Word: casino
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...than-subtle pastels. These he color-coordinates with silky haberdashery and alligator loafers dyed to match. But underneath his sight-gag plumage lives a gray, watchful, calculating spirit. He's a professional gambler, always looking for an edge. Or, once the Mob makes him manager of a Las Vegas casino in the 1970s, the preternaturally alert defender of its edge over the assembled suckers...
...however, what you'd call a people person. And therein lies the downfall it takes Casino (or should we call it GoodFellas Go West?) three hours to record. Until it's too late, Sam is entirely too tolerant of his lifelong buddy Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), a cheerful psychopath who is more trouble than he's worth. Sam also falls into distracting obsession with Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), and that's not good for him or for business either. She's a hustler whose excessive interest in furs and jewels would warn off a more worldly man. As would...
...that has just been published, and the screenplay he wrote with director Martin Scorsese is at its best in its reportorial passages. If you want to know just how the Mafia skimmed the profits from its Las Vegas operation, or how not-so-wise-guys tried to scam it, Casino is instructive in an almost documentary way. But Scorsese, one of the cinema's great stylists, has evolved a manner for his film--a compound of mini-dissolves, jump cuts, freeze frames and optical effects--that is anything but documentary. It is a kind of objective correlative...
...long as Casino stays focused on the excesses--of language, of violence, of ambition--in the life-styles of the rich and infamous, it remains a smart, knowing, if often repetitive, spectacle. But in its last hour, as it concentrates more and more on Ginger's increasingly desperate and degrading attempts to escape Sam's smothering affections, the film winds neurotically in on itself. And neither the controlled rage of De Niro's playing nor the entrapped ferocity of Stone's, as she breaks definitively with her sex-symbol past, can prevent the film--and its audience--from sinking into...
...Washington, many see him as a captive of special interests. He has had to defend the $1 million in campaign contributions he has reportedly received from the tobacco and gambling industries over the years (he stirred up more controversy when he suggested exploring the idea of opening a casino at a local naval base). Achtenberg, for her part, cannot count on a solid gay vote. Some are angry that she quit her Washington position, the highest ever held by an openly gay federal official. Indeed, she is likely to take only half the gay vote...