Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven - Posted by Michael Fomkin

"We just vibed almost immediately."
 
Joe Carnahan fascinates me as a writer and a director and has since his showy debut film, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane. Made for a mere $8,000, he stretched his resources by turning exposition into spectacle and dialogue into action, setting up the plot in a driving multimedia monologue and editing his Mamet-inspired diatribes with runaway momentum. It's a triumph of sheer ingenuity and showmanship over story and substance. With his new film, Smokin' Aces, he revisits that idiosyncratic structure with a bigger budget, a massive cast, and greater ambition. Reams of exposition are spit out in the first twenty or so minutes of the film, delivered in rapid monologues and edited into a breathless rush, to explain how Vegas showman and wise-guy wannabe Buddy "Aces" Israel gets in over his head and turns state's evidence to save his hide, and why every freelance assassin races the feds to his Tahoe hideaway for the bounty posted by the mob.