Greed foils crime

Rating: 5/10 (19 July 2013)

Casino is tough to analyze with Story Charts. The casino racket plot (along with all the other subplots) all start at their highs and tumble down to failures. The only Controlling Idea I can think of is that crime will always fail because of greed. The Story Chart for Casino is not very interesting, basically everything crumbles because of the characters are up to no good.
My main beef with the movie is two fold.
One is specific about this movie: why make a movie about crime that fails when no one in the movie does any good at all and there is no moral center to the film? Since everyone is up to no good, the only rational way to keep our attention is to up the ante on how bad the characters become and how cool they when they are being bad.So a film whose central idea is about the inevitable downfall of crime betrays its central idea by making the characters "cool" and full of "attitude" and glorifying them. Seriously why do we need a movie like this? It seems to just perpetuate all the negative stereotypes about movies glorifying violence and bad characters.
My second beef is in general about Martin Scorsese. I feel films like Casino and many of his other works are mostly show-and-tells rather than true storytelling by characters, conflict and consequence. This shows through most obviously through the abundant voice overs that tell us how "cool" the characters are and tells us the changes that are happening as opposed to showing us through action and consequence. I think voice overs are the nemesis of absorbing movie making and Casino spends about half its time with its characters voicing over stuff that happens on screen: its like a holiday slide-show from "cool" gangsters.
I think Casino tries to objectively document a period of Vegas excess driven by a few characters and their criminal ways. It's voice overs certainly make it documentary-like. But its glorification of how cool these guys subjectively tells us to sympathize with these criminals on their inevitable demise.
I don't get it, why make a movie that suggests crime doesn't pay but suggest it's cool to be a criminal? How does this make the world a better place? If it doesn't, why make movies at all?
My Story Chart of the movie is at storycharts.ca