I watched a preview of 21 with
cooncat,
mizemm and
luchog. That was a happy thing and I'm glad I got to spend some more time with
cooncat before she flies off to Japan.
But the movie was mediocre. It was a not-very-believable dramatization of a real-life event. The dialog was dumb. The main character is somehow supposed to be credibly having a discussion of the Newton-Raphson method (which is a pretty elementary method for root finding that you learn early in calculus) in a senior level course at MIT.
The drama was predictable and also dumb. None of the characters was particularly believable. The only interesting thing was the card counting techniques and how they worked the tables. And I bet they didn't describe the real card counting system they used.
This story survives solely on knowing that somehow somewhere real people used something approximating the techniques in the movie to win a lot of money at Vegas. It would've been really nice if Hollywood could've told the real story and done some actual filmmaking to make it interesting to an audience instead of gussying it up in fake drama and bad characterizations and making it a different (and much worse) story.
I made the mistake of seeing this movie on a whim without reading any reviews. It is an awful movie. Horrible dialog, bad special effects, corny unbelievable plot, tons of historical inaccuracies, just all around a bad movie.
The worst part is, I get the impression that the people putting it together didn't realize it was a bad movie. At every turn the narrator is telling us how much of a serious, epic story this is supposed to be. If you didn't realize that the narrator is intended to be serious it would be funny. As it is, it's just sad.
I almost left halfway through, which I've only done once or twice before. I just couldn't see it being worth my time, even after I paid money.
If you all want to see a decent cave man movie, go rent Quest for Fire. That one is truly excellent.