shooting scene images from movie casino 1995

He films Las Vegas in all its Technicolor glory and grotesquery, a symphonic swirl of lights, sex, currency, and gore.

In its cut-up aesthetics and spurning of the subtle, Casino was Scorsese’s angriest, most punkish film since Taxi Driver and joined two other exciting films from the mid 90s-Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls -in offering a purposefully excessive take on the city of excess like those films, though not as severely, Casino was greeted without adulation.īut Casino is Scorsese’s great burn-it-down statement, the furthest end of his disgust and delight in everything seamy in American culture. It pointedly lacks the comforting blue-collar attitude of the Goodfellas crew Jimmy the Gent, Tommy, and Paulie are lovable when contrasted with the at-all-costs obscenity of Las Vegas and its resident hoods. Casino is another logical step up from the street-level quasi-hoods of Mean Streets. Richardson’s camera drinks in a landscape of bad wigs and make-up caked faces, cocaine and blood, phony glamour and phonier humanity.įor all this, Casino is a film about marriage-bad marriage on a Shakespearean scale undone by what kills most marriages: money, distrust, and infidelity.

Scorsese’s first film in 12 years without Michael Ballhaus is instead filmed in the bolder colors and light-diffusing style of Robert Richardson. The film that erupts in its opening scene-literally, as Robert De Niro seems to be blown sky high by a car bomb to strains of Bach’s “Matthaus Passion”-becomes an opera of the sordid (the credits also represent the last work of the great film editor and title designer Saul Bass). It’s a film where a shot from within a cocaine snorter’s straw, white flakes hoovered up towards the camera like a sandstorm, seems subtle. If The Age of Innocence is Scorsese at his most poised, Casino is Marty gone primeval. Scorsese’s attempts to shunt narrative and explore worlds through montage and voiceover, to fuse high and low culture, to gain panoramic insight into America, to show violence as harsh and ugly as possible-all pushed to the far edge in Casino. Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in WordsĬasino presents the rare, inspiring sight of a director pushing his capacities, obsessions, and stylistic experimentation to the limit.

Shooting scene images from movie casino 1995