Gone are the days of the dapper, dashing James Bond. in the 60′s and 70′s Jimbo would be in command of every situation, never get a smudge on his suit, and only engage in the classiest activities.  That’s why he played the high brow, gentleman’s game of baccarat. Now we have…

Daniel Craig’s Bond is not quite as confident and his suit get mussed far more often that Connery’s ever did, but he is playing a younger, more inexperienced secret agent. He’s a little rougher and dirtier around the edge’s and in Casino Royale, to go along with this new image, he played poker.

Giving the axe to the little known, lesser understood game was actually a smart idea beyond the simple fact that poker was a hot property in 2006. With a movie going populace that could be expected to have familiarity with poker as a climactic device, it was the perfect game to add suspense to the film without being bogged down with a lot of explanation. The audience could be trusted to just get it. They already knew the hand values and the flop/turn/river sequence of betting thanks to ESPN.

This film uses the game to very good effect. although I must say that I’ve never seen four of a kind come up against stright flushes more often then in the movies. I mean how often do regular poker players see either of those hands period? The prospect of them both coming up on the same hand is astronomical. I’ve certainly never seen it happen. Well, thats just the magic of the movies.

Last night my wife and I went to the opening of 21, the movie based on Ben Mezrich’s book “Bringing Down the House”.   We were looking forward to the movie.   My wife had written a very positive review of “Bringing Down the House”, a book that she and I both enjoyed a lot.   She had done a great interview of Ben Mezrich, which showed how funny a guy he is.   And the trailer of 21 made it look like it would be a fun movie.

We were disappointed!  21 isn’t terrible.  It’s definitely watchable.  But it is nowhere near as good as the book, and in important ways it strays from the book.  Below are five reasons why I didn’t like the movie.

1. The main character, Ben Campbell, who is played well by Jim Sturgess, does something to the leader of the team, Micky Rosa, played by Kevin Spacy, which makes Ben Campbell look like a real jerk.  I think that the screenwriters thought that what Campbell did was both clever and justified.  It was neither.  It wasn’t clever because if Mickey Rosa was as intelligent as he was portrayed, he would have never fallen for it.  It wasn’t justified, because he wasn’t compelled to do it, which the movie seems to suggest.  And, as they teach you in elementary school, two wrongs don’t make a right.  Moreover, what Ben did to Mickey was something that didn’t occur in the book, which was supposed to represent what really happened. 

2. In the beginning of the movie, Micky Rosa is teaching a class in mathematics and he presents what is sometimes called the ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ logic puzzle.  Of course, Campbell gives the correct answer to the problem in no time at all.  But his explanation for his answer is pretty lame.   This isn’t a reason why the movie is not good; rather, it’s a reason why I didn’t like it.  I use the ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ puzzle as fun way to break the ice when I teach, but now that the answer is part of popular culture, some of my students will know it, without understanding the explanation for it.  As you can probably see, this will make it more difficult for me to use the puzzle in class.

3. The cinemotography is kind of drab, like MIT, the school that Ben Campbell attends.  From the trailer I thought it was going to be a slick, stylistic, fast-paced movie, something like Scorcese’s ‘The Color of Money’.  But it had more of a feel of a made-for-TV movie.

4. The movie uses a a certain cliched plot device which involves Ben having trouble paying for medical school.  It’s unrealistic.  Most mds take out loans and pay them back with their salaries.  It is not part of the book.  It takes too long to develop.  It isn’t necessary to tell the real story, which is more interesting.   If you’re as smart as Ben Campbell, you probably wouldn’t go to medical school.  I believe that Hollywood incorrectly thinks that if you don’t give people what they’re used to in terms of plot devices then they won’t like it.  Grow up.

5. Ben Campbell’s friends in the movie, a couple of well-acted MIT geeks, are thrown in for humor.  And there is a moment where they did make me laugh.  But again it was so formulaic and kind of sentimental.  Campbell’s friends are real nerds.  But Campbell is good looking and a little awkward.  A bit unrealistic.  Instead of wasting their time developing these characters, the screenwriters should have worked on developing Ben Campbell’s character as he changes from a moral upstanding brilliant mind to a person who is corrupted by the temptations of Vegas.  This would have made for a much more interesting movie.

I give the move 2 stars out of 5.   

You read the book review of “Bringing Down the House” here. You read the interview with Ben Mezrich here. And now you can enjoy the trailer of the movie 21 here at PokerMoments.

You might be wondering why 21 wasn’t called “Bringing Down the House”, since it was based on Ben Mezrich’s fun book of that title. The answer is that there is already a movie of that title with Steve Martin and Queen Latifah.

I finally saw Rounders (1998) last night.  It was a good poker movie.  There were, however, a couple of weak scenes.  For example, Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon, is supposed to be this brilliant poker player.  But he looks pretty amatuerish in the opening scene, when he loses all his money in one hand to this guy called the KGB guy, played by John Malkovich.  Also, there is a difficult to believe scene when Mike McDermott and the Worm, played by Edward Norton, have a dialogue after both are beaten up for cheating.  Despite their bloody faces, then don’t seem as sore as they should be given the way they were manhandled.  

There were some decent poker quotes in the movie.  Here are my five favorites (all are taken from IMDB):

1. If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker. (Mike McDermott)

2. In the poker game of life, women are the rake man.  (Worm)

3. You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle.  But you can’t win much either. (Mike McDermott)

4. It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money. (Mike McDermott)

5. In “Confessions of a Winning Poker Player,” Jack King said, “Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.” It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can’t stop thinking about the way I lost it.  (Mike McDermott)