Originally published in Gadfly.
I got lost again last weekend. GoogleMaps can only guide you so far when the sun goes down and the street lights get dimmer and dimmer. I always thought that my tremendous lack of direction might evaporate once I started driving all across town, like some mechanical part of my brain that I never knew existed would pop up in a flat-screen inside my mind and project a fully functional map of Saint Louis and all of its suburbs. But, as time has fluttered by on its winged whatchamacallit, I’ve realized that I’ll probably never get over this lack of directional and practical sense. I’ve often thought about living in New York when I grow up, not for the city’s great cultural or historical landmarks but for the simple and easy-to-use public transportation. People are often quick to acknowledge that we are all born with natural talents and skills in certain areas. What they don’t often mention is that we’re also born with horrible deficiencies in scores of other disciplines.
I think my trouble with direction has something to do with my horrible lack of foresight. I’ve never been one to look to the future. Instead I’ve found myself constantly looking backwards. Which is probably what I was doing that night last weekend when I got lost on my way to a friend’s house in the backwoods of Affton. While the roads twisted and turned into heavy thickets and I had to guess which street I wanted—was it Country Field Drive or Country Field Court?—I was also caught up in the old David Bowie record that I’d dusted out of my dad’s old collection and thrown into my car. It was Hunky Dory, and the album’s warm and friendly sounds made the lostness feel kind of exciting. There was no one on these back roads and I enjoyed the countless U-turns my poor judgments called for. And the Bowie, too—there’s an electricity to his voice on that album, and it doesn’t come through warm and muted like many of the other albums of the early 70s. Instead, it’s wiry and wild and relentlessly playful, and it made my small directional transgressions seem like amusing footnotes rather than major miscalculations. When I finally arrived at the party, I rushed inside with Hunky Dory and a few other CDs in hand—my friend had requested that I pick out some tunes for his party. Perhaps he was there the weekend before, for Halloween, when my Steely Dan album got scrapped in favor of Z 107.7 by some vociferous girls in capes, who apparently “couldn’t dance to that” and was acting out of pity. Whatever the case, I quickly threw on the Bowie and was delightfully surprised when people immediately began to sing the words to “Changes.” I heard a couple of satisfied grunts and even a muted but passionate “I love this song.” Things seemed to be going well so I had my friend place a couple more albums in the stereo system to save for later. I waltzed over to the snack table with eyebrows cocked and feelings assuaged and as I did so, I started to fill out a small self-confidence checklist in my head: 1) I made it without having to call my parents to ask which way direction to go on 270. Check. 2) I successfully avoided a situation that would require parallel parking. Check. 3) They appear to have a full cooler of Dr. Pepper at this house. Check. 4) These people like the Bowie. They really like the Bowie. Check.
“Changes” hopped toward its ending and I smiled as I weaved through the crowds to say hello to friends and acquaintances. Soon, though, I realized something was up. As “Changes” finished its last chorus, I suddenly heard the fuzzed-out chords of the Rolling Stones’s “Shattered.” How come Bowie and Jagger were mixing? Was that even allowed? And, moreover, how come it was “Shattered” that was playing? That song doesn’t come to the end of the Some Girls album. I ran and shook the shoulder of my friend to see what was going on. He informed me, quite casually, that he had put the albums on “shuffle.” I jumped back a bit, thinking about the terrifying possible combinations—Stevie Wonder leaking into Sonic Youth, Pavement blurring into the Allman Brothers. It was scary, and I had to make it stop.
Later though, as the night continued, I started to think about the thinking behind the “shuffle” button and why so many of us choose it on our iPods and stereo systems. Ideally, when an artist creates a record he does so with order and sound and pacing in mind. Essentially, the tracks are being shuffled for us to suggest the greatest depth of sound and meaning. Why then do we need randomizer to undo all that work for us? It seems that with the pressings of the digital age of iTunes and iPods, we’ve lost our interest in the album. Things in the technological world work too quickly for a piece of art to be consumed in an hour. Instead, we place our value on the song before the album.
In my four years writing for Gadfly I’ve tried to avoid slipping into generalization and writing one of those “state of the music world” pieces, but sometimes a piece just nabs at you and you get a little pissed off and you find yourself drinking Sprite at two a.m. the night before you have to print this magazine and you need something to comment on. It’s an interesting phenomenon to think about, though, in the world of rock and roll. How much emphasis do we put on the single these days? Has the song even eclipsed the singer?
One of my favorite parts of musical investigation is tracing a band in all its incarnations and phases. It’s fun, for instance, to track the Rolling Stones—from tinny sounding white boys to psychedelic sitar players to the grizzly blues players they are now. Even single albums, like Exile on Main Street for example, teem with variety. There’s the rock and roll side, and then the folk and country side, and then the gospel and soul side. It goes on and on. Today, though, it seems like bands and artists have constructed themselves and their ideas around the single song and that, unfortunately, means the single sound. Even some of the most talented groups of our generation seem guilty of this—where album after album seem like repetitions and layers of the same fundamental sound. This is true of the most recent Arcade Fire release, The Suburbs. I was waiting for the stripped-down soul Arcade Fire record, or the solo acoustic Arcade Fire record. Perhaps the artists might have recorded it, too, if there were any kind of market for an album instead of a collection of singles. Rather than getting one band that absorbs many different genres and ideas, we get many different bands each devoted to a specific genre or idea. In the current indie scene, this is painfully clear. There’s your synthesizer, hipster pop bands and your noise-rock bands and everything in between but nothing that attempts to tackle anything comprehensive.
It’s an interesting paradox of the internet age that we find our music becoming more and more stilted and niched. In one sense it’s a sensible response to the technological market, where a specialized product that can fully appeal to one group is more important than a broad one that can partly appeal to many. But, at the same time, sites like Facebook are committed to an idea of constant iteration, which is to say that they are constantly changing. Think about how much Facebook has changed in the last year (I’m thinking of the invention and then frequently adapting look of the “chat” feature) and compare that to how much Arcade Fire has changed in the last year. The Facebook age means constantly changing ideas and a variety of them too, but it also means presenting those ideas in the simplest, fastest way possible. This is not good news for artists, whose work is less concerned with ergonomics and more concerned with drama and tension in both the simple and the complex, the accessible and the difficult to understand. Rather than encourage us to find the subtlety and variety over artists’ careers, the digital age prefers us to find artists, enjoy their musical shtick for a little bit and then throw them aside for the next band that sounds a little bit different.
This is scary stuff for me to think about, as one who grow up along side the Beatles—hitting A Hard Days Night in third grade and working my way up to The White Album in the eighth, when I bought a corduroy jacket and grew my hair out. I saw John’s songs go from “She Loves You” to “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” all in a span of five years. That’s certainly rapid change, but it’s also growth—and that’s where the difference lies. I’ll always prefer some songs as singles contained outside their albums—songs like “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Born In The U.S.A.” come to mind, songs that are too wild and singular for inclusion in something grander. But, as far as I’m concerned, listening to “After the Gold Rush” is only part of listening to After the Gold Rush. There’s that feeling of extreme connectedness, a personal bond that exists between you and an album. You hear the opening lick of “Rocks Off” on Exile on Main Street and you know you’re in for an hour and a half of wild music. Over time, too, I find myself returning more to the albums that I love more than the songs I love. For me, “Like A Rolling Stone” will always exist outside of time, as some liquid flow of energy that can take no context. But when I pull out of my driveway with a warm piece of GoogleMaps paper and an uncertain mind, and I slide in Blood on the Tracks to the CD holder, I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up someplace special.
16 November 2010
Casino Jack Review
Originally published in the Prep News.
In the Prep News’s recent remembrance of SLUH filmmaker George Hickenlooper, Nick Fandos chews on a quote from Joe Schulte about the director’s interest in telling stories about people living on the outside of the world they populate, and trying to fight their way in. “In a way,” Fandos asserts, “that outsider was Hickenlooper.”
It seems strange then that the filmmaker’s most recent work, Casino Jack (which premiered at the Saint Louis International Film Festival last night) is through and through a Hollywood film. After all, it stars the bankable Kevin Spacey and it boasts a deft, fast-paced script from studio sweetheart Norman Snider. More than anything, it appears to come out of a period of swiftly paced but grandly designed topical films like, say, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps or David Fincher’s The Social Network. Hollywood, it seems, has finally caught up with the wave of grimy, slimy events of the last decade. If the 2000s were about immediate indictments of failing systems in documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2010s appear to be about using those events as templates on which to construct tight, character-based narratives. Even this summer’s Will Ferrell comedy blockbuster, The Other Guys, built its story around cops who are out to bust money launderers instead of drug dealers. At first glance, Casino Jack is just one more Hollywood film made by, apparently, one more set of Hollywood insiders.
It’s hard, also, to immediately find the connection between Schulte’s outsider claim and Hickenlooper’s chosen subject: Washington super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. By all first impressions, Abramoff is nothing if not an insider. He shoots through back doors of the Capital and smiles while he hands Senators corporate kickbacks. We quickly learn that these are the men who really make things happen in Washington. In one early scene, we travel through Jack’s office and see the framed photos of Abramoff alongside Republican mastermind Karl Rove and House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Soon we see the Ronald Reagan baseball cap that sits on a plaque by Abramoff’s desk and a thank-you note signed by President Bush. If anything, we’re thinking, this guy is the insider’s insider.
Hickenlooper is also quick to marry the big-budget Hollywood scene with the politics of Washington—Abramoff had, at one time, produced a few Dolph Lundgren flicks and he and his lobbyist cronies spend all day spouting out classic movie quotes and impressions, usually borne from Robert De Niro gangster movies. Abramoff, in his slick-laced humor, tells off a Senator by stating that “Washington D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.” Certainly, Jack shows us that Washington, like Hollywood, is a world dominated by a tight relationship between approval and ego, where how you think about yourself is defined by what everyone else thinks about you. In the first scene, we listen in as Jack gives himself a pep-talk while he brushes his teeth. He talks about the “disease of the dull” that he fights against, that those around him who do not do and do not act are nothing more than slaves to mediocrity. There are few other moments of incredible outbursts of tragic-hero hubris where the usually mild-mannered Abramoff explodes into incalculable rage, yelling “I’m Jack Abramoff, the one Time magazine called the most important man in Washington.” I think of the end of Macbeth when the mulish king announces loudly to young Siward, “My name’s Macbeth” and then moves in to slay him. It’s hard not to wonder if Hickenlooper ever received that same worksheet we all did in Sophomore English about the qualities of a tragic hero.
It’s at these moments of incredible emotion and inflated ego that the viewer starts to wonder if a classic Hollywood piece is all Hickenlooper has up his sleeve. Around a fourth of the way through the film, we learn of Abramoff’s devout Jewishness. He says his prayers, he wears his Yamaka, and he preaches about using his money to give back to the community by creating a top-level Hebrew school and new addition to the Jewish Community Center. Suddenly our Washington, hubris-headed insider is something fundamentally different. He’s a Jew in the land of born-again Christians. And where his lobbyist cronies buy mansions and speedboats and shuffle from affair to affair, Abramoff stays at home with his wife and kids and invests his money in restaurant ventures to help finance his community projects. “I want to give back,” he tells his wife. And, of course, Kevin Spacey is acting it all out. Spacey holds a common and comforting face but, as he does in most roles, quickly subverts all that normality into something kinetic and, often, strange.
Ultimately, Abramoff is able to rationalize his work by latching on to a few moral footholds by lobbying for under-represented Native American Tribes and other ethnic outsiders. Perhaps the film’s most haunting scene plays out when Jack’s main lobbying partner talks about his plans to kick an adversary while he’s down. Not only are we going to kick him, he says to Jack, we’re gonna gouge out his eyes and rip out his teeth. “Don’t do that,” Jack says, “that’s bad karma.”
And, of course, what ensues is serving after serving of bad karma. After the first part of his community work, Abramoff’s financials start to dive and swerve until he gets involved in bad deal after bad deal. It’s not so much what Abramoff does, but what happens under his watch. A wave of excess and greed and rather un-kosher acts that bubble up around him start to bring him down. There’s also, though, the nature of Abramoff’s own vaulting ambition and his desire to no longer be the faceless man behind the scenes. Ultimately, the film finds incredible strength and power in the conflict between the Jewish family man and the Hollywood cowboy.
Hickenlooper, too, works subtly and tirelessly to make these twin personalities pull at each other. In addition to the scores of gangster film cross-references, he also adds a touch of an alienated hero approach. As Abramoff brushes his teeth and peps himself up in the film’s first scene, it’s hard not to think of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. These are hard-nosed characters, sure—they’re bullies, even killers. But they’re also lovers living in the gutter, outcasts that fate picks around and then throws into the drainpipes. Ultimately, Casino Jack makes us ask the question that all great films of its kind do: why do we care so much about such rotten people? The answer, I guess, is because those rotten people are people too.
What’s most interesting, though, is how exactly Hickenlooper guides us to these questions. Those familiar with my reviews will recall that I reached very similar conclusions at the end of my treatise on The Social Network. Hickenlooper’s film, though, accomplishes something that The Social Network, or any other similar film for that matter, doesn’t. With Casino Jack, Hickenlooper created a film from a true story of real events and real people that, in the end, still is a real movie—one that gains traction from ideas pulled from old gangster and noir flicks that the director must have spent hours and years consuming in dark rooms. Hickenlooper treats the world of those old De Niro and Brando films so seriously that he’s willing to put them into a story that the whole world already knows about. He’s willing to say that those films mean something in the way we really think, in the people we really are. It’s a daring act, and one that rarely is attempted, let alone succeeds. Casino Jack is a movie hopping between reality and illusion, truth and theatricality. Towards the end, we witness an explosive sequence only to find out it was all imagined. It’s this fusion between reality and illusion, journalism and filmmaking that makes our willful suspension of disbelief both easy and terrifyingly hard. Hickenlooper’s working from the inside out and the outside in—a technician and a rebel, a truth-teller and a mythmaker.
In the Prep News’s recent remembrance of SLUH filmmaker George Hickenlooper, Nick Fandos chews on a quote from Joe Schulte about the director’s interest in telling stories about people living on the outside of the world they populate, and trying to fight their way in. “In a way,” Fandos asserts, “that outsider was Hickenlooper.”
It seems strange then that the filmmaker’s most recent work, Casino Jack (which premiered at the Saint Louis International Film Festival last night) is through and through a Hollywood film. After all, it stars the bankable Kevin Spacey and it boasts a deft, fast-paced script from studio sweetheart Norman Snider. More than anything, it appears to come out of a period of swiftly paced but grandly designed topical films like, say, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps or David Fincher’s The Social Network. Hollywood, it seems, has finally caught up with the wave of grimy, slimy events of the last decade. If the 2000s were about immediate indictments of failing systems in documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2010s appear to be about using those events as templates on which to construct tight, character-based narratives. Even this summer’s Will Ferrell comedy blockbuster, The Other Guys, built its story around cops who are out to bust money launderers instead of drug dealers. At first glance, Casino Jack is just one more Hollywood film made by, apparently, one more set of Hollywood insiders.
It’s hard, also, to immediately find the connection between Schulte’s outsider claim and Hickenlooper’s chosen subject: Washington super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. By all first impressions, Abramoff is nothing if not an insider. He shoots through back doors of the Capital and smiles while he hands Senators corporate kickbacks. We quickly learn that these are the men who really make things happen in Washington. In one early scene, we travel through Jack’s office and see the framed photos of Abramoff alongside Republican mastermind Karl Rove and House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Soon we see the Ronald Reagan baseball cap that sits on a plaque by Abramoff’s desk and a thank-you note signed by President Bush. If anything, we’re thinking, this guy is the insider’s insider.
Hickenlooper is also quick to marry the big-budget Hollywood scene with the politics of Washington—Abramoff had, at one time, produced a few Dolph Lundgren flicks and he and his lobbyist cronies spend all day spouting out classic movie quotes and impressions, usually borne from Robert De Niro gangster movies. Abramoff, in his slick-laced humor, tells off a Senator by stating that “Washington D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.” Certainly, Jack shows us that Washington, like Hollywood, is a world dominated by a tight relationship between approval and ego, where how you think about yourself is defined by what everyone else thinks about you. In the first scene, we listen in as Jack gives himself a pep-talk while he brushes his teeth. He talks about the “disease of the dull” that he fights against, that those around him who do not do and do not act are nothing more than slaves to mediocrity. There are few other moments of incredible outbursts of tragic-hero hubris where the usually mild-mannered Abramoff explodes into incalculable rage, yelling “I’m Jack Abramoff, the one Time magazine called the most important man in Washington.” I think of the end of Macbeth when the mulish king announces loudly to young Siward, “My name’s Macbeth” and then moves in to slay him. It’s hard not to wonder if Hickenlooper ever received that same worksheet we all did in Sophomore English about the qualities of a tragic hero.
It’s at these moments of incredible emotion and inflated ego that the viewer starts to wonder if a classic Hollywood piece is all Hickenlooper has up his sleeve. Around a fourth of the way through the film, we learn of Abramoff’s devout Jewishness. He says his prayers, he wears his Yamaka, and he preaches about using his money to give back to the community by creating a top-level Hebrew school and new addition to the Jewish Community Center. Suddenly our Washington, hubris-headed insider is something fundamentally different. He’s a Jew in the land of born-again Christians. And where his lobbyist cronies buy mansions and speedboats and shuffle from affair to affair, Abramoff stays at home with his wife and kids and invests his money in restaurant ventures to help finance his community projects. “I want to give back,” he tells his wife. And, of course, Kevin Spacey is acting it all out. Spacey holds a common and comforting face but, as he does in most roles, quickly subverts all that normality into something kinetic and, often, strange.
Ultimately, Abramoff is able to rationalize his work by latching on to a few moral footholds by lobbying for under-represented Native American Tribes and other ethnic outsiders. Perhaps the film’s most haunting scene plays out when Jack’s main lobbying partner talks about his plans to kick an adversary while he’s down. Not only are we going to kick him, he says to Jack, we’re gonna gouge out his eyes and rip out his teeth. “Don’t do that,” Jack says, “that’s bad karma.”
And, of course, what ensues is serving after serving of bad karma. After the first part of his community work, Abramoff’s financials start to dive and swerve until he gets involved in bad deal after bad deal. It’s not so much what Abramoff does, but what happens under his watch. A wave of excess and greed and rather un-kosher acts that bubble up around him start to bring him down. There’s also, though, the nature of Abramoff’s own vaulting ambition and his desire to no longer be the faceless man behind the scenes. Ultimately, the film finds incredible strength and power in the conflict between the Jewish family man and the Hollywood cowboy.
Hickenlooper, too, works subtly and tirelessly to make these twin personalities pull at each other. In addition to the scores of gangster film cross-references, he also adds a touch of an alienated hero approach. As Abramoff brushes his teeth and peps himself up in the film’s first scene, it’s hard not to think of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. These are hard-nosed characters, sure—they’re bullies, even killers. But they’re also lovers living in the gutter, outcasts that fate picks around and then throws into the drainpipes. Ultimately, Casino Jack makes us ask the question that all great films of its kind do: why do we care so much about such rotten people? The answer, I guess, is because those rotten people are people too.
What’s most interesting, though, is how exactly Hickenlooper guides us to these questions. Those familiar with my reviews will recall that I reached very similar conclusions at the end of my treatise on The Social Network. Hickenlooper’s film, though, accomplishes something that The Social Network, or any other similar film for that matter, doesn’t. With Casino Jack, Hickenlooper created a film from a true story of real events and real people that, in the end, still is a real movie—one that gains traction from ideas pulled from old gangster and noir flicks that the director must have spent hours and years consuming in dark rooms. Hickenlooper treats the world of those old De Niro and Brando films so seriously that he’s willing to put them into a story that the whole world already knows about. He’s willing to say that those films mean something in the way we really think, in the people we really are. It’s a daring act, and one that rarely is attempted, let alone succeeds. Casino Jack is a movie hopping between reality and illusion, truth and theatricality. Towards the end, we witness an explosive sequence only to find out it was all imagined. It’s this fusion between reality and illusion, journalism and filmmaking that makes our willful suspension of disbelief both easy and terrifyingly hard. Hickenlooper’s working from the inside out and the outside in—a technician and a rebel, a truth-teller and a mythmaker.
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