Lawrence Bender, January 1993

Lawrence Bender

EDITOR'S NOTE: This interview was conducted at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.
 
By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff

PARK CITY -- Lawrence Bender sits at a table in the hospitality suite of Z Place, where press and filmmakers come to mingle, do business and escape the crush of humanity on Main Street during the Sundance Film Festival. Bender has a broad smile fixed on his face, conveying his feelings of wonder and excitement to all who see him.

He's been that way for a couple of days, since "Reservoir Dogs," a gritty crime film he produced, began getting most of the ink and much-coveted buzz at the 1992 edition of the premiere festival for American independent filmmakers.

"This is a really great time for me," Bender says ,with barely contained enthusiasm. "I'm like a kid in a candy shop. I've made a couple of other movies, but I was a production assistant on a TV commercial two months before we went into production on 'Reservoir Dogs' because I had no money."

Don't prejudge 'Christ' movie, Aug. 12, 1988

The Cal Grondahl cartoon that ran alongside the editorial.

This is the first editorial I wrote for the Standard-Examiner. The editorial page editor at the time asked me to write it, since I was the paper's film critic.

Book-burners and self-appointed censors are fanning the fires of fear and ignorance again. This time they're out to get "The Last Temptation of Christ," a new movie that supposedly takes an unorthodox view of the life of Jesus Christ.

Based on the 1955 novel by Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, the film -- which has not been made available for preview in Utah, where currently there aren’t plans for its release -- reportedly takes a fictional "what if?" view of Christ's life, portraying him as a human being subject to temptation, lust and anger. The movie opens today in select cities in the United States and Canada.

'Casino' (released Nov. 22, 2005)

By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff

A ponderous, meandering beast of a crime epic, Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” takes many greatish elements and reduces them to tedious mediocrities.

Scorsese is a filmmaker with an affinity for stories about mobsters and their peculiar manner of doing business -- he directed “Mean Streets” and “GoodFellas,” the latter of which is one of the finest films released since 1990. So he seems a natural for this tale of a mob-run Las Vegas casino in the ‘70s, before corporate America took the gaming racket away from organized crime.

Alas, Scorsese’s affinity for the minutiae of the gambling industry hobbles “Casino,” diverting attention from the characters and the story at hand: how gambler Sam “Ace” Rothstein and his childhood friend, Nicky Santoro, managed to screw up a gig that not only managed itself, but was also making them fabulously wealthy.