Caesars Palace opened in the 1960s and took design inspiration from the Roman Empire, with a giant statue of Julius Caesar in the entrance and décor dripping with statues, mosaics, fountains and marble. Next cross over West Flamingo Road to the Bellagio’s neighbour, Caesars Palace (0.2 miles). Read more: Visiting Las Vegas on a budget A Las Vegas film locations walking tour The whole walk covers almost five miles (with a bus/taxi shortcut) but a word of warning: Las Vegas can get incredibly hot, so make sure you’ve got a bottle of water and a hat on you, and avoid the middle of the day in the summer. So join me and follow in the footsteps of Dean Martin, Elvis and George Clooney on this Las Vegas film locations walking tour. But there are still plenty of spots around the Strip and downtown where you can see where scenes from movies old and new were filmed, from Viva Las Vegas to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Ocean’s 11 to – er – Ocean’s Eleven. Some of Las Vegas’ film locations have been and gone, and others only ever existed on a Hollywood sound stage. Over 100 movies have featured Sin City’s over-the-top casinos and iconic Strip views. (John's last name is Alighieri, while another character is introduced as Lucypher - a shameless crib of Louis Cyphre, Robert De Niro's character in Alan Parker's Angel Heart.) Unfortunately the torment he evokes is suffered by us all.Bright lights, blackjack tables, glitz and glamour – it’s no wonder larger-than-life Las Vegas is a favourite location for filmmakers. As does Silverman, a sharply intelligent actress here reduced to a retro Barbie with jaundice-hued fingernails and a Grand Canyon cleavage.Īdding pretension to affectation, Rhodes extends his religion motif beyond the film's title, linking the story to Dante's Inferno. Watching John navigate an unorthodox lap dance and an attack by solar panels in the Nevada desert, all we can think is that the actor deserves better. "I used to be lucky," Buscemi moans in voiceover, while we're treated to more than one uncomfortable, bathroom-mirror close-up of his snaggletoothed mug. Accompanied by a po-faced claims investigator named Virgil (Romany Malco), John bounces from that stripper (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and her wheelchair to a gun-toting naturist (Tim Blake Nelson), from a loony park ranger (Jesse Garcia) to a nicotine-craving human torch (John Cho). Illuminated by the garish lights of sterile convenience stores and soul-sucking offices, Saint John of Las Vegas is less a movie than a straggling archipelago of offbeat encounters. She's elegantly retro and indie-precious, and Silverman probably deserves better. (Hey, I didn't write the screenplay that honor also goes to Rhodes.)Īlighieri's Beatrice: Sarah Silverman plays the smiling, cleavage-baring object of John's affections. Having accomplished the first in a bathroom stall, he broaches the second and is soon dispatched to the outskirts of Vegas to investigate a stripper's possibly fraudulent claim of having been rear-ended. John has but two ambitions: to nail the coworker in the adjacent, smiley-face-bedecked cubicle (Sarah Silverman, swelling exuberantly from tight '50s outfits), and to extract a raise from his insane boss (Peter Dinklage). As his character plunks down $1,000 for lotto tickets at a Vegas gas station - he even has a sad-sack gambling preference: scratch-off cards - Buscemi's jumpy, bug-eyed desperation seems more to do with an actor trapped in cliche hell than with a character trapped in a gambling addiction.Ī surreal journey from Quirksville to Oddballtown, the movie follows John, an Albuquerque insurance-company drone, on his quest for microscopic personal growth. But though Buscemi can be a kind of sad-sack virus, infiltrating a perfectly normal narrative and altering its genetic structure, this time he bears none of the blame. It takes barely 10 minutes with the titular John (Buscemi), however, to realize we're knee-deep in indie-movie preciousness. And with Spike Lee and Stanley Tucci among the producers, plus Giles Nuttgens behind the camera, this first feature from Hue Rhodes (a founder of, Kmart's online store) seemed certain to pique audience interest. Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage head the cast, after all. Like Ted Bundy, Saint John of Las Vegas probably looked good on paper.
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