A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This time I watched "the killing of a Chinese bookie".It is a neo noir film, about a man (Cosmo) who is forced to terms with himself as a man.A strip club owner who thinks he's got the world by the balls, makes a fiesta when he pays off a gambling debt ending with a bigger one. When his creditors lose their patience waiting for him to pay them, they force him to do a job, but he ends up trapped.At first I liked how the film was going, low light, quick scenes, I expected something great to come.Unfortunately, that didn't happen as its interesting mood gave its place to an awful directory, useless scenes and plot holes.First of all, all those shaky scenes made me dizzy. Many scenes had these close-ups on people's faces and blurry image which made the movie difficult to follow and to watch. It was like an amateur film. Sometime in the club, each scene looked like an ending to me, with all the music and stuff.An other major mistake is that there was no character development. All the characters were just so flat. No story behind Cosmo's gambling addiction, or his affair with his girls.At last, there were many scenes that just to justify the almost 2 hours long film (fortunately I watched the shorter version). I mean, there was absolutely no reason showing those long scenes of the girls' performance in the club.A major plot hole was the simplicity with which Cosmo went into the "Chinaman's" house, with all his dogs and bodyguards, killed him and a couple of them and left on his feet.The ending was kinda terrible too, with another long scene of the girls in the club performing and suddenly it focuses on the man of the show who walks away, like the audience cares about him.To conclude, the plot had potentials, but the bad directory and screenplay ruined it. Also, the acting was kinda good! That's why I give it a 3/10...

One of the most stimulating relaxations I know is simply floating on water. The good thing in living a short walk from the beach is that I get to do this every other day of nearly half the year. It's great at dusk, whereby the sea is not some abstract volume but the specific sensation of upfloat, and the early moon is that rock over there from me. Tangible moments of world, encompassing what the Chinese call the tao.No film even compares to the feeling, certainly no piffle Koyannisqatsi. But a few filmmakers come close to this totality as something felt. Cinema is nothing in a large sense, that is until a certain point where it becomes a most powerful tool for enlightenment. Cassavetes is one of those guys, and knows just how to use it.So I revisited this after many years as part of my Cassavetes series, this time watching the extended version. The shorter one may be tighter, more focused, but I'll always opt for a longer stay in his world.The film is the perfect summer night movie, one to watch with the distant sound of motor noise flowing through open windows. Cassavetes loves the night, the neon signs, the sound of traffic, the hubbub of the nightclub, the brushing of people in close spaces. The film is full of extremely memorable spaces, years later I could recall Cosmo standing in the entrance of his club, the backalley where he's beaten up, the empty highway, the phonebooth in the middle of nowhere, running from the Chinaman's house.Here, Cassavetes stretches two things. The existential noir where desire, not even so much for poker money, the desire it seems to look comfortable in front of people, summons the noir darkness. Usually in a noir, from that point we get some hallucinative fooling with the narration, here completely merged with the flow of things. The murky proposal for the kill in the cramped car, nothing telegraphed. The subtle menace and helplessness around the gangsters. The foreshadowing bang of the flat tire. The inescapable framing where he was the stooge of fate all along.And a more gentle self-reference, where Cosmo, standing for Cassavetes, gambles with money-people and loses. These mafia executives want from him a straightforward movie that ends with a killing, the simplest stuff, which he grudgingly delivers. The starkest contrast from the fancy, lively improvisation going on in his club, that both reflects and ribs at Cassavetes' own stuff. He does it his way of course, with fumbling, confusion and uncertainty. And still succeeds. Only The Long Goodbye rivals it in the crime sweepstakes of the 70s, no doubt inspired by this.Here, because of the adoption of genre with its clear horizon, the tethers are easier than previous Cassavetes films. Oh there is the anxiety, but that is part and parcel of the greater life. More than any of his films though, it achieves that sublime floating sense that encompasses a concrete totality. His camera excites me like no one else's. Antonioni adopts the transcendent position. Tarkovsky the one of flowing mind. Cassavetes adopts the position of tentative coming-into-being, his visual space has a thick and viscous quality, it has time, it has a tangible and floating gravity, all things coming to be and vanishing again in a cosmic vitality.Cosmo, a man of cosmic vitality. All through the gangster stuff, Cosmo keeps worrying about the show and the club. Because the show and the atmosphere around his club are of the soul of this man, the images and living space worth living for—dreamy and spontaneous, scented air, a little sloppy because it is re-discovered each night. But that is as much a role, the entrepreneur, as that of the killer, the gambler, the suave playboy, masks for the night. Not the original face. Deep down I get the sense of a weary joy that runs deeper than happiness, a mono no aware.Something to meditate upon.

"The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie" is not only a crime drama with a familiar type of plot but also a fascinating character study which explores the ways in which a flawed man's preoccupations and propensities could determine his fate. The main protagonist's vanity and high regard for the value of style provide the trigger for this story about a gambling debt, a murder and a double-cross and the circumstances in which his life is propelled into an uncontrollable downward spiral is portrayed as being both pathetic and inevitable.Cosma Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) is the owner of an L.A. strip joint who celebrates making the final payment on the purchase of his business by taking three of his strippers for a night out that ends at a gambling club where he runs up a debt of $23,000 which he's unable to pay. Club owner Mort Weil (Seymour Cassel) is a gangster and soon Vitelli is told forcibly that in order to pay off his debt, he must either produce the full amount immediately or if not, murder a Chinese bookie who has, for some reason, become troublesome to the mob.Vitelli decides to make the "hit" because he has no alternative and sets off to carry out his mission reassured, to some extent, by the advice he's been given that his target is a small time operator who has little or no personal security. To the astonishment of the mob, Vitelli carries out his task successfully and as a result, their plan to take over his business, following his death, fails.The Chinese bookie had, in reality, been a high-ranking gangster with a number of well armed personal bodyguards and Vitelli is shot and seriously wounded by one of them. Typically, for a man who's greatest love is his club, he returns there to carry on his work despite his injury and the fact that his actions have led to him being dumped by his girlfriend as well as being pursued by the mob and the Chinese gangsters.Cosmo Vitelli sees himself as a successful businessman with an artistic bent as he manages his own club and also has first hand involvement with choosing the musical numbers and choreographing the dance routines. He likes to impress others by travelling in a limo with his glamorous girls and also by gambling in a style that he can't really afford. He's also a passive man who, when things go wrong, simply seems to accept (in a fatalistic way) the inevitability of what's happening. Ben Gazzara, with his innate charisma, is perfectly cast as the likable Vitelli who's destined to never achieve the kind of respectability that he thinks he's already achieved.This movie was directed by John Cassavetes whose use of hand-held cameras, unusual editing techniques and improvisation creates an amazing naturalism and an atmosphere that's unsettling and sometimes tense. Cassavetes was an innovative filmmaker and it's disappointing that this movie never achieved the commercial success that it merited, either in its original 135 minute 1976 version or in the 108 minute re-edit which was released in 1978.

Artsy crap masquerading as a gangster film, is so annoying and boring, that it is a form of punishment to watch. Lines are mumbled and in many cases inaudible, not that anything interesting is being said anyway. Unbelievable chop shop editing, meaningless redundant scenes, such as the terribly boring strip club act are repeated over and over. No characters other than Ben Gazzara's are even remotely developed. The extreme closeups and hand held camera are headache inducing. Frequent light flares into the camera lens, and overly dark night scenes only add to the ineptness of this improvised mess. Avoid at all costs........ MERK