Why are gambling films so hard to follow?
Many movies have been released in the past depicting the lives of individuals in a financial fix attempting to use gambling as an escape. Many of them, like Mississippi Grind, have story lines that are easy to follow.
The basic narrative is usually simple as the movies try to show individuals looking to balance the books with several bookies and repair fractured family lives or broken relationships.
However, most of the movies fail to make the different kinds of gambling depicted quite so easy to follow. They gamblers play different varieties of poker, blackjack, craps and roulette. It’s very hard to follow the different rules if you never played casino yourself. You can find a list of rules and free versions of popular games on most online casinos sites. They also gamble on basketball games, dog races and even play the ponies. The movies do well to show all the gestures and posturing you would expect at a gambling desk in Vegas as players determine their opponent’s next moves. However, they rarely show enough to make the steps taken in each game understandable for even those that are knowledgeable about the different games. This is a bit disappointing, especially now that casino games that accept payment with PayPal have increased the popularity of the different types of games seen in gambling movies.
People watching the movies have to cope with not knowing what is going on during actual gaming sessions. This doesn’t make it impossible to enjoy the movie fully. Mississippi Grind, backed by Kodak Film was still a good movie. However, it would have been easier to enjoy the movie to the max if the gambling scenes were clear and understandable for everyone watching. Such movies make the mistake of unfounded assumptions on the knowledge level of the viewing audience.
Why is this so?
Firstly, the movie makers do not expect the gambling scenes to be the main focus of the movie. This is perhaps why the gambling sessions are often shortened. If they wanted poker to be the mainstay of the movie for instance, they would show every round of the game from the serving of cards to every single move made by players during the course of the game. If this were the case, the movie would be longer than necessary and other important plot aspects could be affected. People that are not lovers of gambling may become disillusioned with the story line too.
Secondly, gambling movies want the audience to revel in the big picture. In this case, it is the wider storyline. They want the audience to see how the main character reacts to failure, how he is dealing with challenges facing him at work and at home, the emotional trauma he is going through, etc. while the gambling scene remains an aside.
While there are many people that would welcome more defined and easy to follow gambling scenes in movies, such scenes will remain a backdrop for the motion pictures. The main focus of gambling movies like Mississippi Grind will remain on drama, emotion and tension and generally less on the rules of any particular game.
