Tag: Jodie Foster

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

Elysium

Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” is a smart sci-fi heavy on parallels to contemporary American social politics.

The futuristic sci-fi “Elysium” may be the most modern and topical movie of the year. With tense action movie thrills and a jaw-dropping CGI backdrop, it not so subtly refers to the political hot spots of immigration, the poverty divide, the environment and universal healthcare in modern America. That it doesn’t forget to be a creative and compelling sci-fi in the process is part of the fun.

In the early 22nd Century, the wealthiest humans have fled the now deeply polluted and over populated Earth to an orbiting space station known as Elysium. In their space resort, the synthetic grass is green, the pools are shimmering blue and healing pods have effectively eliminated death, disease and aging.

Meanwhile on Earth, specifically in Los Angeles, everyone is poor and working class, “Soylent Green” levels of people roam the ghetto and abusive, snarky robots police the streets. This life is not the apocalypse; it’s simply the new normal.

That “Elysium” feels less like dystopia and more like an extension of contemporary ills will be the dividing line between those feeling Director Neill Blomkamp is beating a dead horse and those prepared to accuse it of a socialist agenda. Continue reading “Elysium”

Carnage

When Alan Cowan’s cell phone vibrates, everything stops, or at least on the surface. Eyes still twitch and appendages fidget, and Alan doesn’t forget whose company he’s in. We wouldn’t want to be rude.

Yet the never ending, subtle anxieties nagging us in social situations, like wanting to drop Alan’s cell phone in a flower pot, make Roman Polanski’s “Carnage” so devilishly enticing. “Carnage” makes the compulsion to be rude immensely enjoyable.

Polanski’s 79-minute nugget of a film is based on Yasmina Reza’s play (she co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski) “Le Dieu du carnage.” It was “God of Carnage” on Broadway while I was in New York, and it starred James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. I didn’t get to see that version, so I was thrilled when I heard it was being made into a movie with a cast I admire even more.

Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play two married couples discussing what to do following Winslet and Waltz’s son attacking Foster and Reilly’s son with a stick. It’s a dark and dryly funny character study of society, civility and judgmental human nature in Western culture.

The families are on edge from the beginning, choosing their words carefully but making their honesty heard.

Michael and Penelope Longstreet (Reilly and Foster) are parents who know best; they have a belief for everything and a blind right to exact justice and understanding for their children. Alan and Nancy Cowan (Waltz and Winslet) are wealthy, busy and intelligent; they disagree but hold their tongues and condescend in private.

This is true at least for awhile, and although there’s a clear sense of how compelling this one-room drama could be on stage, Polanski’s camera show us the finer nuances in these characters’ social awkwardness. He carefully frames each at a variety of lengths and paired with a different partner, so what remains interesting is all that is not being said, the wonderful acting being done when they are not the center of attention and how the screenplay remains nimble and complex to allow changing allegiances.

If in its brief running time “Carnage” devolves to childish bickering too quickly, it’s a forgivable sin because of its naturalism. Perhaps unlike “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, to which it is often compared, “Carnage” is never strictly goofy or morose and never heavy or frivolous. It doesn’t monologue profound social philosophies and it doesn’t take sides.

“Carnage” is a balanced and delicate character drama that never stops spinning its tiny gears, even if a phone call interrupts it.

3 ½ stars

The Beaver

Some stories are flawed on a fundamental level. No matter how well told or performed they are, there are certain things it becomes tough to get past. “The Beaver,” a lovingly directed film by Jodie Foster, falls into this trap. It’s not bad or uninteresting, just problematic.

Walter Black (Mel Gibson) is a hopelessly depressed man. He has no ambition and spends much of his day sleeping. As the CEO of a failing toy company and the distant father of his lonely little boy Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) and his self-hating teenager Porter (Anton Yelchin), he has no one to look to but his wife Meredith (Foster). But she has given up on him after years of trying to help him come out of his slump and kicks him out of the house.

He drunkenly tries to kill himself, only to be startled by an ugly old hand puppet of a beaver. Walter talks through it with a Scottish accent and assumes this new persona. He convinces his wife it is a therapy procedure and finds his confidence at home and at work through it. Continue reading “The Beaver”