Word: huck
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That marked the end. Like the sideshow, the monster movie, the snake-oil barker and the highway attraction, the fabulists of Huck Finn's world are gone. "The Weekly World News is kind of corny. It's so screwball and off-the-wall it feels like we're too jaded for it anymore," says Birmingham...
...Elvis' A Little Less Conversation, which told me so much. Namely, that Romney, like me, is not a man who enjoys foreplay. And he spent some real time on the "interests" section. I know the bands he likes (all cool except the Kingston Trio), his favorite books (Thomas Friedman! Huck Finn! No mention of Battleship Earth!). One of the groups he's involved in is National Campaign for Turn Signal Enforcement. I totally hate it when people don't signal...
...needs to take lesson in cool from his daddy, L.C. Cheever (Robert Duvall), a poker champion and a master of icy self-control. But they have issues - something to do with the way the old man treated Huck's mother - and they are, eventually, head-to-head competitors in a very big Texas Hold 'Em game. Huck also has - you guessed it! - commitment problems. He meets a sweet-spirited woman named Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore), who's a poker innocent, but wise in the ways of fiddle-footed men whose obsessions do not necessarily include settling down with sensible women...
...sense, the theme of director Curtis Hanson's movie, which he co-wrote with Eric Roth (Munich, The Good Shepherd) - a writer with a gift for patient, novelistic complexity - is the education of Huck Cheever. Even though that process proceeds via a certain amount of boy-girl, father-son clichés, the movie does not have a tired feeling about it. In part that's because Huck, who needs to get together enough money to pay his entrance fee for the World Championship of Poker and can only do so by "playing with the guppies" in small stakes games...
...Huck finally does make it into the World Series, where, at last, he commits what may be the first selfless act of his life, but before we get there, a lot of poker gets played and that's the movie's other great strength. Poker, obviously and uniquely, is a game of skill and luck - its drama consisting of talent mobilizing its strengths to minimize the workings of mischance. Wisely, I think Hanson (also the director of LA Confidential and 8 Mile) focuses on the game, which is the thing to which all his characters, except Billie, have utterly surrendered...