Word: pokerful
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Robert Altman ushers an audience along like this: in the poker palace at the beginning of California Split you get a sense that a thousand things are happening at once but that you're in on every one, invisible and knowing...
...microphones so that conversations overlap, swirling in and around each other fast enough that you don't follow any of them but you're getting them all. What you're catching is the way the energy of a room works, the way little events loom and subside. At a poker table you perceive the unconscious underside of the whole group, the cumulative impression that the individuals playing the cards and making the cracks...
Like all his work, California Split (slang for high-low-split poker) has its own bent rhythm. It gives the feeling of having been made with a stoned offhandedness. In fact, there is a relaxed precision governing everything, even Elliott Gould's mumbled throwaways...
Segal's is the more kinetic performance. He plays a magazine writer named Bill Denny, separated from his wife, living out a drifting fantasy of risk and destruction. He hooks up with Gould at a Vegas poker parlor, and the two of them get their small winnings beaten out of them in a fast parking-lot brawl. From then on they become accomplices in misfortune. Gould inhabits some sort of foggy half-world of the hard scuffle, keeping company with a couple of soft-core hookers who serve beer and Fruit Loops for breakfast. Segal likes the style, likes...
...atmospheric film about gambling. It has no story, no plot, but it does have a progression." It is the same progression as the unfolding highway. The movie's obtrusive sense of present, constructed from the fast win and fast loss, the tension of a big money poker game, the green felt of a Reno crap table, a bowl of Fruit Loops for breakfast, flashes by with the same dreamy transcience as Colorado mountains, Utah salt flats, Nevada deserts, and California farms outside a car window...