ONLINE GAMBLING AND CASINO GUIDE

21 - A True Blackjack Story with a Hollywood Twist

Lately, filmmakers and scriptwriters have more and more seized on poker as an appropriate theme for good stories and lucrative movies.

But poker isn’t the only game that has found its way to the screen; recently launched 21 builds on the ever popular game of blackjack.

You’ve probably heard the story of the MIT blackjack team before. One of its members, Andy Bloch, later became a poker celebrity. Their card-counting odyssey through casinos in the U.S. and Europe has been told many times in articles and books and televised documentaries.

Now it’s being re-told in the form of a big Hollywood production featuring Kevin Spacey as Mickey Rosa, the master mind behind the ingenious scheme of card-counting in teams.

According to the trailer, 21 The Movie was “inspired by a true story.” This probably means that the movie does not feed us the true story but something similar that has been “improved” to please movie goers.

True stories are hardly ever good enough to make good films; they need to be improved. But in the case of the MIT blackjack team, the true story is really strong in itself and improving it too much clearly risks making it worse.

Won’t an ambitious adaptation of this true story to the unwritten rules of Hollywood productions take its toll on the original story?

The trailer seems to confirm these suspicions. Not only does the blackjack team end up being roughed up by casino security workers, like in the true story; it seems a fierce conflict arises in the very heart of the team itself, pitting its members against each other in a fight that even results in a violent outcome.

As far as I know, this part of the movie is pure fiction.

But then again, why the hell not? Give it to us all guns blazing! We already know the true story, and we already love blackjack, so no harm has been done.

/Spinner

Bookmark this post:       

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 1:31 am and is filed under Other, Blackjack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.