FILM REVIEW: CASINO

While Goodfellas portrayed the gangster lifestyle as an almost non-stop 24 hour party, Scorsese took a completely different route with Casino (1995), a much darker and more nihilistic film. During its initial release, although it had some effusive praise, Casino was met with a much more lukewarm reception from critics. Many compared it to the highly acclaimed Goodfellas, citing that it lacked the warmth and vibrancy of the former film. However, while it indeed is a colder and more brutal film, Casino is a masterpiece in its own right, as it expands upon Goodfellas' documentary-like approach to the gangster genre in a more epic and operatic manner.

Based on Nicholas Pileggi's nonfiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, Casino recounts the life of Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro). Set during the 1970s, Casino depicts how Ace, with the help of the mafia and his mob associate Nicholas "Nicky" Santoro (Joe Pesci), oversaw a lucrative gambling empire in Las Vegas. It also recounts his tumultous marriage to former prostitute Ginger (Sharon Stone), a relationship which gets further complicated once she starts having an affair with Nicky, as well as her former pimp Lester (James Woods). This starts a dominoe effect of compications that eventually leads to the end of Ace's gambling empire after the FBI catches up to him.

Casino uses the same cinematic techniques as Goodfellas to tell its story, with an almost constant voice-over narration from the main protagonist, rapid camera movements and edits to emphasize the sometimes frenzied criminal operations of the gangster lifestyle, as well as a soundtrack of popular, retro rock songs, along with an effective, recurrent use of J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion in the opening and closing credits, as well as throughout the film. However, where Casino diverges from Goodfellals is its much less sympathetic protagonist Ace, who is a stone-cold businessman who rarely seems to take any pleasure in the gangster lifestyle, much different from Henry Hill and his joie de vivre gangsters.

Indeed, Ace takes a very analytical and exacting approach to running his operations, best exemplified in his insistence on the chef at his casino's restaurant to have the exact same amount of blueberries in each muffin. Scorsese takes this same precise approach to the making of Casino, as he documents almost every detail of Ace's business operations in minute details. In one amazing sequence, Scorsese traces the specific trail of the flow of money within Ace's casino, from the gambling floors, through the kitchen, along a hidden location, and into a highly guarded secret vault. At times, this attention to detail can be exhausting, which may have alienated some critics, but Scorsese is doing this to put the viewer into the cold and sometimes heartless mind of his protagonist.

In this way, Casino is one of Scorsese's most demanding films, as it removes virtually any aspects of sympathy and warmth from its characters, and asks us as viewers to truly see if the gangster lifestyle is something we really want to join. Due to its general tone of joviality, it is easy to misinterpret Scorsese's earlier film Goodfellas as being a celebration of the life of a gangster. Casino, on the other hand, is an unrelentingly grim and dark film, filled with brutal scenes of unadorned violence that recall the nihilistic gangster films of Kinju Fukasaku. 

Along with this pessimistic outlook on the gangster lifestyle, Scorsese also employs religiuos symbolism throughout Casino, such as portraying Ace's Las Vegas casino as a sort of Eden-like paradise in the midst of a vast desert (this is exemplified in an astounding shot of the lights of the Las Vegas Strip at night surrounded by the darkness of a seemingly endless desert). Ace is eventually tempted by the Eve-like Ginger, who seduces Ace and manipulates him to bring about his own Edenic downfall. 

Also, Nicky is portrayed as a Satan-like figure, as exemplified by a scene where smoke seems to ascend from behind Nicky after he commits a horrific act of violence. Nicky's rampant amorality heightens this symbolism, and he serves in a way as the instigator for Ginger to destroy Ace's Edenic paradise when he starts an affair with her, much like Satan tempted Eve with the apple to bring about the fall of Adam and Eve from Eden.  

Casino opens with Ace literally falling through the air in slow-motion against flames and the glowing lights of Las Vegas. This image is Scorsese's way of poetically portraying Ace's eventual fall from the Eden of his Las Vegas casino empire. The paradise that Ace controlled was one of his own making, but one that had to end because it was ultimately an amoral, criminal enterprise. 

With its religious symbolism, anchored by Scorsese's Catholic faith, and its morality tale of a man brought down by the sin of his own pride, Casino is very much the counterpoint to Goodfellas' more lively portrait of gangsters. The two films on their own are masterpieces of cinema which need to be judged on their own merits to fully appreciate them. Goodfellas was a reverie of sorts for the exultation of youth, while Casino is more about the more mundane responsibilites of adulthood and trying to keep your career and success in check. Ultimately, Casino is a cold-blooded portrait of a man whose entire life was built upon his own self-interest; something which Scorsese shows ultimately leads to personal isolation and destruction.

FILM REVIEW: THE LAND OF HOPE

While the world is in the midst of a global pandemic in the form of the Coronavirus, and civil unrest is erupting in the United States and beyond due to the tragic murder of George Floyd, there is truly an apocalyptic feel to the start of the new decade in 2020.  Back in 2012 Sion Sono made a film called The Land of Hope, which was eerily prescient of the chaotic and disruptive events of 2020.  The Land of Hope was a fictionalized account about the adverse effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, and how it destroyed the lives of two families.

The two families are the Onos and Suzukis, who are produce and dairy farmers whose lives are uprooted after an earthquake causes a nuclear meltdown nearby. Although the government evacuates the Suzuki family to a shelter, the Onos are told to remain where they are because their property was deemed safe due to being only inches away from the government designated nuclear meltdown danger zone. The Land of Hope explores how the various members of the Ono and Suzuki family respond to the chaos wrought by the nuclear accident.

What reminds one of the Coronavirus outbreak are chilling, intimate scenes in The Land of Hope of people trying to lead normal lives in the midst of a deadly environmental disaster; the pregnant wife Izumi Ono (Megumi Kagurazaka) shops for groceries in a full hazmat suit, the elder Yasuhiko Ono (Natsuyagi) cares for his dementia suffering wife Chieko (Naoko Otani) by himself while living right next to the nuclear poisoned zone, the young couple Mitsuru Suzuki (Yutaka Shimizu) and Yoko (Hikari Kajiwara) wander through the eerily deserted and destroyed wasteland of the nuclear meltdown.

Indeed, The Land of Hope is very much about the will to survive and bring about a semblance of normalcy to ones' life while a society is falling apart everywhere. Most of Sion Sono's films are about outsiders who refuse to fit into the norms of everyday society, while The Land of Hope is about people trying their best to rebuild a society to its original roots. However, if one digs a little deeper, Sono may be using a natural disaster as a means to destroy the current society and rebuild it based on new values. It's no coincidence that the younger members of the Suzuki family are more willing to let go of their home and start a new life, while the elder Yasuhiko stubbornly refuses to leave his property even though it will inevitably be destroyed by the nuclear disaster.

While Sion Sono's earlier films like Love Exposure and Tokyo Tribe are filmed in a wild and hectic manner verging on inspired anarchy at times, The Land of Hope is startlingly restrained and constructed in a much more traditional manner. Scenes are allowed to play out naturally and without the use of rapid cuts or camera movements, and Sono is more interested in exploring intimate depictions of domesticity and quiet human interaction than splashy outbursts of cinematic lunacy. 

It isn't until the last act of The Land of Hope that Sono starts employing some of his more avant-garde techniques, with the use of disarming instrumental music and rapidly cut scenes of death and destruction, but until then Sono holds back his more outlandish tendencies. However, The Land of Hope ends on a note of optimism and renewed faith in the general goodness of human nature, something which we don't see too often in a Sono film.

Although it's not as much discussed as his more bonkers films, The Land of Hope is a refreshing change of pace for Sono. The Land of Hope is one of Sono's most humanistic films, as it explores the notion of hope and familial love as opposed to his darker and more nihilistic films about the baser side of human nature, such as Strange Circus, Guilty of Romance, and Cold Fish. Sono uses a fictionalized account of the Fukushima nuclear accident to reveal how human nature can transcend even the most intense forms of suffering. Like Martin Scorsese did with Silence, Sono is taking a break from his usual more frenetic fare to tell a contemplative tale of faith and survival.

FILM REVIEW: GOODFELLAS

Some films you watch once, and their memory gradually fades into oblivion. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) is a film whose individual scenes linger in your mind like blissful memories from a more glorious time period. Indeed, Goodfellas ushered in one of the best decades in world cinema (the 1990s), which produced such groundbreaking classics as Casino, A Brighter Summer Day, The Emperor and the Assassin, Ju Dou, La Belle Noiseuse, Underground, Princess Mononoke, and Days of Being Wild. What makes Goodfellas such an essential film is its virtually perfect blend of various cinematic audio and visual techniques to give the viewer an immersive, ground-level portrait of the outlaw culture of the gangster lifestyle.

Goodfellas is based on Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction book Wiseguy, which chronicles the rise and fall of the former gangster, later turned FBI informant Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), from his youth in the 1950s, through the turbulent and wild 1960s, and into the 1970s and 1980s. The film is grounded by career highlight performances of such legendary actors as Lorraine Bracco as Henry's wife Karen, Joe Pesci as the volatile gangster Tommy DeVito, and, of course, Robert De Niro as the cold-booded killer James Conway. Paul Sorvino also gives a memorably chilling performance as the gang boss Paul Cicero.

What sets Goodfellas apart from so many other gangster films is its genuine passion and commitment to the material. Scorsese didn’t just make a gangster film to introduce another familiar entry into the tried and true gangster genre.  Rather, he created Goodfellas as an homage to all the gangster films he loved, and also as a memoir of sorts to the gangster lifestyle that surrounded him as a young man raised in the Little Italy area of New York. The tone of the film itself, depite its grim and ultimately nihilistic ending, is almost celebratory of this lifestyle, which has caused some to accuse it of glorifiying the violent lifestyle of the mob.  

The truth is that Scorsese is not advocating the life of the gangster, rather he is portraying it without passing judgement on the admitedly morally corrupt characters he depicts. Yes, we see Henry and his cohorts living what seems like a grand and lavish parade of uninterrupted pleasure, but this is only a reflection of the reality of their lives at the time. From the instantly memorable opening of the film, when Henry proclaims over voice-over that he always wanted to be a gangster, Scorsese is making it clear to the audience that he is not making Goodfellas to outright condemn the protagonists of his film. Instead, he is providing us an immersive, ground-level, almost documentary-like portrait of the working grunts of the Italian mafia.

Henry, along with Tommy and James, are not the bourgeois and sophisticated royalty family of gangsters in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather films or even Scorsese's own Casino; they are more like working-class stiffs who are constantly trying to score the next big heist. The lifestyle that Scorsese depicts in Goodfellas is one of a brotherhood of associates who live each day like its their last. We see dynamic sequences of Henry and his close-knit group of outlaws partying at the Copacabana nightclub (which includes one of the most celebrated, uninterrupted, tracking shots in cinema history), staying up late at night after one of their many illegal schemes, and genuinely enjoying each other's company. 

However, Scorsese knows that all good things must come to an end, so after Henry and his gangster associates eventually pull off their most lucrative scheme, the robbing of the Lufthansa vault at JFK airport, their lives start to fall apart due to jealousy, paranoia, and back-stabbing acts of violence. Scorsese tells this epic story of friendship and betrayal using a wide-range of cinematic techniques that have influenced countless filmmakers. He employs almost non-stop background music of various pop, rock songs, complemented by a lively voice-over narration by Henry Hill that serves to not only move the story forward, but also mirrors at times the hectic nature of what we see on-screen. The best evidence of this is the epilogue of the film, in which Henry narrates his increasingly frenzied and drug-fueled activities during the day in which he was finally caught by the FBI and turned over to witness protection as an informant.

Goodfellas is one of those films where every element, from the acting, to the directing, to even the smallest details in the set design, works almost perfectly to create a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experience. Scorsese himself has tried to emulate this same experience in future films to varying degrees of success, from his follow-up film Casino, to his late career masterpiece The Wolf of Wall Street.  Although these subsequent films are classics in their own ways, none of them match the passion and intensity of Goodfellas, which leaps off the screen as if it was something that Scorsese just had to make. With Goodfellas, Scorsese is showing us the visceral power inherent in cinema, a force which can reach unprecented heights with the right combination of talent and love for the material.