California Split (1974)

Gambling movies tend toward fable: The Cooler, Intacto, The Cincinnati Kid, even Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the goulash that is Rounders--all tacitly accept that Fate and Chance and Luck are real, primal forces, or agents to be angered, appeased, and bullied. The struggle against fortune (good or bad) is broad and dramatic rolls/parleys/hands mark the plot like a metronome (I have convinced myself that the poker scenes in Casino Royale are acid parody). These films pair the gambler's superstition with the gambler's degeneracy: The willingness to wager everything (the only stakes worth making a film about) is the mark of an action junkie, someone eager to burn his house down if he has a bet on fire department response time. Altman's California Split puts these two parts together in a way that avoids cliche: we settle into an immersive, barely plotted character study of two degenerate gamblers and only very late in the film do we realize that they are in the middle of a gambling fable that cannot end well.

Charlie (Elliot Gould) and Bill (George Segal) meet among accusations of cheating in a chaotic LA cardroom and bond over drinks, silly prop bets, and a mugging. Bill--an actual, productive member of society and only a casual gambler--is both fascinated and horrified by Charlie's life, with his call-girl roommates, petty ripoffs, and morning beer. Soon of course he's hiding from his boss, joining Charlie at the track, and getting in bad with his bookie. Two things really carry this movie through its desultory plot: First is Gould's great Altman chemistry--he owns the screen as a colorful, slightly menacing whirlwind, playing a character that is apparently about 80% Gould. Second is the sense of euphoric claustrophobia: Altman accomplishes this in part through his blanket of dialogue (in eight-track stereo!), which captures the non-stop and even oppressive hubbub of casinos and similar places; but he also puts together some great shots (Bill, giddy as if he's calling a new crush, gets off the phone with Charlie and gets a little tangled in the cord; Bill and one of the girls try to get undressed on a couch), where excitement, cramped quarters, and slightly oppressive close-ups combine into a great representation of the discomfort and thrill of out-of-control gambling.

Eventually, Bill is in deep enough that he gives it all over to a hunch: he has a "special feeling" and hocks all his possessions, and he and Charlie head to Reno for a high-stakes poker game. Bill goes on a heater and crushes the game (including Amarillo Slim); he takes his winnings to blackjack and roulette and craps; and we find ourselves watching the fable and wondering how it will crash down around them. A comedy (less for its laughs than its temperament) about the absurdity and pathos of gamblers becomes, in a matter of seconds, an understated, tense meditation on chance, expectation, and superstition.

This is a neat film to remind you what you like about "major" Altman--the bemused horror at Americana, the crush of people and lives, the setting as character. It is also a good film to remind you about the difference between confidence and luck, and the dangers of confusing the two.

[Photo: Egyptian Femme! EGYPTIAN FEMME!]

I will see Labor Pains, no matter what you say

So Lindsay Lohan's been in the news again. I'm not here to defend her choice of words, which though odd was probably not racist in any traditional sense. I'm here to defend my fondness for her, which has not died despite her terrible behavior and her even worse movies.

First, let's take a minute to remember her charming and delightful early days.

Behold the precociousness of her in the remake of The Parent Trap:



That uppercrusty English accent is totally recognizable!

Really good child actors with few exceptions (Jodie Foster, um...I can't think of any other exceptions...Scott Baio? Dean Stockwell, I guess) grow up to be...really good child actors. Think of Macaulay Culkin in Party Monster. He is perfect in the role, but only because he is a terrible over-actor playing a terrible over-actor. Christina Ricci has carved out a fairly respectable carreer almost entirely made of camp. But speaking of Jodie Foster, the first thing I remember seeing Lindsay in was the remake of Freaky Friday, in which she plays a Rebellious Teenager (or the Disney version of one). Freaky Friday isn't an important movie, and it does nothing new, but it is exactly what it sets out to be: cute, fun, competent, predictable. This is what I want from a PG/PG-13 teen comedy.

Which brings me to Mean Girls, a movie that slightly exceeds expectations on almost every scale. It's smarter than it should be. The cast is better than it looks. The jokes are funnier than you would expect -- people often point out that Tina Fey, who wrote the screenplay, was the first woman head writer on Saturday Night Live, which is probably true, but she was the head writer during one of the show's least funny eras. And yet.

I was dragged to Mean Girls (by Anna, who is my reliable date for lame movies, from Uptown Girls to Mamma Mia. So far). Before it left the theater, I had seen it two more times. Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, a high school junior transplanted from Africa, where she was home schooled, to a public school in suburban Evanston, Illinois. She is befriended by "art freaks" Damien and Janis Ian (hm), then betrays them on a climb up the social ladder of high school. Sounds like a boring cliche, and it is a cliche, but the script is so neatly crafted, the characters just three-dimensional enough, that the movie overall succeeds where it could very easily have failed. Mean Girls isn't flawless (it could be a little less homophobic, for one, and after repeated viewings the "Asian hotties" are truly cringe-worthy) but it's close.

LL starred in a few other fine-but-forgettable teen movies (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Herbie the Love Bug). And she was in I Know Who Killed Me, a movie almost but not quite absurd and unsatisfying enough to be entertaining as an example of How Not to Make A Movie. Then there was Georgia Rule. Garry Marshall has directed a fair number of my least favorite movies, but Georgia Rule is in a category of its own. It feels like it was written for the Lifetime network, but it's rated R. It is sappy yet brutal, naive yet loveless. I really really hated it.

Still, on the strength of my Mean Girls affection, I decided to give Just My Luck a chance when I noticed it in the grocery store DVD rental box, and I thought it was fine. It was cute and fun and competent and predictable, just like I wanted it to be. And she was in Robert Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion. For me, the PHC movie was just like the radio show - awesome when it's people performing songs and kinda pointless otherwise.

Anyway, I guess I would just like Lindsay Lohan to ignore Roger Ebert's advice that she "move on to more challenging roles." It seems clear that she can neither choose nor carry a heavy movie. But that's okay! We need more charming fun predictable character actors, and she can totally do that.

Oh, one more thing. Kristin provided the only plausible explanation of the weird line in LL's Access Hollywood interview. Turns out, she never said "our first colored president." Turns out, she said "our first unicorn president." Go watch it again. Now. She totally says unicorn. UNICORN.