For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Excellent but underrated film

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

In an era where it is easy to be distracted, where we have a short attention span, I find it hard to finish a film in one seating.But House of Games was different. Worth being watched twice. It will get you hooked until the end, just like a movie should be. tHE STORY IS ORIGINAL AND THE ACTING IS WELL DONE. bRAVO

Dr. Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) is a celebrated psychiatrist who, at the beginning of the film, we learn has just published a bestselling self-help book. However, she is not as good a therapist as she is a writer. She interrogates her patients with subtle intimidation which causes them to pull away from her well-intended treatment. One of her patients comes to his appointment and claims an underground speak-easy of gamblers are out to get him because he owes a large gambling debt. Her patient tells her she must speak with "Mike", and Ford decides to take investigate.She wanders into a shady bar with a gambling room at the back. There she finds Mike (Joe Mantegna), an amiable and well-dressed man who happens to engage in gambling. Turns out her patient's gambling debt is not as high as he had said. Mike makes the psychiatrist a deal: if she'll help him out in a current poker game, he'll forgive the debt. She agrees, and thus becomes enraptured with this cutting edge world of gamblers and grifters. She learns Mike is a grifter, a con artist who uses deception and cunning against marks who willingly give him money.Dr. Ford, bored with her position as a psychiatrist at a local medical institution, decides she'll devote more of her time to writing. Her subject: gamblers and grifters who live on the periphery of mainstream society. She insists Mike teach her everything about con games. Not just gambling games, but the games he plays to extract cash out of unsuspecting victims, many of whom don't realize they are being conned.David Mamet's foray into the world of grifters is one of the better offerings of its type. Similar fair include "The Sting", "The Film-Flam Man" and "The Grifters". Mantegna in particular makes the perfect con artist, whose charm and likability pull in marks from all social strata. In an interesting scene, Mantegna demonstrates why the "con" of "con man" means confidence in which the grifter gives his confidence to the mark. He compels a young soldier-in-training (William Macy) into giving a sizable amount of cash to a complete stranger at a Western Union office. A well-done and thoroughly entertaining film.

No use pretending there aren't some great lines in this Mamet masterpiece. There are holes in the story, sure, and I'll get to those later. But for those of you wondering how you transfer a work of literature from the stage to the film set, this makes for a wonderful study. You may have noticed how some techniques do not transfer from the stage to film set easily, if at all, but that's partly what makes this film so fascinating. It's a play on roles and their traps and freedoms.Margaret Ford is an intriguing character; educated to the point of embodying a robotic decorum, her faintly masculine persona as an educator is absorbing to watch. Her success as a psychologist and an author should bring her a sense of inner peace and satisfaction, but there is something missing from the equation.The fact is that Margaret is intelligent enough to know that she is not really helping people, only playing a role of elevated status in the social order. A role she has worked hard and studied hard to win. But now that she is secured in her success she has doubts about its true validity. She possesses advanced knowledge of a type, but have her educational activities drawn out the best in her or simply made her another cookie cutter personality? Margaret wants to help and it is this desire to truly help that gets her involved in some really rugged business.Enter Mike into the frame. Mike is also an intriguing character; soft-spoken and suave, glib almost to the point of being feminine, he also comes across as a personality conforming to a type of role, that of the shifty con man. He is playing the tough guy, but he's far too articulate to carry that off convincingly.So what's really going on here? What you have in 'House of Games' to my way of thinking, are males playing at being men and a lone female playing at being a female according to definitions that in the end prove as unworkable and unsatisfying as some of Margaret's psychology sessions with her patients. That these roles do the exact opposite of what they are intended to do, i.e., ultimately feminize the male in spite of all his macho posturing and masculinize the female despite her avowed assertion to want to help through expressions of her own compassion is what makes this so thought provoking a piece.Margaret realizes near the end of act one in this film that her intelligence and shrewd observational skills have just barely saved her from being conned out of a substantial portion of her money. At this point, she has demonstrated both Moral and Intellectual authority over these would be predatory Con Men. This is surely enough to warrant a chapter in her next upcoming book.But what does she do? She returns to have another dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight.Why? This is the interesting part and where the hole in the plot leaks like a squirt gun filled with water. Why does she do it? Why does Margaret return to consort with Con Men who have already tried to make her a mark and who undoubtedly will try again should she have any further dealings with them? What is it about her academic environment that is so arid and vacuous that she must at length seek out a criminal for a date? That this is in the end a date movie with a deadly twist is not be denied. It appears to me there should have been a male character or characters in Margaret's academic setting with whom she tries to relate but fails to do so. This would have lent greater credence to her rendezvous with Mike.Yes, Margaret comes back and bares her breast to all the misogynistic intentions and elaborated schemes of this den of thieves she has stumbled upon in her quest to truly help a human being in need.Why does she do it? To feel more like a woman? At the end, she attempts to exact her revenge on Mike using his methods which, it turns out he understands better than she does as he has been applying them most of his adult life.All I can say is I would have rather seen her wearing a wire and regaining both the Moral and Intellectual high ground she demonstrated at the beginning of the film to bookend it here.I think this would have been more interesting than seeing her become both a murderer and a thief. She could have watched Mike being taken away in handcuffs while she fought hard to stifle her tears at the loss of this love of her life. Somewhat like the last scene in 'The Maltese Falcon', only this time with the woman contemplating the stuff that dreams are made of...

I first experimented David Mamet with The Spanish Prisoner, and I found it unimpressive. The Mamet pattern is pretty simple and is explained extensively in The House of Games: set up a story in some edgy setting and then build up the audience trust in the proceedings, only to add a manipulative twisty ending.There is one big flaw with that kind of 'ain't I clever' artsy flicks, and it is exactly the same as with whodunits. Either the twist is too abrupt and it really feels like an 'in your face' conclusion, or it is too soft and you are bored because you saw it coming. Either way it's a loser. I reckon some like deceptive story lines, and yes it works once in a while: The Usual Suspects worked... on first viewing, but there is no way to enjoy it again afterwards.What I liked in The House of Games is the soft directing style, it's a bit too much on the artsy stagey side but it is really enjoyable to have a director know how to set up an atmosphere. Then I think most of the movie exists thanks to Joe Mantegna. He is very good and it helps because the lead is a pretty lousy character. And the actress is totally unimpressive: there is expressing a lot with little, and there is little little.I guess the bland introverted hero is a way to summon cheap mystery, but it is not really a way to captivate one's audience. With such a low level of involvement, no wonder you see the twist coming and then you just don't care any more about the main character, then the ending simply doesn't matter.