Niclucky

The movie is about that kid, whose father is a bus driver named Lorenzo, and whose hero is a street-corner Mafioso named Sonny. The two men dislike one another, but they both like the kid, and between them he gets some advice that is useful all of his life. De Niro plays Lorenzo, and Palminteri plays Sonny--a smart, violent, lonely man who sometimes sighs, 'Just remember this, kid. Nobody really cares.'

We went to see Uncut Gems on Christmas Day. It was the highest-rated movie available, and while we didn’t know much about it, we thought it would be a safe bet. Uncut Gems kills your Christmas spirit with the speed and power of a baseball bat hit on the side of the head. Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is a New York City jeweler and compulsive.

Palminteri, who is around 40, has been knocking around for years on the fringes of the movies. You may have glimpsed him in some minor roles. He knew 'A Bronx Tale' was his shot at the gold ring, and he wasn't going to let anybody take it away from him. He got some big offers from Hollywood studios for the screenplay, but when he said he wanted to play Sonny, the studios shook their heads.

They said the role required an established star. Someone like Robert De Niro.

1. After the scene where Batman talks to Chase on the rooftop and lands in the batmobile, that is where the Two-Face car battle takes place in the uncut version. Yes, the scene where the Riddler bats.
2. Casino is an extremely violent and rather emotional film. Since the attacker is known for hard blows. The baseball bat scene is graphic and lengthy. The Parents Guide items below may give away important plot points. Violence & Gore. Near the end of the movie, there is a scene of men being executed.

The afternoon after the movie played in Toronto, De Niro smiled at that irony. 'I went to Chazz,' he said, 'and I told him, they'll promise you you're gonna do it, and eventually somewhere down the line they're gonna come to someone like me. But if you let me direct this screenplay, I'm telling you that you'll play Sonny.'

It was a neat irony: The only way to keep De Niro out of the role was to let him direct the picture. Palminteri was in the same position as another unknown Italian-American from New York, Sylvester Stallone, who in 1975 had a screenplay all the studios wanted--but they didn't want Stallone to play Rocky. Palminteri, who was broke but determined, held on, and the result, as it was with 'Rocky,' is a great performance we might not have gotten from anybody else, even De Niro.

The movie lives and breaths the street life of the Bronx, as young Calogero, nicknamed 'C,' grows up getting sound advice from his father. 'Nothing is worse than a wasted talent,' he tells his son. He is a hard-working family man with good values, and orders his son to stay away from Sonny and the other neighborhood mobsters who hang out at the corner saloon. But C is fascinated by them, and drawn to Sonny, who hires him to run numbers and also gives him advice.

In a routine screenplay, this situation would be predictable: The bus driver would give good advice, the mobster would give evil advice, and eventually there would be a violent showdown. But 'A Bronx Tale' is not ordinary, and the boy is able to learn from both mentors. One of the things he learns is to be true to his own heart, and when, in high school, he develops a crush on a black girl from a nearby neighborhood, he finds the courage to go out with her despite the racism on both sides of the local dividing line. In scenes so carefully written that every word is important, both Sonny and the father react to the kid's decision, and their advice is about the same: Do what you gotta do, to feel good about yourself.

Talking about his movie after the Toronto premiere, Chazz Palminteri looks larger and younger than Sonny, but there is an essential niceness that feels the same. He said he wanted his movie to give a more balanced portrait of Italian-American communities.

'Too many movies speak about us as just gombas or Mafioso,' he said. 'I wanted a movie about the working man, about a real Italian-American community. The real fabric comes from working men. My dad was similar to Lorenzo. I used to see him put his boots on in the morning to go out and drive the bus. He'd get up in the rain, the snow. smiling, just to make his children's' lives better. That's all he wanted. No dreams to be this, or that. To me, a man like that is a hero, and I wanted the movie to reflect that.'

Is your father still alive?

'Yes, and he still drives a bus. He'll see the movie when it opens in New York.'

Was there also a Sonny in your life?

'Not a character like that, although of course living in the neighborhood you know who the guys were. But I did see a killing as a young boy, and it happened almost exactly the way it does in the movie. I saw it all. My father grabbed me by the arm and hauled me upstairs.'

A week ago, I told him, I was talking to Martin Scorsese, who grew up in Little Italy, and had just seen 'A Bronx Tale.' He said his own upbringing was similar: 'My father was not involved with the Mafia, but, living in the neighborhood, he had to figure out how to coexist with them.'

Palminteri nodded. 'The Mafioso are just an aberrational subculture. You know they're there, but the neighborhood is a lot more than that.'

De Niro dedicated the film to his own father, the painter Robert De Niro, Sr., who died earlier this year. 'My father had a lot of integrity,' he said. 'As a painter, he was very clear about what was art, and what wasn't. So there was a similarity with the character in the movie, who knows what he believes.'

Growing up, he said, 'I knew kids who were very similar to the ones in the movie. I knew a lot of what to show and how to show it.' He also knew he wanted mostly unknowns, new faces, in the cast. That was crucial for the role of young Calogero (which happens to be Chazz's real first name).

'We looked at actors for over a year,' De Niro recalled. 'One day Marco Greco, who was casting for us, was on Jones Beach and he saw this kid and asked him if he wanted to audition for us. The kid says, 'You're not looking for me. You're looking for my brother.' And his brother, Lillo Brancato, came out of the water, and started doing impersonations of me and Joe Pesci in 'Goodfellas.'

'He was great. He was perfect for C. It always excites me to work with people who are new, who fit. To create this world--this medieval village in the Bronx--I needed real teenagers, not actors trying to be teenagers.'

Palminteri recalled another casting coup: 'We were looking for someone to play Bad Luck Eddie Mush, the guy who is a jinx. We couldn't find anyone. Finally I told Bob the real guy, Eddie Montanaro, was still around, 63 years old. Bob saw him and cast him--but I was worried, because Eddie really does bring bad luck, and sure enough, the first day he worked, it rained.'

Both De Niro and Palminteri thought that the movie's interracial romance between C and a fellow student named Jane (Tarai Hicks) was crucial to the story, because it provides a test for the stand-up values both of C's mentors have given him. When blacks venture into his neighborhood they are sometimes beaten (and sometimes blacks return the favor). Yet when C first sees Jane (in a slow-motion shot with much the same mood as De Niro's first glimpse of Cathy Moriarity in 'Raging Bull'), he is instantly attracted, and feels compelled to seek her out, despite the disapproval of the neighborhood. He has become his own man, not simply a repository for the opinions of others.

'His decision shows he is ready to live his own life,' De Niro says. 'Even Sonny sees that. Sony adheres to a very strict code of rules, but this is something that he understands, and even if he couldn't do such a thing himself, he would advise the kid to do it.' When C asks his father a hypothetical question about a 'friend' who was thinking of dating a black girl, the De Niro character replies, 'You know I've never been prejudiced,' but observes that he believes people should stay with their own kind. There isn't a scene where the father actually reacts to his son's decision, but De Niro thinks 'the father would have understood it on one level and resisted it on another, but ultimately would have accepted it.'

Casino Baseball Bat Scene Uncut Pictures

Palminteri says the subplot is based on his own high school romance with a black classmate.

'The racial tensions were very strong in our neighborhood,' he said. 'I don't want to say it was a racist neighborhood, but there was racism there, and also loving people who weren't racist, of course. But in this community everybody was poor and it was also a territorial thing--this is our neighborhood, this is all we have, and we don't want anybody else here.

Casino Baseball Bat Scene Uncut Photos

'Like one of the teenagers who sees a black kid riding down the street on a bike, and says his father says 'that's how it begins.' And another teenager says his father says they have a right to ride down the street. I wanted to show how racist attitudes are not something you're born with; they're passed down.'

Palminteri said the screenplay follows his own teenage attitudes. 'It was hard for me. I was in the middle. I wanted to be one of the guys, but--why am I hurting these people? They're good people. What am I doing?'

In the film, C's friends steal a car and go on a trouble-making trip into the black neighborhood. C is in the car, but is removed forcibly by Sonny.

'That was based in a way on something that happened to me. There's tremendous peer pressure. When I was about C's age, some friends pulled up in a car and I got in, and found out the car was hot. They're all laughing, and I shut my mouth because I was afraid to say anything. Finally we ditched the car. I desperately wanted out of that car. I didn't want to get arrested for car theft. But peer pressure kept me in the car. Often we ignore out own best natures, just to go along.'

In 1968 it must have been relatively unheard of in the Bronx for Italian-American and African-American teenagers to date.

'Yes, but I did date a black girl. I remember it was hard because we couldn't meet in my neighborhood, or in hers. But she liked me and I liked her. We didn't force each other. We looked at each other and we liked each other and so what was the big deal? As an adult, I put my feelings into Sonny's mouth. He says, 'The only thing that matters is when we're under the covers and we hold each other, and the rest?--don't worry about'.'

Popular Blog Posts

​Joker Leads Oscar NominationsBrian Tallerico

The 2020 Oscar nominations.

Buck Henry: 1930-2020Brian Tallerico

A tribute to the great Buck Henry.

Creators of Modern Sherlock Bring Dracula to Life on NetflixBrian Tallerico

A review of Netflix's Dracula, from the creators of Sherlock.

Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez Offers Glimpse into American TragedyBrian Tallerico

A review of the new Netflix crime docuseries about former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez.

Martin Scorsese's fascinating new film 'Casino' knows a lot about the Mafia's relationship with Las Vegas. It's based on a book by Nicholas Pileggi, who had full access to a man who once ran four casinos for the mob, and whose true story inspires the movie's plot.

Like 'The Godfather,' it makes us feel like eavesdroppers in a secret place.

The movie opens with a car bombing, and the figure of Sam 'Ace' Rothstein floating through the air. The movie explains how such a thing came to happen to him. The first hour plays like a documentary; there's a narration, by Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and others, explaining how the mob skimmed millions out of the casinos.

It's an interesting process. Assuming you could steal 25 percent of the slot-machine take - what would you do with tons of coins? How would you convert them into bills that could be stuffed into the weekly suitcase for delivery to the mob in Kansas City? 'Casino' knows. It also knows how to skim from the other games, and from food service and the gift shops. And it knows about how casinos don't like to be stolen from.

There's an incident where a man is cheating at blackjack, and a couple of security guys sidle up to him and jab him with a stun gun.

He collapses, the security guys call for medical attention, and hurry him away to a little room where they pound on his fingers with a mallet and he agrees that he made a very bad mistake.

Rothstein, based on the real-life figure of Frank (Lefty) Rosenthal, starts life as a sports oddsmaker in Chicago, attracts the attention of the mob because of his genius with numbers and is assigned to run casinos because he looks like an efficient businessman who will encourage the Vegas goose to continue laying its golden eggs. He is a man who detests unnecessary trouble. One day, however, trouble finds him, in the person of Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), a high-priced call girl.

Scorsese shows him seeing Ginger on a TV security monitor and falling so instantly in love that the image becomes a freeze-frame.

Ace showers her with gifts, which she is happy to have, but when he wants to marry her, she objects; she's been with a pimp named Lester Diamond (James Woods) since she was a kid, and she doesn't want to give up her profession. Rothstein will make her an offer she can't refuse: cars, diamonds, furs, a home with a pool and the key to his safety-deposit box. She marries him. It is Ace's first mistake.

Another mistake was to meet Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) when they were both kids in Chicago. Nicky is a thief and a killer, who comes to Vegas, forms a crew and throws his weight around. After he squeezes one guy's head in a vise, the word goes out that he's the mob's enforcer. Not true, but people believe it, and soon Nicky's name is being linked with his old pal Ace in all the newspapers.

Scorsese tells his story with the energy and pacing he's famous for, and with a wealth of little details that feel just right. Not only the details of tacky 1970s period decor, but little moments such as when Ace orders the casino cooks to put 'exactly the same amount of blueberries in every muffin.' Or when airborne feds are circling a golf course while spying on the hoods, and their plane runs out of gas and they have to make an emergency landing right on the green.

Casino Baseball Bat Scene Uncut Game

And when crucial evidence is obtained because a low-level hood kept a record of his expenses. And when Ace hosts a weekly show on local TV - and reveals a talent for juggling.

Casino Baseball Bat Scene Uncut 2017

Meanwhile, Ginger starts drinking, and Ace is worried about their kid, and they start having public fights, and she turns to Nicky for advice that soon becomes consolation, and when Ace finds out she may be fooling around, he utters a line that, in its way, is perfect: 'I just hope it's not somebody who I think it might be.' 'It was,' a narrator tells us, 'the last time street guys would ever be given such an opportunity.' All the mob had to do was take care of business. But when Ace met Ginger and when Nicky came to town, the pieces were in place for the mob to become the biggest loser in Vegas history. 'We screwed up good,' Nicky says, not using exactly those words. Scorsese gets the feel, the mood, almost the smell of the city just right; De Niro and Pesci inhabit their roles with unconscious assurance, Stone's call girl is her best performance, and the supporting cast includes such people as Don Rickles, whose very presence evokes an era (his job is to stand impassively beside the boss and look very sad about what might happen to whoever the boss is talking to).

Unlike his other Mafia movies ('Mean Streets' and 'GoodFellas'), Scorsese's 'Casino' is as concerned with history as with plot and character. The city of Las Vegas is his subject, and he shows how it permitted people like Ace, Ginger and Nicky to flourish, and then spit them out, because the Vegas machine is too profitable and powerful to allow anyone to slow its operation. When the Mafia, using funds from the Teamsters union, was ejected in the late 1970s, the 1980s ushered in a new source of financing: junk bonds. The guys who floated those might be the inspiration for 'Casino II.' 'The big corporations took over,' the narrator observes, almost sadly. 'Today, it works like Disneyland.' Which brings us back to our opening insight. In a sense, people need to believe a town like Vegas is run by guys like Ace and Nicky.

In a place that breaks the rules, maybe you can break some, too. For those with the gambler mentality, it's actually less reassuring to know that giant corporations, financed by bonds and run by accountants, operate the Vegas machine. They know all the odds, and the house always wins. With Ace in charge, who knows what might happen?