at the hundred flowers blooming in present-day China.
What else? Well, there's Emir Kusturica's Underground (Oct. 18), which finally arrives in Madison three years after winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes. One of the most controversial films of recent years, Underground had French intellectuals hurling croissants at one another over whether the movie--a magic-realist allegory that traces the last half-century of Yugoslav history--is pro-Serbian. Now you can decide for yourself. You can also decide whether John Ford or Howard Hawks was the better director based on the 16 films of theirs that will be screened between now and Dec. 9, from Young Mr. Lincoln to Sergeant York, Fort Apache to Red River. Gee, I'm out of space, and I haven't even mentioned the seven Edward Yang films, the Latin American Film Tour, the films of....
