The Screengrab : kate bosworth

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.

SXSW Review: 21

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s not unusual for South by Southwest to select a high-profile studio release as the opening night attraction, but it’s hard to understand how a movie as slick and empty as 21 could have been chosen for the honor. It’s an anti-SXSW film if ever there was one.

Directed by Robert Luketic (Monster-in-Law), 21 is based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, although there’s no evidence on the screen to suggest that anyone involved with the production read any further than the title on the book’s cover. Mezrich’s book is nonfiction; Luketic’s movie is nonsense.

Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) is Ben Campbell, an M.I.T. student with plans to attend grad school at Harvard. The tuition is a little out of his reach: in the neighborhood of $300,000. His nonlinear equations professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) takes an interest in Ben and invites him to join an extracurricular student group he’s mentoring. These math geniuses have used their skills to develop a sophisticated blackjack card–counting system – or at least, we’re forced to assume it’s sophisticated. Screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb have boiled the mechanics of 21, one of the most engrossing sections of the book, down to a handful of gestures and code words.

Rosa and his students take the act on the road to Vegas, where they work the tables as a team. The big flaw in their plan is that they apparently only hit the casinos where Laurence Fishburne is in charge of security. Soon the entire operation is at risk, along with Ben’s future.

Spacey isn’t believable for a second; Larry the Cable Guy would make a more convincing math professor. As the team’s two Asian-American members, Liza Lapira and Aaron Yoo radiate ten times as much charisma as Sturgess and co-star Kate Bosworth in a fraction of the screen time. (The actual M.I.T. blackjack team was predominantly Asian-American, but heaven forbid we be deprived of bland, attractive white people in the leading roles.) Between the Scorsese-lite stylistics and the dumbed-down plot (including a stupid vengeance twist and an obligatory romance), it’s tempting to think the SXSW powers-that-be chose to show 21 first only to make the rest of the festival selections look even better.

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.

Citizen Cruise

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In her final, book-length interview with Francis Davis, the late film critic Pauline Kael lamented that entertainment reporters were always wrting about John Travolta as if he were stupid. When Davis suggested that this might have something to do with Travolta's devotion to Scientology, Kael said that nobody seemed to have the same problem with Tom Cruise. That was then and this is now, and the furor over Andrew Morton's forthcoming unauthorized biography of the brainmaster behind Days of Thunder is shaping up to be all about the Scientology association that has done some much in recent years to type Cruise as a towering weirdo in the public eye and may be on the verge of derailing his career. Once upon a time, gossipy speculation about Cruise (and threats from his lawyers regarding same) tended to be all about his sexuality. Now they tend to be about whether it's true that he is the "defacto second-in-charge" of the "religion" and whether his choice of Katie Holmes to be his zombie bride (over such proposed candidates as Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, and Kate Bosworth) was the result of internal negotiations with his Scientologist brethren.

Morton, who made his name serving as confidante and tell-all author to then-Princess Diana (producing a book that became a bargaining chip in the public relations war surrounding the royal divorce) and Monica Lewinsky; he's also written "unauthorized" bios about Madonna and the Beckhams, and reportedly claims that Cruise's current to-do list includes a high-pressure campaign to bring David Beckham to Scientology. He also claims that Nicole Kidman has kept mum about the church since her divorce from Cruise for fear that she would be prevented from seeing the two children she and Cruise adopted together. For his own part, there have been reports that Morton himself has been keeping a low profile for fear of violent reprisals from the Scientology Mafia. Cruise's attorneys have poo-poohed such talk and concentrated on making with the legal threats against the book's publisher, St. Martin's Press. As for Cruise himself, his lawyer Bertram Fields will say only that "He has no intention of reading it." It would seem to be implicit in this statement that for Cruise to pass up a chance to read about himself is no small gesture.

SXSW Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

As you read here yesterday, kicking off the 2008 fest on March 7th will be 21, based on the self-explanatory Ben Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It’s probably long past time to keep hoping for Kevin Spacey to return to form, but his role as the professor who masterminds the ring of blackjack geniuses would seem to be his most promising in years. Kate Bosworth co-stars as the world’s sexiest math student.

Other intriguing entries include Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary retrospective on the always prickly and entertaining sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, and Wild Blue Yonder, in which Celia Maysles turns the tables on her famous documentarian father and uncle, Albert and David Maysles.

On the back burner, there’s Michael Radford’s Flawless, in which Demi Moore and Michael Caine team up for a diamond heist, and Run, Fatboy, Run, in which Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg attempts to win a marathon and the respect of his family. It’s directed by David Schwimmer, if you want to start curbing your enthusiasm now.

SXSW runs from March 7th through the 15th, all over Austin, TX.

Trailer Roundup: 21

Paul Clark — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

If Hollywood is to be believed, smart people are only interesting when they're using their intelligence for selfish, greedy ends. So it is here, in a movie inspired by an actual case in which a group of college students took a Las Vegas casino by counting cards in blackjack. Of course, blackjack and math aren't particularly fun to watch by Hollywood's standards- blackjack doesn't have the built-in drama of poker, after all- so the trailer includes plenty of tricked-up filmmaking like sped-up play and funky camera angles. In addition, he's still trying to force Kate Bosworth on us, despite her being largely rejected by paying audiences (seriously, what was she doing as Lois Lane?). Still, I'll see this, since a friend of mine worked as an extra in some the MIT scenes, and I'd like to support him. It helps that this looks somewhat better than his last extra gig, last year's The Game Plan.