Yesterday we watched The Color of Money, I totally thought I'd seen it before, but apparently not cos none of it seemed even slightly familiar. Also, I don't think I knew it was Martin Scorsese, and I think that the reason for that is cos it's never mentioned in the same breath as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets etc which makes total sense cos they are all seen as classics, and I can't imagine that anybody in their right mind would seriously suggest that this is a classic.
I suppose that from the start I didn't really have much in the way of high expectations, and when I paused to ask myself why that was, I realised that I have this built in idea that Tom Cruise is shit. Or that's not it. He has his place, if you want someone to jump off a mountain on a motorbike or grin maniacally while fighting three baddies and hanging upside down from a fighter plane he's your guy, but I have never known him to come close to creating any kind of emotion in me while watching any of his films. That's not even that much of a criticism cos Mission Impossible or Top Gun or Jack Reacher or whatever don't bother to try for that, in fact they actively avoid any kind of boring emotion that might get in the way of the relentless stunts - unless you count anger or insane adrenaline induced euphoria as emotions. It's just not what he does. Tom Cruise is in the films to be an impossible hero who is literally the best in the world at every single thing he tries his hand at. I do remember thinking that he was the perfect person to cast as an invincible pool player who gets really annoyed when he has to pretend to be bad so he loses to people he plans to hustle. I imagine that's probably what happened in real life when it was being made... "No Marty I'm not losing to this guy" "But Tom, your character is actually a better pool player and he's letting him win. Don't worry you'e still the best" "Sure but isn't there some way for him to hustle them without losing? It's completely unrealistic that that guy could even think he could beat me, surely you can see that?".
Anyway, Paul Newman does his best but he's struggling with a terrible script and having to act with a spoiled child who is incapable of properly playing a spoiled child on screen. The stakes have to be the lowest ever too, Paul Newman's character is rich and puts up the money for Tom Cruise to play with, but there is never any sense that it will run out or that it really matters if he loses it. Also Tom Cruise's pool player seems to be completely invincible and so the only question is will he a) win straight away and make a small amount of money or b) manage to pretend to lose a couple so that he can bet big and then win a large amount of money.
So in this low stakes, low tension set up they manufacturer a load of stupid disagreements about things that don't really matter, in fact if you pay attention you'll probably notice that the arguments don't even make much sense. What are they actually arguing about? So that's the film, oh and it's really long, and it has a really terrible soundtrack with loads of brown sounding white boy pseudo blues. There is a pointless cameo from Iggy Pop. But that's about it. It's just a bad boring film really.
I saw a thing called Mississippi Grind not too long back which has quite a similar set-up with Ryan Reynolds staking some loser to play poker in low rent dives so they can make it to the big game. It's not without its flaws but it's a million times more gritty and dirty and fun and effective so if you do want to see gamblers and the seamy underside of their world go for that instead.