He's not all that… How is it that Barry Hussein Obama Christ gets plaudits (which stop just short of, I'm CUUUMMMMIIIINNNG!!!) for "the most extensive discussion of race ever by a presidential candidate", when the fact is that anyone lighter than a dusky caramel who says anything intelligent on the topic is exiled by the same effusive punditry?

It seems like a contest rigged so that only blacks can speak honestly (or "honestly" as in this case) about racial issues and only when they feel like it and only when their closing statement is along the lines of "and this is why we need to tax and spend the wealth of people other than you".

Is it really all that courageous for a black politician to say anything that Obama said?  And if you peer more closely at what he said – rather than just enjoying the way it made you feel – isn't there a rather empty quality to his applause lines?  But once again, Barry can say he "understands" why [insert broad stereotype here] feel the way they do, and educated people mistake this for sympathy or unity.  It is more like emotional sleight of hand.

Remember, if you are a black politician you can say anything you want about blacks such as Barry's spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as long as you remind everyone that rich white people and corporations are still the enemy.

But American pundits are cheap dates, and smooth talkin' Barry Half-White knows just what to tell them.   

21… Last night I went to a free showing of 21, a movie based on the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich.  If you've seen the previews, you already know that 21 is going to be a ridiculous, over-the-top version of Mezrich's account of an MIT card counting team who hit the Vegas strip during the 90s and rolled the casinos for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the blackjack tables.  (My favorite line from the trailer and movie is when Jim Sturgess urges an unsure teammate with an emphatic "I can lead this team!" – pure corn.)

What you might not know is that Mezrich's book is itself a heavily embroidered version of real events.  By all accounts there really was an MIT card counting team that played Vegas blackjack tables working in groups to evade detection (counters had been employing this strategy since the 70s).  The team used disguises, fake identities, signals, and shrewd psychology to operate under the noses of pit bosses trained to sniff out card counters.  But beyond that not much of the book's dramatized story should be taken at face value.

In brief, counting cards involves one of several systems for assessing the proportion of low to high value cards remaining in the deck, on the knowledge that a deck rich in high value cards increases the chances for the dealer to bust and for the player to take advantage of betting strategies such as doubling down to maximize his winnings (there's also a slightly increased chance of getting blackjack, which pays 3:2).

The first counting systems were probably developed in the late 50s, but the concept of mathematically proven card counting first rose to prominence with mathematician Edward Thorp's book Beat the Dealer (in the movie a character is shown reading this book as preparation, which is rather like a modern medical student reading Fleming or Pasteur).  In fact for a long time the casinos didn't take the threat posed by card counting very seriously because they didn't believe anyone could overcome the house edge simply by keeping track of which cards had been played.  After all, there are systems for roulette, craps, slots, nearly every game the casinos offer, and they're all strictly for rubes.  But not Thorp's.

Eventually the casinos caught on – numbers don't lie – and they started retaliating against the card counters.  First they tried to argue that card counting was actually a form of cheating.  After the courts rejected this silly claim, casinos exercised their right to blackball anyone they suspected of counting, which meant keeping an eye out for suspicious, counting-like behavior (such as wild betting swings and studious attention to the other players' cards).  They also resorted to harassment – no, not by tasing counters and smashing their hands with a hammer like in the movie Casino, but by making card counting incrementally more difficult and less profitable.  Tactics such as engaging the counter in conversation, shuffling the decks more frequently, slowing down the pace of the game, changing up the side rules in ways that amateur players wouldn't notice but that counters would know significantly altered the odds of play.  The casinos added decks, limited betting spreads, placed the cut card further and further ahead in the shoe – anything to make life difficult for counters.  Some casinos even installed continuous shuffling machines, which makes counting for profit impossible because the continuous shuffle eliminates the game's "memory".

In truth, the casinos probably spend more effort than it's worth deterring card counters.  The unglamorous reality of card counting is that it is mostly a grind.  Even the best counting system offers a fairly low statistical edge over the house, which means that purely random swings in luck can make for plenty of losing sessions and long, grueling play.  The large betting variation required to make counting monetarily rewarding means that counters need large bankrolls to weather the bad runs.  If you like spending hours, days, and weeks doing nothing but counting blackjack hands and making small talk with abject morons while moving constantly from casino to casino, then a modest income could be all yours.

Meanwhile, card counting systems are unforgiving of human error – for every Al Francesco or Ken Uston who managed to make a decent living off card counting, there are thousands of wannabes who come to Vegas to beat the dealer only to get beaten (figuratively) by the game – just a few mistakes in tracking the count are enough to completely nullify the counter's edge and even increase the house's edge due to mistimed betting swings.  Books like Beat the Dealer were terrific inducements for people who don't ordinarily gamble to come to Vegas and lose as much as they can stand.  (The new movie will probably encourage another huge wave of fools to fly in, play some half-assed basic strategy while trying to count from a continuous shuffling machine, and lose their entire stake in a day or two.)

Getting back to Mezrich's book (which does at least admit that not all the team's counting trips were successes), by the end of it the reader will have the distinct feeling that he's been told a pleasing story that is not entirely true.  The biggest problem with Bringing Down the House is that almost all of it comes from a single source, former team member "Kevin Lewis" (real name Jeff Ma).  Mezrich talked to at most a handful of other members of the MIT team, few of whom appeared willing to go into any detail or corroborate Ma's many dramatic flourishes.  And by few I mean none.  The believability of Bringing Down the House rests entirely on just how much you want to believe Ma's version of events, steeped as they are in Mezrich's amateur thriller prose and self-aggrandizing mythology.

Perhaps the best approach is to believe as much as you can – the idea of a team of good-looking, likeable math nerds going up against fat Vegas pit bosses who make their living off the longest, dumbest con in the books has a certain appeal.  There's even some stealthy commentary on racial profiling – Ma's team is staffed mostly with Asians and women on the grounds that casinos are mostly on the lookout for white male nerds (who are after all the most avid consumers of card counting literature and gambling systems).  If you take this novelized account with a few stiff drinks, the inaccuracies and inconsistencies that Mezrich documents will eventually wash over you as you fall into the story's rhythm.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of 21, an excruciatingly dumb and formulaic Hollywood version that mostly apes other gambling movies and leaves out just about everything interesting in Mezrich's book.

Let me emphasize the witlessness of this movie, which is more a loosely stitched-together collage of dramatic clichιs ranging from Boy Makes Good to Hero Forgets His Friends (But They Forgive Him) to Girl Falls For Passive, Feckless Nerd – nothing has been spared to make the dumb story way dumber.  Don't worry, in the end everyone wins but the heavy, played here by Kevin Spacey, who proves once again that his career rise was an unwarranted fluke and he should return to roles such as Office Manager and Angry Bank Teller.

For no particular reason, secret Asian man "Kevin Lewis" becomes "Ben Campbell", a white and nerdy MIT student with stereotypically blunted affect who is also nervous around girls (get it, he is a nerdy nerd nerd).  Asians, who are keen to whine about anything lest they be left out of the multicultural pity party, have complained that the largely Asian blackjack team from the book has been deliberately whitened up in the movie:  namely, the male and female leads at the center of the story.  Having watched the movie, I begin to see their point, if only because Aaron Yoo, playing a one-note gag character who steals hotel furnishings, has roughly ten times the screen charisma of the diffident and mopey Sturgess.  Kate Bosworth is equally unimpressive next to Liza Lapira, although in fairness Kate Bosworth is unimpressive next to background extras played by relatives of the production.  To make matters worse, Sturgess is given what looks like a meticulous recreation of Jeff Ma's haircut, as if the only part the filmmakers didn't like was Ma's Asian features.  You can almost hear the Hollywood producer saying, "Can we make him white, though?  Plays better with our target audiences.  Better opening weekend numbers."

The movie opens with a retarded narrative device, wherein Sturgess, attempting to impress a Harvard official into giving him a full scholarship to medical school, tells the story we are about to see (the movie makes a weak effort to disguise this gimmick, but it's plain as day to anyone paying attention).  From there we meet Sturgess and his two incredibly dork friends, dorky that is in that annoying Superbad way of non-stop one-liners about their own dorkiness.  They are part of the movie simply to provide comic relief and to give Sturgess a paint-by-numbers moral crisis halfway through the movie (is he abandoning his best nerd friends for the glamor of Vegas???).

But back up a moment.  During Sturgess' interview with the Harvard finance officer, he goes on and on about how it's been his dream since boyhood to go to Harvard Medical School.  But of course that costs $300,000, money Sturgess doesn't have.  (In a moment of unintentional comedy, the finance officer seems to assure him that the scholarship is as good as his – if he can tell an amusing story about himself.)  If you're thinking the same thing I was thinking, you're wondering why you should care about a character's nerdy obsession to get into the most expensive, highest status medical school in the country – as opposed to one of many other, more affordable medical schools.  In short, who fucking cares whether Ben Campbell goes to this particular school?  If it's not too much trouble, he can just fuck right off.

After a perfunctory classroom scene to show that Sturgess has the right stuff (you can practically hear the script meeting in the background), Sturgess is led one night to a chemistry classroom where his math professor Kevin Spacey and an assortment of students are playing blackjack.  You see – and please don't laugh – Spacey has spotted that Sturgess has "it" and can operate under pressure without losing control of his emotions, all from grading his math papers, and even though Sturgess pipes up that he knows absolutely nothing about blackjack and looks for all the world like the limpest, sweatiest nerd on the MIT campus, Spacey must have this mastermind.  He simply must!  (At least if the movie had stuck with the minority recruitment concept this would have made some sense.)

But Sturgess, for reasons he cannot articulate either through dialogue or the acting that is required of him (but never actually obtained) in this shitty movie, turns Spacey down.  Even the promise of money that could resolve his convenient financial situation seems not to tempt this very plodding boy, who apparently can't remember his own motivation.  Since the script requires Sturgess to go along, it's just a matter of waiting through the next few scenes wherein team member Bosworth turns on the sex appeal because, hey, nothing gets a girl excited like a passive nerd with zero confidence.

And then they're off to Vegas, or rather to a Vegas montage where they just have crazy good luck at the blackjack tables and are soon throwing money toward the ceiling as is required in all movies set in or around Las Vegas, Nevada.

Meanwhile, Laurence Fishburne is feeling some pressure as his casino security firm is losing clients to a new biometric face recognition something something – pure bullshit of course because recognizing someone's face is only helpful if you already know that he is counting cards.  No matter how Fishburne gloomily frowns at the video monitors, the team stays just one step ahead of them.

Tension in Spacey's team sets Sturgess off on his own (I CAN LEAD THIS TEAM!!!), where Fishburne finally catches him, then of course works him over in the casino basement because this is what happens in Vegas.  Sturgess heads home with his tail between his legs to find that Spacey has stolen his drop ceiling stash (do MIT dorms have drop ceilings?) and is threatening to ruin both his MIT and his prospective Harvard Medical academic careers for not playing along.  We have reached maximum retardation.

I could go on.  21 is filled with laziness and stupidity and Hollywood condescension – you won't mind all these stupid things because you're so stupid – and worse than that it grinds on well past two hours, dragging its ridiculous clanking subplots behind it like chains.  It eventually grinds to a stop like a card counter after an 18 hour session at the tables and gives us the feel-good ending that every Vegas loser daydreams of while crying himself to sleep back at his hotel.