Money Monster

Director Jodie Foster’s film challenges a sensational media and corrupt corporate culture.

moneymonstersmallShe’s as mad as hell and she isn’t going to take it anymore. Jodie Foster’s “Money Monster” (her follow-up to “The Beaver“) doubles as a media critique and a corporate screed folded into a small-scale thriller, and frankly it has just a few too many targets; “Network” meets “The Big Short” it’s not.

George Clooney plays his typical charming asshole, but this time channeling a Jim Cramer-type TV personality named Lee Gates. On his show, he makes stock tips with bells and whistles so ludicrous that his producer Patty (Julia Roberts) has accepted a job at another network and neglected to inform him. Because of the nature of the show’s stunts, a disgruntled New Yorker named Kyle (Jack O’Connell) manages to sneak onto set and hold Gates hostage with a homemade suicide vest, all while still broadcasting live. Kyle holds Gates responsible for telling his audience to invest in a company that just lost $80 million overnight due to a “computer glitch” and won’t stop until the company’s CEO (Dominic West) explains himself.

As Gates showboats with boxing gloves on the set of his show or draws voluptuous curves on an earnings graph, the movie starts to roll its eyes at itself and tacitly suggest that the sensationalism in today’s media could realistically result in such a hostage situation. But while Gates’s show resembles “Mad Money,” neither the terrorist scenario nor the Wall Street debacle necessarily feel ripped from the headlines.

Rather, “Money Monster” imagines how the world would react if such a circus took place on live TV. In between the cops plotting their rescue attempt and the corporate Communications Officer attempting to unravel the mystery of what happened to $80 million, Foster cuts away to random people watching TV in bars and coffee shops. Those in suits on Wall Street smirk and laugh, while others keep ordering drinks and playing foosball. To them it’s just another reality show.

The screenplay’s commentary (co-written by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf) has some interesting ideas, but flounders compared to the humanity Foster is able to wring from these characters. O’Connell’s character especially displays a lot of range, quickly moving from a deranged maniac with a manifesto to someone relatable and pitiable. And Clooney has to face the realization on live TV that his flashy personality and surface level charm may not be worth a thing.

If “Network” has become a classic, it’s because its sensationalized version of the media all came true. It has aged with shocking poignancy and clairvoyance. “Money Monster” may even be an entertaining drama, but when it hops on the soapbox and condemns a fishy stock market and fixed legal system, it already feels outdated.

2 ½ stars

August: Osage County

Meryl Streep is excellent in the broadest, most vile performance in her career.

Meryl Streep has gone broader in her acting as her career has continued to explode. Between a vicious nun, Julia Child, a scathing magazine editor and Margaret Thatcher, her roles as an ordinary everywoman from “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” have somewhat faded in memory.

With a role like Violet Weston, Streep is playing the broadest and vilest in her career. The character from Tracy Letts’s play “August: Osage County”, unseen by me, is infamous, and people have been quick to label Streep as merely scene-chewing. Her challenge as an actress is to rise above the bigness and vices of her character, to show a wounded, sympathetic and tragic figure underneath all the bile.

When we first meet her in “August: Osage County,” she’s worn, frumpy and unrecognizable, sporting the thin hairdo she had in the concentration camp in “Sophie’s Choice,” this time ravaged by chemo therapy. But with her big black wig on or not, she shows no vulnerability in taking swipes at her family while being slightly endearing in the process. Continue reading “August: Osage County”

2014 Oscar Predictions Round 3

“Her” and “American Hustle” give “Gravity” and “12 Years a Slave” a run for their money.

Checking Twitter in the past few weeks has been exhausting. It seems as though every hour there’s a new Top 10 list or set of nominations from a guild or critics group being handed out.

It’s not enough to merely list the best movies of the year but to give the best cast, score, soundtrack, performances, breakout performances, breakout directors, best movie posters, most underrated, most under the radar, best documentaries, best animated films, best foreign films and so on.

Would you know that each needs to be analyzed and has an impact on this thing we call the Oscar race? Critics awards in New York and L.A. (as dictated by people who live in New York and L.A.) hold a lot of influence, while others get laughed out of the room because they’re horrible barometers for the actual Oscar winner, as evidenced by statistics and numbers that often don’t hold up to a science anyway (ask Nate Silver).

What’s worse is when many of these Oscar pundits are shocked (SHOCKED) that a given critics’ group went the way it did. It’s as though every critics group is not just voting for the things they liked but are scrutinizing the “message” that a given selection will send. “Ooh, well we can’t choose ‘Gravity’ because that’ll make us look populist, but if we choose ‘American Hustle’ it’ll look like we were goaded by the most recent press screening, so we better choose ‘Her’ so that we keep our hip, indie cred.” How dare they not go for “12 Years a Slave” like everyone was sure they must?

The point is, all of these intangible drops in the pond do color the race as a whole. If we can pick up on those trends perhaps we can better predict. Suddenly it seems as though we have at least a four-horse race between “Gravity,” “American Hustle,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Her,” as all have picked up some major victories in the past few weeks. At the same time, certain contenders like Octavia Spencer, Tom Hanks or Paul Greengrass seem conspicuously absent from major nominations while people like Joaquin Phoenix, Will Forte and those behind “Before Midnight” look a lot less hopeless.

This remains anyone’s race, but somehow this wide open field feels a lot more treacherous.

* Designates a movie I’ve seen

Bulleted entries are Dark Horse candidates ranked in likelihood of getting in

Her

Best Picture

  1. Gravity*
  2. American Hustle
  3. 12 Years a Slave*
  4. Her*
  5. Captain Phillips*
  6. Saving Mr. Banks*
  7. Inside Llewyn Davis*
  8. Nebraska*
  9. The Wolf of Wall Street
  • Lee Daniels’ The Butler*
  • Dallas Buyers Club*
  • Fruitvale Station*
  • Before Midnight*
  • Rush*
  • All is Lost*
  • Blue Jasmine*
  • August: Osage County*
  • The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

If you want to make this easy, look at the American Film Institute’s unranked Top 10 list for the year, and that might be your Best Picture slate right there. Each of the movies selected has had well-rounded praise. “Gravity” is getting the populist vote, “American Hustle” scored with the New York film critics, “Her” with the Los Angeles critics and the National Board of Review, while “12 Years a Slave” has scored with everyone else.

As for the rest, the remaining films are using their winter season releases to drum up steam where those like “The Butler”, “Before Midnight” and “All is Lost” have to fight their way back into a crowded room. And those movies are getting no help from places like the Golden Globes. “The Butler” picked up a goose egg of nominations. But they did manage to shove “Rush” back into the hunt.

But Steve Pond has the reason above all why the cutoff may be at “The Wolf of Wall Street”: math. The Academy has yet to nominate 10 films under the new flexible rules, and in past years when the ballots were rerun, the magic number resulted in everywhere from five to nine movies, but never 10. Things could change, but as he explains, even the sheer numerical breakdown is against such an outcome. Continue reading “2014 Oscar Predictions Round 3”

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Steven Soderbergh takes the heist movie to the art house with his “Ocean’s Eleven” remake.

 

“Ocean’s Eleven” was when Steven Soderbergh took the art house to the mainstream. It wasn’t Oscar bait like “Traffic” and “Erin Brokovich,” and it wasn’t gritty and experimental like “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” It was just pure Hollywood fun in the biggest way possible, which is probably the reason why most critics were unkind to it. To see such a gigantic studio picture with no lofty ambitions come from an otherwise serious director was like a concert pianist pounding out a little honky-tonk, as Roger Ebert put it in his 2001 review.

But to see how much it gets right, how different it feels and how unique it looks at every moment in comparison to similar Hollywood capers like it is to realize that “Ocean’s Eleven” is a great film after all, and a fun one. Continue reading “Ocean’s Eleven (2001)”

Larry Crowne

Tom Hanks’ “Larry Crowne” is a harmless film that will offend no one. This is a luxury if you don’t mind your films so tepid and tame lest anything more surprise you.

Hanks directs himself as the title character, a loveable lug who was just fired from his long time job at the superstore UMart. This bothers him, slightly, but he soon realizes that if he wants to get back on his feet and start working again, he’ll need to get a college degree.

“Oh No! I lost my job at UMart,” I thought as Larry returned to his comfy suburban home. The film naturally addresses the economic crisis and does so simply and directly. This is not a difficult film. Continue reading “Larry Crowne”