Reviews

This movie doesn't show the worst things that addiction can take you too but it comes close and it does show the risks which is appropriate given that it is about gambling. Mostly about how personal responsibility relates to addiction but it shows a little of the problems in society, with online poker being easy to access and easy to spend large amounts of money. It is quite an intimate portrait of psychological suffering giving the main actress a chance to show off and her performance is sincere, the rest of the cast is similarly convincing. Paris at night provides a good background for the excitement of high stakes poker as well as underground game. As someone who went deeply into debt and hid a psychological condition I can say that it is an accurate portrayal what can go wrong and how hard it can be to come back after burning too many bridges.

I'm not sure why this film was made, every character is bland and the actors are either talentless or badly directed, everything is by the numbers; dream sequences, an incredibly obvious twist, no social commentary and no examination of morals or motives. Don't expect anything particularly Japanese or French, this is as bland as anything out of Hollywood, it only inspires confusion and frustration. Like many movies made about writers this is full of awful writing, it should have been two intelligent complex characters matching wits, subtly probing, dropping taunting elusive clues. Instead it is one barely competent adversary foiling a totally moronic protagonist while dropping unambiguous proof and lucking into foiling the one able character who is then perfunctorily killed.

The worst sci-fi series I've seen, I cant think of anything I can compare it too that makes it look good. The pacing is terrible, nothing happens without 10 second close-up shots, 30 second establishment shots, ten different shots of the encased brains and every single one is stock footage. Maybe if they had cut each episode down to 30 minutes they would used less film or video and have some money to spend on actors or props or effects. Everything surreal or interesting is stolen (Warriors of plasma came up with the idea of a planet made of bio-organic material and the melting of people to feed it. Hitchhikers guide the idea of a small group of people stealing a giant ship from a universal government and goofing around with it) I couldn't find previous examples of every idea but none felt original. Everything else is stupid or boring.

If they could get Ed Asner why didn't they get other actors instead of people who go to the same church as the producers? And why did the protagonist throw the wise old sage character to the ground when he was never in danger. It forced the old guy to mask the injury out of pride and so the young guy would feel guilty leaving him with a life long disability. I guess thats why the main character refuses money though and why the old guy works him like a dog even when he volunteers for extra work. If the d-bag boyfriend is a bad guy because he is long-distance boyfriend then why is a soldier any better. He has good reason to be jealous, good reason to get her away from her hometown and over protective, controlling manipulative father. All the characters that are meant to be likable aren't and everyone else is the 'bad' boyfriend. How did they meet anyway, a wine broker and a saw mill worker?