DUMB MONEY*

There is a really good movie to be made about the Gamestop sage, but DUMB MONEY is not it. Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, TONYA) and written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, the movie aspires to be THE BIG SHORT but has none of its wit, its deep understanding of financial markets, or its sheer dynamism. I didn't laugh once. I didn't learn anything. And more than that I got increasingly angry at the film's inability to tackle the real issues at stake, or to actually get the point. In fact, I think DUMB MONEY may be the most wrong-headed, dumb film I have watched in a long while.

Now, full disclosure, this blog used to be called Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards. And maybe I know more than the average movie goer about how financial markets work. But that isn't the point. Films like MARGIN CALL and THE BIG SHORT did great work in taking complex financial issues and interrogating them clearly and even-handedly.  But instead of having the balls to be nuanced, what Gillespie gives us is a fake David vs Goliath story, with pantomime villains and a very bizarre take on what a hero is. I think the result is morally questionable, and certainly not entertaining.

So let's go back to the beginning.  Keith Gill (Paul Dano) starts off as a little known retail investor in the US stock market.  He decides that Gamestop is undervalued, and explains why in a little-watched youtube channel. At the start I think he was in earnest. He believed he had found Deep Fucking Value in a retailer that was oversold on fears of e-commerce. I have no issue with him at this point. Then he started gaining traction on a Reddit channel called Wall Street Bets and I think it went to his head.  He realised that not only was he pumping up the value of his recommended stock, but that he could actually get it up to a level where he could punish the big hedge funds that were betting against the stock - the kind of folks that had refused to hire him all those years.

What the film should have asked is at what point our supposed hero of the little man realised the stock price had gone beyond Deep Fucking Value to Fair Value (on his reckoning) and then to Over Valued.  Even allowing for some kids still liking to buy actual hard copy games, did he really believe a value of >$100 was fair? And if he did not, then continuing to pump up the stock was just as nefarious as the institutional investors he and his dumb money disciples said they were fighting against. If we had seen any of this moral questioning, Paul Dano might have actually had something to do worthy of his talent. 

But this film isn't actually interested in asking the hard questions about Gill.  And it sure isn't interested in asking the hard questions about the toxic online culture he was part of.  There are a couple of throwaway lines that dismiss the misogyny, racism and generally 4Chan nastiness as a "few bad apples". Riiiiight. That toxicity and populist fact-opposed bullshit is exactly why a bunch of normal ordinary people lost their savings in this meme-stock insanity. Shouldn't the film have asked if Gill had any remorse?

No, the bad guys here are the evil hedge funds and the tech guys who invented Robinhood, a commission-free trading platform. Never mind that the Hedgie (Seth Rogen) made a conviction bet just like Gill, but did not pump the stock artificially - he just sat back for years waiting for e-commerce and bad management to do its work. I do indeed blame the Robinhood folk for switching off trades when they couldn't post margin.  But the film actually let's them off rather lightly, over-excited about getting Sebastian Stan to do a Sean Parker in THE SOCIAL NETWORK-lite cameo.  The film also seems to imply in its end credits that somehow Nick Griffin at Citadel (Nick Offerman - excellently understated) got away with nefarious influence over Robinhood. Maybe if charges weren't posted it's because there wasn't a case? 

I just can't take a film seriously that doesn't have its basic thesis straight. These meme stock traders were not heroes who started a revolution, as the end credits argue.  They were literally dumb money that didn't invest but gambled, refused to close out their positions out of greed, and lost their shirts.  To argue that they are somehow the righteous Davids, inherently morally better than the evil Goliaths, is nonsense. 

DUMB MONEY is rated R and has a running time of 105 minutes. It played Toronto 2023 and is now on global release.

I, TONYA

I, TONYA is a gripping, deeply moving, and beautifully put together account of the infamous Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding and the events that led to her ex-husband hiring a goon to knife Tonya's rival Nancy Kerrigan. Those of us of a certain age will remember the circus and the ensuing drama of Tonya's Lillehammer performance.  It was a massive trashy story told with no nuance - a true tabloid scandal.  It pitted a nasty, white-trash, jealous cheat against an all-American princess - the kind of elegant, pretty figure that figure skating touts as the perfection of womanhood. This long overdue retelling focuses firmly on Tonya and tries to give some shade and context and sympathy to her story.  Along the way we get some laughs, but I found this to be less of a dark comedy than a pathetic tragedy.  Those laughs mostly come from Bobby Canavale's cynical journalist, commenting on events with the benefit of time, and providing much of the sporting world context. The tragedy comes from the central character and strong performance of Margot Robbie as Tonya. 

As the movie opens, we see a four year old Tonya with a genuine passion and talent for skating pushed to excel by her emotionally and physically abusive  alcoholic white trash mother LaVona. LaVona justifies her behaviour by telling herself she's toughening her daughter up, and pouring every hard earned cent into skating.  She's played with a Cruella DeVille nastiness by Allison Janney and is the most terrifying and brilliantly performed screen mother since Livia Soprano. No amount of superbly hilariously ugly 1980s hairstyling can obscure the sheer malevolent selfishness of her character. Unsurprisingly, the victimised Tonya takes the first path of escape she can find, but jumps out of the frying pan into the fire with her feckless, physically abusive husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan).  What's so scary about this character is how quickly Stan can take this fairly innocuous man from calm incompetence to violence and back.  The film doesn't shy away from showing the abuse, and it's truly horrible to watch.

MILLION DOLLAR ARM

MILLION DOLLAR ARM is a straight forward no-nonsense sports under-dog story imbued with all the earnest good intentions and feel-good loveliness that a Disney movie entails. It's based on the true story of baseball pitchers Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel who were discovered by sports agent J.B. Bernstein after winning a reality show competition and went on to become the first Indians to play major-league baseball.

The conventional character development arc lands on Jon Hamm as the sleazy hard-up lothario and agent JB.  He initiates the completion as a means to revive his career and has no interest in his putative stars other than the commissions and new clients they can win him.  Naturally, India is a transformative experience - particularly a visit to the boys rural village.  It's a cliche that I find as insulting now as I did when I watched THE DARJEELING LIMITED.  But not content with one movie cliche, the film introduces another, when JB falls for his kind-hearted no-nonsense tenant - a doctor played by the ever-authentic Lake Bell.  She brings the most out of a two-dimensional character and softens both JB's heart and ours.

The obvious things happen. There are high pressure try-outs that are fumbled and second chances at redemption.  The mean nasty businessman has a heart of gold and all things can be cured by the love of a good woman and a visit to a third world country. 

All of which is highly disappointing given the quality of the cast - not least  the Indian actor Pitobash - and the director Craig Gillespie (LARS AND THE REAL GIRL) and writer Tom McCarthy (UP). If Disney had been willing to make the film a little grittier, and JB a little less likeable, they could have done something really memorable. 

MILLION DOLLAR ARM has a running time of 124 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie was released earlier this year in India, Canada, the USA, Cambodia, Pakistan, Argentina, Greece, Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Peru.  It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland.  It opens in September in Italy, Panama, Colombia, Germany, Denmark, South Africa and Brazil. It opens in October in Japan, Spain and Norway, in Hungary on December 1st and in Sweden on March 11th 2015. 

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL - Don Quixote in Minnesota

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is an improbably wonderful drama from the director of the piss-poor Billy Bob Thornton vehicle MR WOODCOCK. It's about a young man (Ryan Gosling) who deals with stress by inventing an imaginary girlfriend in the guise of a blow-up doll. The movie challenges us not to laugh but to empathise, and even to enjoy role-playing ourselves. The small-town community in which Lars lives is a proxy for the audience. We might start off like his elder brother (Paul Schneider) - thinking it ridiculous and hoping for a quick fix. Or maybe we start off like his sweet sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer), playing along, hoping he'll work it out. But pretty soon, we're like the old women at church, the work colleagues and the friends at the mall. It's fun to play dress up with a real life doll - to cut her hair - invent social outings: the whole town falls in love with "Bianca".

With LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, Craig Gillespie has done that rare thing: he's made a romantic comedy with substance; furthermore a film that feels as credible as it does incredible. He hints at how common delusion is with his reference to Dulcinea, but more widely he shows how far the whole community enjoys Lars' delusion. Ultimately this is a profoundly uplifting film - and not in the easy, saccharine manner of films like THE BUCKET LIST. It's a film about a bunch of people doing something a little bit silly because they love someone, and believe he'll work it out. And in a cynical, busy, impersonal world, that's a wonderful thought.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL played Toronto 2007 and was released in the USA and Singapore last year. It opened in Hungary, Italy, Israel, Greece, Belgium, Norway and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in South Korea, Iceland, the UK and the Netherlands. It opens in Australia and Spain in April and in Japan in June.

MR WOODCOCK is a big shiny formica coffee-table of nothingness

MR WOODCOCK is a really mediocre comedy. Note that it's not actively piss-poor. It doesn't try hard enough to fail that spectacularly. It's all shiny surfaces and slick production and low on genuine belly-laughs. Billy Bob Thornton does his usual schtick as the eponymous mean, angry sonofabitch. Back in the day, he tortured a kid called John Farley. Years later Farley (Seann William Scott) is a successful author of self-help books and returns home to pick up a prestigious prize. Much to his horror, not only is the bullying Woodcock being feted as the "Educator of the Year", he's also dating Farley's mum. Farley and his best mate (Ethan Suplee) try to frame Woodcock as an adulterous bastard, but basically the son and the lover have to agree to disagree and keep Susan Sarandon's long-suffering Mrs F sweet. Billy Bob is on auto-pilot. Sarandon and Suplee are way too good for this nonsense. And Seann William Scott needs to graduate to proper rom-com roles. This movie, sadly, is too obviously filmed and written by newbies who have yet to get a clue.

MR WOODCOCK is on release in the UK and USA. It inflicts itself upon Singapore on October 11th; on Iceland on November 2nd; on Finland on November 30th; on Turkey on December 28th; on Argentina on January 3rd and on the Netherlands on February 14th.