Pivotal, hugely entertaining scene. "I know, but that's enough."
Martin Scorsese's last great movie, if you ask me. Starring real men. A visual feast. With an actual female character. And it's all fucking true! Las Vegas is somewhere I don't need to go, even if just to make that once in a lifetime trip to cross it off some kind of (ugh) must-do list mandated by airport non-fiction. 1000 Places to See Before You Die. Forget that self-help fascism. The old Vegas has been bulldozed and the new corporate Vegas (sans Liberace Museum) keeps pulling in the rubes. I guess the middle classes flock there because it's sanitized and safe but they can still pretend they're palling with the Rat Pack. Why not just go to Orlando?
Martin Scorsese's such a big booster for film preservation, and his love of B-noirs is so genuine that I have mixed feelings about pulling him down. But I think his failure has been to choose DiCaprio for his male muse. I am pretty much in agreement with Erich Kuersten's thesis that movies today lack real men. (Kuersten is the author of the Acidemic blog: http://acidemic.blogspot.com). Kuersten observes: "DiCaprio has never been married or had children. He dates models. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it shows at least on the surface, a level of laddish insecurity; his women must be certified gorgeous in case someone's looking." I am not a deep thinker but yeah, I think strong male performances must be rooted in life experience and maybe we don't have Alpha Males in films today because, well, where are they, and who wants to hire them? Hey, I married a mensch but it doesn't mean I don't want to see male rage and sexuality onscreen. And Scorsese's films continually explore masculinity and male relationships. I could probably find you a half dozen real manly men but they'd be coming from up north in lumber camps and from shrimp boats on the coast. Are these guys trying out for Hollywood parts these days? Can you imagine an established, risk-averse Hollywood exec grooming Mr Fort McMurray these days? I can't. Scorsese followed Casino with Kundun, Bringing out the Dead and then settled into what would remain basically an unbroken pattern for the next decade and a half, casting DiCaprio in Gangs of New York. Gangs to me is as baroque as Casino but structurally a mess, performance-wise hugely uneven and a disaster one inch from stumbling into becoming a Broadway musical dance sequence. Sorry, I hated it and I think part of the problem was making a boy its central focus.
And yeah, I am a girl. I love the costumes in Casino. I guess I bought the DVD to watch De Niro wear cantaloupe pants. Sharon Stone is batshit and I love that she's hung up on James Woods -- trying to figure her out is impossible and she's such dynamite next to De Niro's performance which is highly restrained until he loses his gaming license and bursts forth like a geyser of angry bitterness. I always suffer a Pesci hangover after watching him zip up his pants in that one scene, but Casino is a great, adult film and a gutsy goodbye to the original Las Vegas.
Who else can pull off burnt orange on burnt orange with a burnt orange tie?
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