I did not want to forget it the next day. (I sent myself an email from my phone to remind me of this. As I was dropping off to sleep one night after a day of struggling with this review, this popped into my head: The movie is the cinematic equivalent of sitting as motionless as you can because the roiling in your stomach tells you that you will vomit with the slightest activity. But its quiet stillness is deceptive: a brutality lurks below its calm, slick surface. The Card Counter is grim, mysterious, and unsettling, never more so than when it is quiet and still. There are some games in life that math will not help you with… But however I try to approach analyzing my response to it, however I try to pin it down, it eludes me. This is absolutely a “wow, that was really good” film. Ack.) I’m still befuddled by this movie… but in the best possible way. (I really would have loved to watch it again - procrastination that lets you tell yourself it’s work! - but the press screener I was sent expired before I could do that. I’ve started this review of Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter about a dozen different ways over the past two weeks since I saw it. This movie is about a man whose very life is like this. Sometimes I surprise myself with the places my brain takes me. Sometimes it is the act of putting words to feelings, the attempt to intellectualize the visceral and the spiritual, that helps me understand.
Not even starting a review is enough! I am often working through my reaction as I write. Oh, I may come to the end of a movie with a general sense of “wow, that was really good” or “damn, that was terrible,” but sometimes figuring out precisely what makes me think that movie is good or bad or somewhere in between, why it elicited the emotional reactions it did, never comes into focus for me until I’ve finished my review. As I’ve said many times before - though perhaps I’ve only spoken it out loud and not put it down in my writing - I often don’t know quite how I feel about a film until I review it.
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