Casino – A Review
A casino is a gambling hall where people can try their luck at winning cash prizes. It’s a popular pastime for many individuals and it has numerous health benefits. Humans use hobbies to escape from the stresses of everyday life and a casino provides an excellent avenue for that. Gambling stimulates the brain and releases feel-good hormones, reducing stress levels and improving concentration and cognitive function.
While there are seedy backroom gambling parlors, large casinos are usually clean and safe. They employ security guards, monitor their parking lots and take precautions against violent crime that often plagues smaller establishments.
As with any large business, casinos bring in a lot of money for the local economy. This can help bolster local businesses and reduce unemployment rates. Casinos also bring in higher-skilled workers, which can increase the average wage for all residents of a given area.
Martin Scorsese dialed up the mob drama in Casino to an extraordinary level of ferocity, with gangster Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) funneling money out the front door of his Tangiers hotel for mafia elders back east while running everything from poker games to a televised horse race. It’s all brought to stunning, engrossing life by a brilliant cast that includes Joe Pesci as low-level hood Nicky Santoro and the legendary Don Rickles.
The movie’s production design is equally superb, with Northern California’s Matte World Digital using old concepts and new technology to create latent-image miniature/matte painting hybrid shots and an epic montage that recreates a 1970s Las Vegas strip. Other details that add to the experience include Scorsese’s relentless pacing and his penchant for picking out little moments, like Ace ordering the casino cooks to put “exactly the same amount of blueberries in every muffin,” or a scene where airborne federal agents circle a golf course while spying on a mob hit.