And there is a code to protect the secrets. But there is an eternal gulf between the shark and the mark, between the con man and his victim. There is in all of us a fascination for the inside dope, for the methods of the confidence game, for the secrets of a magic trick.
#GAMESGAMES RATING REVIEW MOVIE#
Crouse is portrayed as an alien in this world, a successful, best-selling author who has never dreamed that men like this exist, and the movie is insidious in the way it shows her willingness to be corrupted. It is a modern American city, but none we have quite seen before it seems to have been modeled on the paintings of Edward Hopper, where lonely people wait in empty public places for their destinies to intercept them. These characters and others live in a city that looks, as the Seattle of " Trouble in Mind" did, like a place on a parallel time track. The way he talks to her is so incisive and unadorned it is sexual. Mantegna has a scene where he "reads" Crouse - where he tells her about her "tells," those small giveaway looks and gestures that poker players use to read the minds of their opponents. They speak it as it is meant to be spoken, with a sort of aggressive, almost insulting directness. The leading actors, Chicagoans Mantegna and Mike Nussbaum, have appeared in countless performances of Mamet plays over the years, and they know his dialogue the way other actors grow into Beckett or Shakespeare. They speak, of course, in Mamet's distinctive dialogue style, an almost musical rhythm of stopping, backing up, starting again, repeating, emphasizing, all of the time with the hint of deeper meanings below the surfaces of the words. At first we don't fully realize that, and there is a strange savor to the words they use. When Crouse enters the House of Games, she enters a world occupied by characters who have known each other so long and so well, in so many different ways, that everything they say is a kind of shorthand. What I can mention are the performances, the dialogue and the setting. The plotting is diabolical and impeccable, and I will not spoil the delight of its unfolding by mentioning the crucial details. "House of Games" never steps wrong from beginning to end, and it is one of this year's best films. Usually the screenwriter is insane to think he can direct a movie. Originally it was intended as a big-budget movie with an established director and major stars, but Mamet took the reins himself, cast his wife in the lead and old acting friends in the other important roles, and shot it on the rainy streets of Seattle. "House of Games" was written and directed by David Mamet, the playwright (" Glengarry Glen Ross") and screenwriter (" The Untouchables"), and it is his directorial debut. She tells him she wants to learn more about gamblers and con men, about the kind of man that he is. She comes back the next day, looking for Mantegna. She also becomes fascinated by the backroom reality of these gamblers who have reduced life to a knowledge of the odds. But he offers her a deal: If she will help him fleece a high-roller Texan in a big-stakes poker game, he will tear up the marker. The gambler ( Joe Mantegna) has never heard anything like this before. She wants to talk him out of enforcing the debt. Crouse walks through lonely night streets to the neon signs of the House of Games, a bar where she thinks she can find the gambler who has terrorized her client.
0 kommentar(er)
