Documentary look at American mortgage crisis
THALIA FILM SUNDAYS: AMERICAN CASINO (Leslie Cockburn, 2009)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, October 18 & 25 and November 1, $11, 4:00 & 8:00
212-864-5400
http://www.symphonyspace.org
http://www.americancasinothemovie.com
“I have spent much of my career filming in war zones and postapocalyptic societies — Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan,” notes director Leslie Cockburn in a statement about her latest film, AMERICAN CASINO. “But I never expected such a disaster at home.” Beginning in January 2008, Leslie Cockburn and her husband, writer-producer Andrew Cockburn, began to delve into the U.S. financial crisis, focusing on the controversy surrounding the subprime mortgage loan fiasco. What they found was both shocking and infuriating. Bloomberg financial reporter Mark Pittman and Professor Michael Greenberger explain how it all happened from the Wall Street side, while mortgage bond salespeople and loan officers describe doctoring forms and making up numbers in order to push through loans that were clearly destined for foreclosure. The Cockburns personalize all the billions of dollars by speaking with Maryland high school teacher Denzel Mitchell, Rev. Almalene Wade, and Johns Hopkins therapist Patricia McNair, three individuals seeking the American dream but instead facing being homeless. And it’s no coincidence that Mitchell, Wade, and McNair are all black, as the Cockburns reveal that low-income minority communities were specifically targeted by banks and mortgage companies, who were building a house of cards destined to collapse. AMERICAN CASINO has several slow patches that meander a bit, as if the filmmakers needed to stretch it to reach its running time of eighty-nine minutes, but hang in there — you’re not going to want to miss how exterminator Jared Dever connects to the crisis.
The endlessly inventive Spike Jonze (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION.) has done the seemingly impossible, expanding Maurice Sendak’s classic 1963 children’s book, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, into a fun and fantastical feature-length film. Written by Jonze and Dave Eggers (A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS), the movie uses the ten sentences of the book and Sendak’s magical characters and transforms them into a world of wonder. Acting out after his sister’s friends crush his igloo and his divorced mother (Catherine Keener) ignores him in favor of a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), nine-year-old Max (Max Records) runs away and sails across the ocean, landing on a faraway island where seven giant monsters live. In search of a leader, they name Max king, but he gets more than he bargained for as the ruler of the cynical Judith (voiced by Catherine O’Hara), the dumpy Ira (Forest Whitaker), the independent KW (Lauren Ambrose), the mysterious Bull (Michael Berry Jr.), the sad sack Alexander (Paul Dano), the dependable Douglas (Chris Cooper), and, most importantly, the manic-depressive Carol (James Gandolfini).
In the 1970s, the so-called blaxploitation genre gave rise to such films as SHAFT, SUPER FLY, ACROSS 110th STREET, CLEOPATRA JONES, BLACK CAESAR, and DOLEMITE, movies of varying degrees of quality that tackled such themes as urban drug use, prostitution, and crime, made primarily by black filmmakers with black actors and comedians and rousing soul soundtracks. In 1997, Quentin Tarantino paid homage to the genre with JACKIE BROWN, while Keenen Ivory Wayans spoofed it in 1988’s I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA. Scott Sanders’s BLACK DYNAMITE, which screened at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, can’t decide whether it’s paying tribute to the genre, spoofing it, or merely remaking it, leaving it in a no-man’s land with some very funny scenes that ultimately fall flat as a whole.
Innovateur Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman follow up the brilliant BEING JOHN MALKOVICH with this adaptation about a screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) and his twin brother (Nicolas Cage) adapting a story based on a book (THE ORCHID THIEF) created by a magazine writer from her NEW YORKER articles about a Florida botanist (Chris Cooper). You’ll never know who or what is real or made up, and that’s a big part of this movie’s charm. However, the last few moments are such a cop-out that it left us pissed off, and not in the way Jonze intended.
