Verity Robins
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
Calum Hutton
It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...
Logan
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
SnoopyStyle
In Fort Lauderdale 2001, Greek tycoon Gus Boulis, who runs SunCruz casino ships, is gunned down. This is the beginning of the end for Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He has built a career coning native groups, corrupted politics, and backslapping all the way to the highest level of Republican officials.This is an exhaustive look at one of the reasons why American politics is so corrupt and how it has ingrained into the system. It is also a fascinating look at Abramoff's personality. Without a doubt, this is definitely ignored or panned by the political right. The big question for this two hour long documentary is whether the story is understandable and compelling. This is a simple to understand story. The story is eye-opening. It is compelling for anybody who wants to know what is going on.
charlytully
First, in regard to CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY, Alex Gibney obviously is spreading himself too thin. Like most directors given an Oscar, he suddenly thinks he needs to cover every sub-genre in his field (in his case, feature documentaries), as evidenced by the quality of the six he has released since winning the Academy Award for his masterful TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE in early 2008. CASINO JACK is no exception to this slide. The title and opening imply the movie's main subject will be the way in which the U.S. House of Representatives' Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, R-TX used millions of dollars of Native American gambling profits to illegally force the Texas state legislature to dole out a half dozen congressional seats (stolen from northern states through the U.S. Census counting of illegal aliens) to his own country-clubbing GOP cronies.However, the first hour of this film is devoted to a peripheral sideshow involving DeLay's go-between with the Native Americans, "Casino Jack" Abramoff, and some Asian sex slaves duped into Northern Marianas Island sweat shops, chained to their sewing machines, raped by their foremen and forced to have abortions while dozens of "investigating" evangelical Christian GOP congressmen golfed at a five-star Hyatt Regency with Jack and Tom a couple miles away.Furthermore, Gibney skims over the relationship between DeLay, Abramoff and the GOP-hijacked pipeline manufacturer ENRON in one brief sentence, politely skipping over how ENRON intentionally bankrupted the state of California because Arnold Schwarzenegger did not want to wait for the next SCHEDULED election to become governor. (C'mon, he's already done a whole feature on this; couldn't he have had at least a TWO-sentence reprise here?) Finally, Gibney uses his exclusive interview footage with DeLay, jailed Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, R-OH and other members of the young Republican Class of 1984 which pulled off the recent economic coup d'etat against the American middle class to lob a series of softball questions that probably had Michael Moore falling out of his chair with hysterical laughter. If only CASINO JACK had a little of Moore's humor, its running time might have seemed closer to its actual 2 hours than 5 or 6.Ironically enough, the very same people "Casino Jack" called "m--f--ing morons" and "monkeys" within E-mails dramatically read aloud during CASINO JACK, that is, the Native Americans Gibney shows contributed $32 million in "lobbying fees" in one four-year period alone, have hired a Washington, DC, PR hack to write a book telling what a bad man Gibney is for impugning the reputation of "Saint Jack," according to a friend of mine who was contacted to help shill her book near one of the reservations Abramoff duped. Apparently, the reservation leaders in cahoots with Jack feel it is bad for their political careers for tribal members to learn they only got about $500,000 worth of actual lobbying, at the going rate, for the tens of millions they secretly funneled to the GOP shell corporations. This movie shows most of that money went for Jack and political soul mates to live the life of bazillionaires while rubbing shoulders at resorts with George W. Bush and most of the other notable Republicans of the times. All the while, Jack and his financial thugs were disparaging the natives, chortling that they were the stupidest rich people in the world. Now, to save face, these same dupes that were fleeced have to pay to have books written in an effort to paint black white (to borrow a phrase that one talking head in this movie says was Jack Abramoff's stock-in-trade).
chuck-526
"Casino Jack" is about the Jack Abramoff lobbying/influence-peddling/fraud scandal ...and more. It's firmly in the form of a "documentary", but with a much larger team and budget and higher production values than that category label might at first lead you to expect. For example, many scenes that could be nothing more than dry transcript reading are in fact voiced by an actor over an image of a moving reel tape player as well as the printed materials.The film is not particularly "slanted" or "one-sided" (although it's fairly easy to figure out where the filmmakers sympathies lie), and doesn't try hard to "demonize" any individual (although some subjects do a pretty good job of demonizing themselves). The film's main challenge is to circumscribe the large and somewhat ill-defined subject of money's influence on U.S. politics into a single coherent short story. Using the Jack Abramoff scandal as the framework to do that is inspired, but still barely enough. All the different sorts of scams that even that one individual was connected with can be a bit unwieldy (quick, how are garment sweatshops, Indian casinos, and a fleet of gambling ships related to each other?).The film's (non)distribution is awful; don't take it as indicative of the quality. As is usual for "Participant" films, this film wants you to think for yourself and avoids "blood boiling". That also seems to mean it hasn't got enough commercial potential to get the full attention of the right people ...but even so I can't figure out why it's so inadequately distributed that it's just plain hard to find in most markets. You have to seek it out - it won't find you.Lots of psychological background information about what may have made various people tick is presented. I found much of it pretty scary. Several political operatives -including some with a very different public persona- are shown to be driven by a "win at any cost" mentality and to have no sense of fairness nor appropriateness (let alone any discernible personal morals). Quite a few are shown to be driven by a "spy novel mentality", and to have played at being guerrilla soldiers. When the least offensive word to describe people is "paranoid", I quake in my boots. There's at least one case of a Luddite revulsion against modern technology and modern society in general, motivated by a rosy fantasy of small village life. And there's at least one explicit case -and several more implicit ones- of someone so totally engrossed in "doing a good job" that they only think about "the big picture" when reality clubs them over the head once every few years.The film lays out pretty clearly the tight connections between lobbyists and the administration in power at that time. It quickly moves on after convincing the viewer that lobbyists couldn't bend our government into doing something it didn't already sort of want to do anyway.In the end, the film tries to make the case that we're not talking about one bad apple, nor even about lots of bad apples, but about something about the barrel that causes apples to go bad. And the film suggests what that might be. The hugely rising and now outrageous cost of political campaigns is mentioned, as are the fact that federal politicians have to spend part of every day raising money, and even that they typically have a _permanent_ campaign organization. One politician whose career was upended by the scandal even explicitly says the words "public funding of campaigns". I was surprised listening to the people around me in the theater that even though the film's projection of this message seemed very plain to me, it could be completely missed by many viewers.While the film mostly focuses on the Jack Abramoff scandal, it does mention the more recent financial crisis, and how campaign contributions and influence peddling may have contributed it. The film very briefly states its point that scores of nameless participants in the system can -and continue to- do far more damage than one rogue "super" lobbyist ever did.
Lee Eisenberg
When mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to jail in early 2006, he was seen as the personification of corruption, along with Tom DeLay and Bob Ney. But as "Casino Jack and the United States of Money" shows, Abramoff and the individuals associated with him were just the tip of the iceberg. Alex Gibney's documentary takes the same approach to its topic that his previous documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" does, looking at the roots of the main character, and how deregulation led to the culmination.I had read in Al Franken's book "The Truth with Jokes" about Abramoff's fleecing of the Tigua Indians and DeLay's promotion of the Mariana Islands to hide the garment industry's sweatshops there. The documentary looks at those, and goes a little further into Abramoff's role in the college Republicans, alliance with Angolan autocrat Jonas Savimbi, and more. One of the most important points is how Abramoff and Ralph Reed used religious fundamentalism, specifically how Reed was making large sums of money through links to Indian casinos while pontificating against gambling.But the most important topic that the documentary brings up is that this is neither "a few bad apples" nor a conspiracy. This happened because the American people let it happen by neglecting to take democracy seriously. Prevention of such events in the future requires the American people to stay vigilant of their government, and of corporations. Everyone should see this documentary.
