No deposit casino cash

Beginning with an explosion whose shockwaves expand across time and space like a narrative Big Bang, Casino is Scorsese's Gotterdammerung, a blistering and haunting last word on the culture of American violence, criminal enterprise, and civic life that he's mined since Mean Streets. Many commentators have held that Casino's impersonal, epic scale, baroque and overwrought narrative construction, and determinedly emphatic style are components of a multilevel critique he's never before attempted. True enough; yet at the same time Scorsese is bringing things full circle. Like the modestly scaled, personally expressed, and psychologically observed Mean Streets, Casino is a fundamentally introspective film that embroiders a classic tragic narrative of hubris and retribution with an episodic surfeit of incidentals, anecdotes, and asides. And its ultimate concerns are much the same as Mean Streets', in a much different register. Both films are about the price paid by those who serve the Mob, still vital in Mean Streets, progressively more decadent and enfeebled in Casino.

Following what the films' titles literally signify, Mean Streets is about territory, GoodFellas about tribe, and Casino about a sacred place, or religion. With glib irony, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) advances this reading in his introductory narration (Vegas is "a morality car wash," the count room "The Holy of Holys"), but it's materialism that's this tribe's religion, and money, the root of all evil, its God. Scorsese's genius, here as ever, is his insistence on depicting the interior emotional, psychological, and spiritual landscapes of his characters in startlingly heightened terms. With his busiest and most tawdry visuals and most relentlessly assaultive style to date, Scorsese is grimly intent on materializing in sensory and dramatic form the spiritual economy of materialism-its emptiness, its sound and fury signifying nihilism. The film's tone of frenzied but depleting energy seems precisely calculated to evoke the moral condition not just of its characters but of an entire culture.

Whereas GoodFellas is Scorsese's least complicated and confucted film, his most ironic, its characters' pursuit of the Good Life and its trappings almost native, Casino is a far more ambivalent and troubled vision, depicting the acquisitive urge in all its savagery, ruthless manipulation, neurotic compulsion, and rush to destruction. And the stakes are higher than in GoodFellas: Casino's mobsters are the cynical architects of an already corrupt civilization's accelerated decline, exploiting a mythic American Dream the better to realize their own. Per Casino, late 20th century civilization has perfected Darwinism into a scientically controlled industrial process, its managers as in thrall to its guiding fictions as their victims. How many of the film's arguments and conversations revolve around money. To his masters Ace is a cash register," and nothing could be more apposite for a man who reduces people to objects, who can only imagine Ginger (Sharon Stone) loving him for mercenary motives. In bell of wedding night consummation, we see Ace showing Ginger around their new dream home and the two of them stuffing cash into a safe deposit box--whose key occupies the narrative space normally reserved for the wedding ring. Amongst the film's more haunting images: Ginger curled up in mesmerized contemplation of the jewelry Ace has given her, her narcotic ecstasy insulating her more surely than the coke ever could. Here is an authentic glimpse of the spiritual vacancy of a life of things, a horror GoodFellas never quite admits.

And what of the curious immunity from retribution, conscience, and self-knowledge get alone justice) that graces both Ace and GoodFellas' Henry Hill? Neither narrator has any philosophical regret--their primary allegiance is to survival. Hill is the simpler man--could he understand Mean Streets' Charlie? Ace could, but it wouldn't affect him. He's pure anemic cerebrality to Nicky (Joe Pesci)'s bloody instinctive appetite (they are separated halves of a single soul), but he's rife with neurosis and denial, which quietly skew his narration: its very reasonability and assurance smells fishy--and sometimes betrays Ace's pathological inability to recognize his own emotional and spiritual shortcomings: He's still clinging to his protective self-delusion when he says of his wife, "I could never reach her, I could never make her love me .... I always thought she should have gone for all that money." (Nicky, who always makes his son breakfast and sobs at his brother's brutal death, knows more of love.) There's no discomposure in Ace's narration as some of the most painful episodes in his life unfold onscreen, because there's no pain. Casino's camera and De Niro's performance allow us to see a thwarted control-freak whose emotional repression encloses a psychopath-as-Organization Man.

Casino's retrospective narration commences with Ace's apparent annihilation by car bomb, and a credit sequence in which his soul hurtles down through an apocalyptic void of neon and file to the strains of a Bach choral piece, establishing the film's preoccupation with the spiritual malaise of modern civilization in the face of eternity. (That fireball generates the film we watch, it is the film's Big Bang, offsetting the Creation/ Garden of Eden imagery Ace's uses, describing Vegas as "Paradise on Earth.") To index his characters' proximity to imminent damnation, Scorsese plays off cinematographer Robert Richardson's signature burned-out highlights and hotspots against the garish neon of Vegas and, in certain scenes, purifying shafts of white light and spectral luminosity. In the aftermath of Nicky's vicious beating of a bystander who has insulted Ace in a dimly lit bar, horizontal shafts of white light all but skewer the characters, and cigarette smoke rises in the foreground as if these men are already smoldering in hellfire; its fleeting wisps are reinforced by the ghostly echo of "Satisfaction" on the soundtrack, linking the insanely disproportionate violence to the insatiable search for gratification.

Countering the narration's cozy, ingratiating frankness, the film's sweeping cranes, corkscrewing booms, and overhead shots convey a sense of detached withdrawal or descent from Olympian distance into worldly debrium to scrutinize the behavior of these ant-like schemers. An establishing shot atypical of Scorsese's visual vocabulary opens the scene of Stone (Alan King) convincing Ace to take the Tangiers job--a brief overhead of the casino/hotel complex hundreds of feet below. This visual register reasserts a God-like metaphysical perspective. Casino's strangely schizoid tone, at once distanced and frantic, flippant and straining, objective and eew! gross, reflects this dialectical strategy--pitting the visuals and the voiceovers against each other in a contest of rhetoric for the viewer's sympathies, for the right to final cut of this history, at least in this life.

Meanwhile, the film's painstaking mapping of a 1984 totalitarian system of spies, spotters, and Eye in the Sky closed-circuit cameras "In Vegas everybody's got to watch everybody else" and Ace's compulsive need for, and eventual downfall by, surveillance suggest a malign imitation of Divine omniscience--and by extension, of the

Movies. Casino's Vegas--man's creation--is a carefully constructed spectacle that doesn't just exploit, it parodies the American Dream. Ace plays God, performing miracles with money, satisfying his fetishistic need to observe employees and public alike with rigid vigilance. Naturally he first sights Ginger on a surveirance monitor, and later remarks, "My greatest pleasure was watching my wife Ginger work the room'" a telling admission of dissociative, masochistic voyeurism, of (self-)deception as perverse pleasure-spectacle. The film's most gratuitous-seeming atrocity--Tony Dogs's eye popping out of its socket as his head is crushed in a vise--literalizes the violence done to (movie-)watching by Ace,s regime of perverse spectacle. The reductio ad absurdum of all this is the humorless Ace's transformation of himself first into showbiz impresario and then juggling talehow host, personifying the entertainment industry's ubiquitous mediocritizing force--and prompting Nicky's apt comment, "You're making a big fucking spectacle of yourself." The Jerry Lewis of King of Comedy could have played Ace.