Standard Scorsese rubbish

Rating: 4/10 (14 September 2008)

The unsavory, trite,dull Mrs. Stone was the very wrong choice for her role; De Niro keeps telling about how she charmed everybody and was a sex goddessrubbish, she looks like a hag! Pesci makes a good role, and Woods too. The main objection against all these mafia dramas (Coppola, Leone ) is their premisethey tend to be characterdriven, which is wrong. They pretend that the mobs portrayed are interesting as peoplei.e., as drama characters. They're not. That is why Pesci and Woods are good, while De Niro flops once againthe first two have wellwritten roles. The directors behave as if the hoodlums they are filming are Kane or the Ambersons, and not some scumbags.
It has zero human content. For a thriller, a genuine one, it is lousy and pretentious and almost flaccid. Who invented Scorsese, anyway? CASINO is meant to be satirical and sometimes funny; but Scorsese is one of the least witty persons in the whole Hollywood. The characters are such that you can not relate to; and not a single stream of sympathy is allowed. It is addressed and meant for the most dubious audience. It's MTV style is banal and vulgar. I mean Scorsese would have been supposed to narrate intelligently about brutes; but the story itself is rubbish.
CASINO is a MTVstyle brutal extravaganza, mindless and remarkably empty, devoid of any emotion and idea, and of overwhelming, overbearing bad taste; Scorsese boasts in cinematographic tricks that at least at the age he was when he made CASINO should have seemed less appealing to him. Pesci's performance is the only good thing in it (Woods, as I said, is very good too, yet his scenes are too few). Like other Scorsese flicks, CASINO takes pride in a sort of mean, cold, empty, academic formalism ,very conventional and dull. That's why Scorsese (even less than Coppola or Palma) says nothing to many cinema buffs.