For me, I like stories about characters finding their inner power was never as dependent on the forces they’ve long tied themselves to.
In Queen’s Gambit, she’s an obsessive drug addict. That’s the face-level dynamic of the show. Look also at Molly’s Game about another obsessive drug addict. The movie barely has any poker but is ten times more compelling as a poker movie than All In or Deal, or even that atrocious TV show written by the same duo that wrote Rounders.
I don’t think a poker movie works as a character drama. You have to think about what primary experience you’re evoking for the audience. I’d argue they’ve tried the character drama angle as primary over and over and they all suck.
You have to go somewhere like Maverick, which is ostensibly about nothing BUT poker and winning a poker tournament but is again actually a heist movie. The experience is full of mistaken identities and deception that are central to the plot, not just as window dressing because it’s a poker movie with clever symbolism.
Only tangentially related, but I’m surprised no one has done a movie or series about Van Cliburn. It seems like the perfect Cold War story, and it’s true. Classical piano just isn’t sexy enough.
For those not familiar, from wikipedia.
The first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 was an event designed to demonstrate Soviet cultural superiority during the Cold War, after the USSR’s technological victory with the Sputnik launch in October 1957. Cliburn’s performance at the competition finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 on April 13 earned him a standing ovation lasting eight minutes.[9][10] After the ovation, Van Cliburn made a brief speech in Russian and then resumed his seat at the piano and began to play—to the surprise and delight of the Russian musicians visible behind him in the film made of his part in the competition—his own piano arrangement of the much-beloved song “Moscow Nights,” which, as the response shows, further endeared him to the Russians. When it was time to announce the winner, the judges felt obliged to ask permission of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to give the first prize to an American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev asked. “Yes.” “Then give him the prize!”[9][11] Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, the only time the honor has been accorded a classical musician. Arriving at City Hall after the parade, Cliburn told the audience:
I appreciate more than you will ever know that you are honoring me, but the thing that thrills me the most is that you are honoring classical music. Because I’m only one of many. I’m only a witness and a messenger. Because I believe so much in the beauty, the construction, the architecture invisible, the importance for all generations, for young people to come that it will help their minds, develop their attitudes, and give them values. That is why I’m so grateful that you have honored me in that spirit.[12]
A cover story in Time magazine proclaimed him “The Texan Who Conquered Russia”.[13] His triumph in Moscow propelled Cliburn to international prominence.[14]
I think a great movie could also be made about the rise and fall of Full Tilt Poker, with a bunch of high-aiming degens battling authorities, other cheaters and swindlers and their own destructive impuleses.
I’m not even going to watch the clip. That show is so bad. Like so bad it makes me suspect Math Damon and Ed Norton had a bigger hand in what we see on screen than we realized.
It does have Michael Madsen, though, so I can’t exactly say I regret seeing it once. But never again. Never again.
Literally the one thing I remember about that show, Michael Madsen had some cheesy line about a set of deuces being a glimmer in a stream or something in that metaphorical neighborhood. Hey Mr. Blonde, give me a set of deuces any hand!
Agree, I’ve used that multiple times. The other line was when the son was playing the tourist, and thinking, “Just because you can shuffle chips with both hands, you think you can blah blah …” My wife razzed me about that, because I had learned to shuffle chips, and did it all the time. Still do, in fact.
On topic, the addiction angle had me hooked from the beginning, and I think
she beat it way too easily. They threw in a few feints at temptation, and one big real temptation that seemed impossible to overcome IRL. And then, without having ever once tried or practiced the visualization trick sober, she does it when she absolutely needs it.
It worked well to have the plot start out with the Paris scene. I was wondering whether that would be the end as we led up to it, but of course not. I guess they didn’t have time for a long drawn-out recovery, and the descent into drugs is always more interesting anyway. Recovery is only interesting to the person going through it, and as a fait accompli to others.
Anyway, I liked it, my wife liked it, and my mother liked it, so good job Netflix.
The other line was when the son was playing the tourist, and thinking, “Just because you can shuffle chips with both hands, you think you can blah blah …” My wife razzed me about that, because I had learned to shuffle chips, and did it all the time. Still do, in fact.