Tagarchief: Las Vegas

05. Casino (1995)

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Martin Scorsese (screenplay), Nicholas Pileggi (book & screenplay)
Stars: Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci

This review is part of the feature:

The 33 Gangster Films You Can’t Refuse

Imagine that you are living in the nineties and GoodFellas is your favorite movie of all time. Then its director Martin Scorsese announces a follow-up with much of the same cast and crew. This lucky occurrence happened to me.

Of course, Casino could have been a disappointment or a mere repetition of GoodFellas, but it became another mob masterpiece by the master of the genre (although he maintains Casino is not a mob movie). I fell in love with Casino in the cinema back then and now, thirty years later, I am falling in love with it all over again. I’m enjoying it even more than I ever thought possible.

Like in GoodFellas, the first hour provides a documentary style insider perspective on the mob’s Las Vegas in the seventies. The voice-overs are provided by Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (De Niro), a professional gambler who ran the Tangiers casino for the Chicago outfit, and Nicky Santoro (Pesci), a mafia enforcer who is sent after him to watch his back. Street guys running an operation of this magnitude? It is easy to see why Marty wanted to tell this story. He loves criminal conspiracies and this is a major one.

Things go smooth for a while, but as the tagline says: ‘no one can stay at the top forever’. Rothstein, the most controlled guy on the planet, falls in love with the highly volatile showgirl Ginger McKenna and marries her. That is one gamble that will cost him dearly. Their rocky marriage is the first thing that gets out of control.

The second explosive element in the mix is Nicky, who starts his own gang in Vegas and then starts pillaging the place as if it’s the Wild West. Finally, there is also the dumbest gangster in the mob’s history – Artie Piscano – who keeps financial records of the entire operation. At the end, ten years after Rothstein moved to Vegas, the whole house of cards starts collapsing in on itself.

The casting alone makes this one of the greatest mob movies ever. De Niro, Stone and Pesci couldn’t be more perfect (one made mafia member said Pesci’s performance is the most realistic portrayal of a wise guy ever), but all the supporting characters are golden as well. I mean, where did they find all these old mob guys in the grocery store? They are just fantastic.

Add to that the incredible cinematography, editing, production design, music, the beautiful credit sequence by Saul Bass, and the most realistic and gruesome mob violence ever put on screen, I mean Scorsese really aced it once again.

Fear and Loathing Drug List

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

In the ultimate dope novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gonzo journalist Raoul Duke travels to Las Vegas with his crazed Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo to search for the American dream. With them, they carry every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D.

The List
– 2 bags of grass
– 75 pellets of mescaline
– 5 sheets of high-powered blotter acid
– 1 salt shaker full of cocaine
– 1 galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers
– 1 quart of tequila
– 1 quart of rum
– 1 case of beer
– 1 pint of raw ether
– 24 amyls

“Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

Illustrations by Troy Little in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – The Comic

Read also: Hunter Goes to Hollywood: Hunter S. Thompson Triple Bill

The Verdict: Army of the Dead

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

When the great zombie revival began with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), director Zack Snyder (300, Man of Steel) was one of the first to capitalize on it with a remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). His innovation: running zombies. While it took some getting used to, it added to the suspense. In Army of the Dead, another breed of zombies is introduced: the Alphas. They’re some type of intelligent zombies. While the master of the genre George A. Romero experimented with this idea in Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005), the Alphas are definitely the most advanced flesh eaters yet. They can communicate, they can hunt every effectively, and I’ll admit: they’re pretty creepy. There are also ‘normal’ zombies present in this apocalypse by the way.

The pandemic occurred in Las Vegas this time, and the US government managed to maintain it within the city borders. As they are about to nuke Vegas, a group of mercenaries go in to steal 200 million dollars from a casino safe before the city is destroyed. These bad asses have to deal with normal zombies, Alphas and double crossers amongst their own ranks. As can be expected, Snyder throws in his usual visual eye candy, and admittedly, Army of the Dead looks pretty stunning. Unfortunately, it appears as though they’ve fired their continuity officer before the shoot began. There are a bunch of really major errors, even for a film of this kind. However, a campy story like this is too delicious to resist and the largely unknown cast definitely do a great job. There is also no lack of gory zombie extermination action and funny side gags along the way (this is Vegas, so an Elvis zombie and tiger zombie – from Siegfried & Roy – are present). Snyder is having a good time again and it shows.

Army of the Dead is now available on Netflix

The verdict: to stream or not to stream? To stream.

Thinking, Fast & Slow: Dialogues on Reality (1)

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

By J.H. Kash

I was on my way to Vegas for a conference on quantum mechanics and the nature of reality with the famous Dr. Lanza. He was driving our fire red convertible as we discussed the difference between mind and brain.

“If the mind is not the brain, then what is it?” I asked.
“The mind is that which experiences. That which perceives. By definition, that means it cannot perceive itself”, he answered.
“But here’s the problem”, I objected. “How can it do anything if it is not physical? You say it’s some sort of super turbine creating reality as we know it.”
“Right.”
“Right. So if it is an engine, but it’s not made of anything, then how can it function? And this is not just me asking, but anyone being skeptical of the mind being anything other than the brain.”
He took a sip of his coffee.
“You ask good questions, Kash. You see, the mind is part of the non-local domain, that is powered by zero point energy. That is energy so powerful a teaspoonful could easily blow Nevada to smithereens. This mind field also possesses phenomenality. Because of this energy, of which we cannot even comprehend how powerful it is, it can create worlds without breaking a sweat. Including our world.”
“You’re a fucking lunatic”, I said. “I love it.”

“So how do you look at this mind-at-large concept?” I continued. “That what we experience is merely a fragment of the potential mind that encapsulates the cosmos?”
“It makes perfect sense. If the brain localises the consciousness to the body, it means it only uses a insignificantly small piece of the mind power that exists.”
“Many people who’ve had near-death experiences say they experienced this mind-at-large. When their consciousness was temporarily detached from their brain, due to say… cardiac arrest, they all of a sudden understood… quantum mechanics.”
“That’s very possible. The brain slows our thought processes way down to accommodate our experience on earth. Would we be in a different dimension, our conscious experience could be entirely different. Perhaps unbounded, completely free from filters.”
“Imagine that.”
“We can’t. Our slow brains normally prevent us from experiencing that.”
“Let’s drop some acid then.”
He laughed. “Yeah, let’s.”

Fragment from what might one day become a novel called ObserverWorld. Right now it merely exists in the ocean of possibilities we call the quantum realm. But it might be in the future manifested by a number of conscious agents, including me, Lanza and you dear readers.