Living Las Vegas

At Home in the City of Lights

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Chips and Fish

I’d been looking forward to seeing 21, the film based on Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, Ben Mezrich’s best-selling tale of beating Vegas casinos at blackjack. I make a point of seeing every new film about my favorite city, and my interest increased when I met Mike Aponte the other day at the airport.

I was at the airport to meet celebrity Las Vegas entrepreneur Tom Breitling and ask him to autograph a copy of his new book Double or Nothing. Vegas being Vegas, however, and McCarran Airport being the crossroads of the West, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when Tom introduced me to Mike. “One of the characters in the movie is based on him,” Tom told me. “He’s Jason Fisher.”

A brief conversation with Mike revealed that his career following his stint as a member of the infamously successful MIT blackjack team has been colorful. In addition to an identifiable connection with the movie, he’ll be the subject of a new HBO series, and his company sells a very popular course in blackjack strategy.

“Did you like the movie?” I asked him, but even when his response was not exactly enthusiastic, I knew it wouldn’t keep me from warming a seat in a local theater. The only question was which one, and the answer was easy. I had never been inside the new Rave theatres at Town Square. Here was my chance to see a new Vegas movie in a new Vegas theatre. A recipe for nirvana if ever there was one, right? Town Square is full of fabulous new restaurants, too. This would be to be a great Monday evening, even if the movie wasn’t quite the story an insider like Mike Aponte might tell.

Before I go any further, I should mention that movie theatres in Las Vegas are very, very nice. Many of them are inside casinos, a match made in entertainment heaven. The theatre closest to my house sells Starbucks coffee and Dreyer’s ice cream in the lobby, and if I’m in the mood for something a little stronger, there’s a full bar just outside. “Stadium seating” is the current standard, a brilliant invention that means the person in front of you can wear a fifty-gallon hat without causing you to swear. The chairs aren’t quite La-Z-Boys, but they come close.

The Rave theatre I entered qualifies as one of the nicer venues in Las Vegas for enjoying a movie. There’s plenty of room between the cushy seats, and “stadium seating” guarantees a clear view of the screen. The concession stand in the lobby, however, is of the extremely mundane over-priced-popcorn-and-Coke variety. Since Rave is in a shopping center and not a casino, there’s no nearby option for anything else.

The theatre cannot be held responsible, however, for the quality of the flicks appearing on its screens. In fact, the fancy digital projectors and state-of-the-art sound system did everything electronically possible to make 21 look and sound fabulous.

It all worked for about 45 minutes. The film did a cunningly appealing job of introducing Ben Campbell, an about-to-graduate MIT student who doesn’t know how he’ll pay for Harvard Med School. Kevin Spacey as a charismatic card-counting professor is also charming, and the audience is quickly enlightened about how he uses a team of mathematically gifted students to win huge wads of cash at Las Vegas blackjack tables every weekend. It doesn’t come as a surprise that one of them is beautiful, female, and blonde.

While the movie is visually appealing, the story takes one wrong turn after another leaving gigantic plot holes in its wake. The Las Vegas scenes are beautiful, but they aren’t enough to keep us from wondering why a math genius is hiding stacks of cash in his dorm room ceiling instead of a vault or a bank. This is only one of the ridiculous scenarios that a soft chair is simply not enough to cushion. What began as a true story of brains against odds descends into an idiotically moralistic fairy tale. Kevin Spacey ends up with — no kidding! — chocolate chips. Ben Campbell folds with a black eye but a mother who still loves him. All the “bad guys” are righteously punished, which is how I felt, too, by the time I stepped outside.

Buy hey, I thought. The evening isn’t over. There’s dinner to be had. Louis’s Fish Camp beckoned with a sign that promised a $10 discount for movie ticket stubs. It’s a restaurant I had read about and wanted to try.

Interesting, sad, irritating — I don’t know what to call it, but Louis’s Fish Camp echoed the movie. It looked good when we walked in, and the food — when it finally arrived — was pleasant. The service, however, was like a series of increasingly bad plot twists. By the time we left, I realized it would take more than a discount to get me to come back. Las Vegas is a city of fabulous eateries and an extremely high standard of service. Why go back to a lousy one twice, even if the food is edible? In Vegas, baby, there’s no good reason.

So here are the morals of my story, such as they are. 1. You can meet the most amazing people here, just by going to the airport. 2. A lame movie cannot be sufficiently improved by cushy chairs, groovy sound, and up-to-the-minute projection systems. 3. Poor service in a restaurant can make you start thinking the food’s not all that good, either. 4. I love living in a place where going to the airport is an adventure, I can watch new movies in sybaritic comfort, and I can try a different restaurant any time I want to.

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