The Screengrab : bringing down the house

The Real Deal: "21"'s Blonde Card Counter

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Mark Shanahan of the Boston Globe tracks down Jane Willis, the female member of the "MIT blackjack team", a group of collegiate math whizzes (not all of them from MIT--Willis herself was a student at Harvard Law School at the time) who stormed the casinos to use their card-counting skills to rake in the big bucks. This story--after a great deal of fictionalization, and after being filtered through the already fictionalized book Bringing Down the House bu Ben Mazrich--serves as the basis for the new movie 21, in which Willis is played, more or less, by Kate Bosworth. Willis, who hails from Mount Vernon, Illinois, is now a 38-year-old, twice-married lawyer working in a Boston firm. Once upon a time, she didn't like to talk about her involvement in the blackjack team for fear that it would hurt her career or freak out her parents (who finally found out about it six years after she'd stopped hitting the tables). But when she's asked now why more people aren't aware of how she picked up extra money in college, she just shrugs: "Sounds weird to say, but it just never came up."

Willis and the boyfriend who eventually became her first husband--both of the confirmed "math geeks", she says--got roped in because they both knew one of the big players in the group, Jeff Ma. "Jeff would occasionally have an expensive bottle of wine or champagne, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Then he told us about Vegas. I think it dawned on him that we could play blackjack and also give the team, which was mostly Asian and male, a little diversity." (Attention, Rush Limbaugh!) She soon discovered that her gender gave her an edge, since the security people keeping an eye out for counters tended to not suspect women. 21 fabricates a romance between the Bosworth character and the Ma stand-in, and it exaggerates the riches that came her way. As a "spotter", it was her job to keep an eye on a game and count cards until the time was ripe to signal Ma to appear, join the game, and start vacuuming up the casino's money. She and the other spotters were paid a percentage of Ma's winnings; Willis, who Ma says only worked with him about once a month, would clear about three thousand bucks over the course of a rich weekend. (Ma says that he figures he made more than a million dollars from the tables while the team was in operation.) Though the work didn't entail the James Bond dress-up techniques that are in the movie--and Willis stresses that counting cards isn't illegal, however much it may burn the casino bosses' asses--and Willis describes it as a "grind," she recalls getting a charge out of the excitement and the rush of winning. It's an interesting story, even if the moviemakers thought they had to "improve" on it.

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Narrative Films

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we took a look at the most notable documentaries playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, which kicks off a week from today in Austin, TX. Today let’s check out the narrative films. Unfortunately, some of the movies we’re most excited about don’t have trailers available online, but here’s the best of the rest.

21

Truthfully, we’re torn about this one. It’s based on the terrific nonfiction thriller Bringing Down the House, about a team of MIT students who become blackjack experts in Las Vegas, and it may actually contain the first bearable Kevin Spacey performance in years. But the casting of bland Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth has us wincing, particularly since the real MIT Blackjack Team was made up primarily of Asian-Americans.

Mister Lonely

A Michael Jackson impersonator falls for a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. "Meanwhile, a miracle is happening somewhere in a Latin American jungle." It could be unbearably precious, but it is Harmony Korine's first movie since Julien Donkey-Boy, so we can’t help but be curious.

New Orleans Mon Amour

Director Michael Almereyda made the little-seen but weirdly compelling Happy Here and Now (which played SXSW in 2003) in pre-Katrina New Orleans. After the flood, Almereyda returns to the Crescent City tell the story of a surgeon trying to get his life back together as the city tries to do the same.

Goliath

Austin’s own Zellner Brothers may not be following the Coens to the Oscar podium anytime soon, but they do have their own special brand of comedic deadpan. Their latest feature Goliath, about a man searching for his lost cat, got a mixed reaction when it premiered at Sundance, but the hometown crowd is sure to be on their side.

Baghead

Greta Gerwig is the undisputed queen of mumblecore, starring in no less than three such films at this year’s SXSW festival. One of them is the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead, the mumblecore horror-comedy about four friends spending a weekend at a woodsy cabin, where they are menaced by a man with a paper bag over his head. Even if you can’t stand these sort of inarticulate twentysomething characters, you can at least hold out hope that Baghead will do something terrible to them.

As a bonus, here’s a short film that will be playing this year’s festival. It’s called "I Slammed My Dick in the Drawer." We think it’s self-explanatory.

Morning Deal Report: No Dogs or Chinese Allowed

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:45:00 GMT

21, the adaptation of the non-fiction bestseller Bringing Down the House, will open SXSW this year. Allow me to editorialize for a minute on this subject. Bringing Down the House is the story of a group of MIT students — mostly Asian-American MIT students — who counted cards in blackjack to win big in Las Vegas. 21 is the story of a group of white, Caucasian, Rockwellian, turnipy-colored, white-ass white people. (And their one Asian friend, Aaron Yoo, as "Choi.") I guess there weren't enough Asian-American actors who needed interesting roles. Clearly, more Asians = less money for Columbia Pictures; it's not like they'd put money on the line for what I'm sure they consider a small detail. But it's outrageously disrespectful to the actual students, and to Asian-Americans in general, to hand over most of the roles to "audience-relatable" white actors, and relegate the one Asian-American actor to a supporting spot. Still, I suppose it could be worse; his part could always be played by Rob Schneider in yellow-face.

Mathieu Amalric, of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, will play the villain in the next Bond movie.

Less than a week after her assassination, Benazir Bhutto gets a biopic. The catch: the producers don't want to "create any controversy." (!)