Via the IFC Blog, the name of the upcoming movie I couldn't remember the name of during one of the previous times I was going grrr about this topic here has been revealed!
It's 21. This is the true crime story from the 90s about of a bunch of MIT students who took Vegas for millions counting cards. They were recruited by a former teacher, backed by an unnamed shady investment group, and it all fell apart because somebody in the group got greedy and turned. It was a fascinating scam, really gutsy in a way. For reasons not clear to me, what they did wasn't technically illegal. It is, however, unwise.
What you will not be able to tell in the movie is that a majority of the kids involved were ethnically Asian and Persian. The guy who recruited them used standing ethnic and racial stereotypes to his advantage; he knew that if he unleashed a group of white, non-celebrity 20-somethings with million dollar bank accounts into the casinos it would never work because the casino people would be suspicious. But if he got a bunch of Asian and Middle Eastern kids, nobody would question it because the assumption was those kids have money and their parents let them run wild. (There was another group he targeted, but I can't remember what it was right now. It was a European ethnic group...I want to say Greek, but I'm not sure if that's correct. I'll look it up later and update.) Just so you know, the kid who is the lead in the movie? In real life he wasn't that white. At all.
Using prejudice provided some of the cover that helped this scam work for a very long time. (The other thing that helped was the reporting and payout rules in Vegas were different back then; the group got paranoid over time; lots of other counting groups were working Vegas; the casino/private detective groups started using face recog and other technologies; and as Vegas turned corporate, it got a bit less wild in that world. No one was going to hand over bag with 100K in it anymore. There was paperwork and stuff involved, now. This story is quite complicated. I wonder if the movie is going to get into all of it. I kinda suspect not gonna..)
Turns out that Angry Asian Man was on it back in the summer. Of course!
I like Kevin Spacey, but I'll have to wait to hear what percentage of Kevin Spacey-ness we'll get in this movie before I decide if this one gets the Arclight or the dvd rental treatment.
Related: The Slanted Screen. It's a documentary, now available on dvd. Check it out.
