Talking Monarch Blues.

Part monarchical bromance, part speech impediment Rocky, Tom Hooper’s impressive if Oscar Bait-y The King’s Speech — about King George VI of England’s attempts to overcome his debilitating stammer — is, in its own way, as edutaining and well-made a recent royal micro-history as the film concerning his daughter, Stephen Frear’s The Queen. The acting is on point, the writing is keenly-observed, the direction is crisp and well-paced, and if Colin Firth gets a Best Actor Oscar for this to make up for his A Single Man loss (much like Jim Broadbent won for Iris after being overlooked for Moulin Rouge), well, no harm, no foul.

The point being, if in doubt, go see this film. You probably know if this sort of thing — a BBC-ish historical production with a feel-good, sports-movie narrative arc — is your cup of tea, and if it is, have at it, good fellow. Still, chalk it up to haters gonna hate, but I left the theater feeling a little underwhelmed by The King’s Speech. Yes, it is well-made. But it also didn’t do anything that surprised me — wait, so Geoffrey Rush’s speech therapist is both wacky AND wise? Irreverent AND endearing? What a delightful combination! — and I ultimately found the stakes to be rather small.

The film opens in October of 1925, as the shy, discomfited Duke of York, Prince Albert (Firth), waits within the bowels of Wembley Stadium with his doting wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter). Third in line to the throne behind his father the King (Michael Gambon) and his rapscallion brother David (Guy Pearce), the Duke is about to deliver an address — to be broadcast worldwide — at the closing ceremony of the British Empire Exhibition. This, alas, he bombs painfully: Albert’s pitiful, strangulated attempts to overcome his stammer make the speech a chore for speaker and millions of listeners alike.

Cut to a decade later, and the poor prince is still prisoner to his unruly glottis. And so, with the Duke at the end of his rope, Elizabeth (who we know better as the beloved “Queen Mum.”) seeks out some aid from a commoner who’s ostensibly trained in the arts of speech therapy, one Lionel Logue (Rush). An Australian transplant to the isles, Lionel is a congenial family man far removed from the etiquette and ostentation of the Crown: The closest he’s ever gotten to royalty is his well-reviewed portrayal of Richard III — another “rudely-stamped” Duke of York, as it happens — back in Perth. But is it possible this scampish, egalitarian therapist has the wisdom and the potential to break through to the future king where others have failed? Gee, you think?

I don’t want to make light of Prince Albert’s stammer, because it seems like a cruel fate indeed for a man born into a family business of speechifying to be afflicted with such a curse. (And Firth does a great job of conveying the sheer horror of it all. At any moment, you can see his fear that he might once again be betrayed by his tongue.) Still, perhaps it speaks to a failure of empathy on my part — I usually do well on the Voight-Kampff, I swear — but the question of whether or not an extraordinarily wealthy and catered-for man can manage to overcome his embarrassing speech impediment was not one I found all that engaging in the end. (This is sorta the same problem I have with Sofia Coppola films, and I fear Somewhere will be no exception.)

It seems the writers recognize the problem here, so to square that circle they invoke the encroaching thunder of World War II. Albert (later George, of course) is more and more explicitly contrasted with that eloquent demon on the Continent, Adolf Hitler, who is mustering a frightful army by virtue of his silver tongue. How will England’s monarch be able to stand against the wrath of Nazi Germany, if he too is not possessed of royal gravitas and a kingly p-p-p-p-poker face? Well, ok, that does raise the stakes some, and, yes, from his decision to stay in London during the Blitz to his 1939 Christmas speech (not featured in the film), the dignity and fortitude of King George VI was indeed a rallying point for his people during the Second Great War.

Still, from watching this movie you’d never get the sense that John Bull already has a great orator in his pocket, in Winston Churchill. (Here, Timothy Spall, who sadly comes off like a guy in a Halloween costume.) At the end of the day, it’s Churchill’s speeches — “their finest hour, “blood, toil, tears, ands sweat,” “we shall fight on the beaches” — that stand the test of time, which, for all its good intentions and attention to craft, makes the central tale in The King’s Speech feel like even more of an historical footnote. (And, as Dangerous Meta points out, Churchil himself was a stammerer. That’s mentioned briefly in the movie, but perhaps not given as much due as it could’ve been.)

In the end, though, the question of stakes is less important than the nagging suspicion throughout The King’s Speech that it was basically just a sports movie for the Merchant-Ivory crowd. There may be a Big Speech at the end instead of a Big Game, but we’re still playing in the same old ballpark. We even have a training montage at one point.

Speech is very well put together to be sure, and if this genre speaks to you then do go see it. Still, I left the theater feeling like I’d seen this exact same sort of tale — adversity overcome with determination and the aid of a kooky-but-wise mentor — way too many times before. Adding British accents, and a stammering one at that, doesn’t really change the tried-and-true Rocky/Remember the Titans/Great Debaters equation at work here in the end.

Venetian Grind.

Let’s get right down to brass tacks: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist, his major studio follow-up to The Lives of Others (#11 on the decade list) is brazenly, woefully, blog-stoppingly awful. I’m serious — this movie is terribad. It’s been awhile since I’ve felt the urge to get up and leave in the middle of a film so strongly (and that’s something I never do, because if I break that seal, it’ll be katy bar the door from then on.) But it’s probably just as well I stayed, since pretty soon thereafter I got the 21 Grams giggles to carry me through this canal of Venetian drek.

So, oof, where to begin? It sounds like von Donnersmarck was mostly a hired gun for an already-troubled production here, so let’s give him a pass to start. (Sam Worthington, Charlize Theron, and Tom Cruise — who mined similar material this year in the considerably better Knight & Day — were all attached as stars at various points, and director Alfonso Cuaron was rumored to be replacing von Donnersmarck when he tried to walk away early on.) So how about the two leads? Angelina Jolie is one of the world’s great beauties, and Johnny Depp is no slouch in the heartthrob department either. But, here, she looks cadaverous, he looks paunchy, and together they have zero chemistry whatsoever.

I’ve long thought that Depp is one of our best working actors, but it has to be said — After two dismal Pirates sequels, he’s now been front and center in two of 2010’s worst bombs, this and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. And after seeing Depp play so many weird parts over the years, one has to wonder if he’s now like butter scraped over too much bread: Maybe he just can’t do normal anymore. (But now that I think about it, has Depp ever played a convincing “normal” romantic lead? Benny & Joon, maybe? Gilbert Grape?)

Anyway, Depp’s character — Wisconsin widower and schoolteacher Frank Tupelo — is meant to be just an average guy in over his head, unwittingly caught up in a spy drama as The Wrong Man. (Jolie’s character picks him at random on a train to be a mark for the Interpol-types following her.) But Depp seemingly can’t help but play Frank as all twitchy and affected. He speaks with Hunter Thompson cadences half the time and eyes his surroundings — and his co-star, for that matter — like it or she are going to sprout wings any moment. He can’t even sip his nightcap without Jack-Sparrowing his way through it. “Hey, look, a beverage! In my hand! I shall drink it! Ooh, it kicks!”

And then there’s Jolie, who also seems bored throughout (and who has her own 2010 sins to atone for in Salt.) For one, Jolie and Depp definitely don’t seem to like each other very much: There’s no romantic spark between them at all. (So much for “tourist attraction.”) But the main problem here is they’ve given her character — Elise Clifton-Ward, beautiful femme fatale with a hidden agenda — a British accent. Now, Jolie can either act or do the accent, but, for whatever reason, she pretty clearly can’t do both at the same time. (And, as you’ll see if you somehow end up watching this disaster, she definitely can’t act, do the accent, and drive a boat.)

And so most of the movie Jolie just seems very far away, a cold neutron star. Her sheer presence can overpower a film sometimes — say, her turn as Matt Damon’s crazy wife in The Good Shepherd. But, here, any spark of personality, wit, or warmth is quickly snuffed out by her stultifyingly bad impression of an English person. It’s like the prom queen somehow got roped into performing in the high-school production of Oliver Twist, and she’s just going through the motions so it won’t negatively affect her cred.

So Jolie and Depp are definitely a drag on the material. But, to be honest, it’s hard to imagine a different set of A-list stars with real romantic chemistry — say, I dunno, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones — pulling off this film either. Some fetching images of Venetian splendor notwithstanding, there’s just no there there. The Tourist moves at a snail’s pace for most of its run, and not in a contemplative Eurofilm way like The American. And more often than not, the movie makes no sense.

To take a few examples: Frank finds himself running from Russian mobsters but doesn’t think to change his appearance in any way. (Here’s a tip — lose the Jack Sparrow ‘do.)The Big Bad dispatches his minions in such an over-the-top Bondian manner that nobody would ever actually work for the guy (although that might explain why said Russian goons can’t hit the broad side of a barn.) And there’s a ridiculous third-act twist which many will see coming within the first five minutes of the movie. But just because you see it coming doesn’t make it plausible.

Granted, these are the type of foibles and Scooby Doo logic you might forgive in a more enjoyable film. But with nothing to latch onto here for entertainment value, they stick out like a sore thumb. So, is there anything good about The Tourist? Well, the movie does feature a cast of obviously European actors, which gives it more of a sense of place than your average studio film. And it starts out with a surveillance scene, which made me think fondly of The Lives of Others for a few beats at the start. Um…Timothy Dalton’s in it, so that’s cool, I guess. (He fares slightly better than poor Paul Bettany, who’s stuck with the clueless inspector role.)

But that’s about it, really. Make no mistake: This is a bad, bad film. Mr. von Donnersmarck, Mr. Depp, Ms. Jolie: Let us never speak of this trip again.

Danse Macabre.

Well, I was rooting for Darren Aronofosky’s Black Swan. I generally think well of Aronofsky even if The Wrestler notwithstanding, he has a penchant for operatic self-indulgence. (In the Best of the Decade list I put together a year ago, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Requiem for a Dream clocked in at #77, #35, and #30 respectively.)

And, at least in general terms, the subject matter of Black Swan hits close to home, given that my sis is a professional ballerina who’s well-versed in the Odette/Odile role(s). (Although, as far as I tell, she hasn’t gone off-the-wall, certifiably bugnuts crazy…yet. Gill’s thoughts on Black Swan are here.) All that being said, Aronofsky’s attempted Cronenberg variation on Tchaikovsky here doesn’t really work. The movie is arousing a good bit of passion and controversy at the moment — some critics love it, some hate it, there may even be an age divide — but, for the most part I just found it overwrought and silly.

Black Swan begins auspiciously with the prologue of the ballet from which it’s riffing: Young dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) dreams she’s on stage performing the opening “transformation sequence” of Swan Lake, when Odette first encounters the villainous sorcerer Von Rothbart. (Here and throughout, Portman doesn’t really have the ballet chops to pull off the dancing, but, to my layperson’s eye, the workarounds seemed decently convincing. And she’s actually quite good otherwise.) But outside of the Dreaming, Nina is still just a lower-level dancer (presumably a soloist) in her Lincoln Center-based company, living with her (s)mother (Barbara Hershey) in a too-small New York apartment.

But opportunity knocks for Nina when the company director (Vincent Cassel, seemingly playing himself) tires of his veteran principal (Winona Ryder) and decides to recast Swan Lake from the ground up. (And for some reason, he only seems to be picking one cast.) Nina seems like a perfect fit to dance the willowy, innocent Odette, the White Swan. But can she handle the Black Swan half of the equation: the alluring temptress Odile? In fact, there’s a carefree, sensuous new corps member — with swan wing tattoos, no less (Mila Kunis) — that seems born to play that role. So if Nina wants to live her dream and dance the lead in this new Swan Lake, she has to cut loose from her perfectionist moorings and embrace her dark side. Which, unfortunately for her, brings on the Madness…the Madness, splitting in half…

Thus ensues a series of increasingly nightmarish vignettes, in which Nina — already fragile and anorexic on her best days — succumbs to teh crazy: Mirrors start acting funny, a stress rash grows worse and worse, and soon she’s ripping long strips of flesh off her fingers at the cuticle. (I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a Cronenberg variation, although the “all-in-a-day’s-work” body horrors of The Wrestler also come to mind.) Unfortunately, while Black Swan pretends to be a psychological horror movie, most of the scares here are really just of the jump-scare or gross-out variety. And, other then an ecstasy-fueled nightclub scene that recalls the druggy cinematic syntax of Requiem (and that eventually devolves into a ludicrous “sapphic succubus” tryst that seems like something out of Showgirls), Black Swan spends too much of its run dancing dangerously on the precipice of boring.

The thing is: If we know the lead character is going bonkers, and that’s made pretty clear from jump street, these endless nightmare sequences have very little dramatic weight to them. Something bad happened, somebody got killed? Eh, she’s probably just imagining it. What might’ve made Black Swan more interesting is to emphasize not how she’s going mad, but why. But, in that department, Aronofsky mostly just burdens Nina with trite Freudian baggage — an overbearing mother and a sexy crush on “father” (a.k.a. Cassel) — that was hoary and cliched even in Tchiakovsky’s day.

And so it’s hard to sympathize with Nina because neither her character nor her plight is at all convincing. So she has to somehow play both an innocent AND a seductress? ZOMG how will she ever manage? Well, I dunno, how about…acting? Sure, there are cases where Method types will lose themselves too much in a part. (Heath Ledger’s travails with the Joker come to mind.) But, perhaps due to familiarity with ballet folk, playing the white and black swans just doesn’t seem like an insanity-inducing event to me. (Although, now that I think about it, I guess a psychotic break after portraying evil twins might explain the late career path of the Shat.)

In the Financial Times, dance critic Apollinaire Scherr makes a key and telling point: In emphasizing the psychological rigors of the Black Swan role, Aronofsky sorta missed the point of the ballet. “Sure, there is a good maiden and a sly vixen in Swan Lake, but, like the ballet’s dopey prince, Aronofsky gets them mixed up. The virtuous woman has a self to lose; the schemer merely fakes it. Odile the Black Swan is easy to understand…what you see is what you get…Odette – part swan, whole queen, once simply a woman – is complex: wild but also majestic, animal yet gentle.”

In other words, the White Swan is the character with actual depth, while the Black Swan is basically all sizzle and flash, the prince falling for a pretty face. In that, the movie Black Swan is much like its namesake. I suppose it works decently well as a cheesy midnight movie for goth girls and the like. But in terms of anything approaching tragic or psychological depth, Black Swan misses the mark wildly. Its pleasures and pains barely scratch the surface.

Nowhere is Safe.

When reading the seventh and final Harry Potter tome in 2007, my sense was it felt more like a scriptment than a novel, and, tho’ often clunky as a book, it would probably work better as a movie a few years down the road. And, hey, I was right! (At least so far.) Even though it’s only half the story, and the leisurely camping half at that, David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Part I is easily one of the best films in the series — perhaps the best, if you prefer your Potter relentlessly dark. (I know Cuaron’s Azkhaban has a following, but for me the real competition is Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire.)

A hardy veteran of Dumbledore’s army at this point — this is his third Potter film in a row after Order of the Phoenix and the Half-Blood Prince — Yates has taken the often-unwieldy wanderings of the first half of Hallows and fashioned a lean, tense, and gripping fugitive story out of them. Better yet, he’s brought a much more palpable sense of danger and darkness to the proceedings. When I read the book, I missed Hogwarts most of the time and wondered why our heroes had to spend so much time camping. Here, the lack of Hogwarts goes unnoticed, and it’s abundantly clear why Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend so much time on the lam — They’re totally under the gun…er, wand.

That may be the part that rankles some of the youngest viewers out there, or their parents — From the creepier-than-usual Warner Brothers card on, the gloom here is unrelenting, and almost sadistic. Hallows begins with a Great Eye — that of the Minster of Magic (Bill Nighy), who’s making a Churchillian attempt to rally the wizarding world against the encroaching forces of Voldemort. (Good luck with that.) The Dark Lord (Ralph Fiennes), meanwhile, is entertaining his Death Eater shock-troops with a banquet at the Malfoys — one punctuated by the torture and eventual murder of Hogwarts’ Professor of Muggle Studies. She dies pleading for clemency from her former colleague, Severus Snape. (Clearly, she was new to academe.)

The Big Three are no happier. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is packing up and hiding the Dursleys somewhere safe from harm — It’s gotten so bad that he’s even nostalgic about his old room under the stairs. Hermione (Emma Watson) has resorted to wiping her Muggle parents’ minds of her existence. And Ron (Rupert Grint)…well, ok, like his older brothers, Ron is still a bit of a goof (at least until his arm almost gets ripped off in a freak disapparating accident later on.) And this, Ron’s injury notwithstanding, is all before Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson) shows up at 4 Privet Drive with an army of returning cast members — or, as anyone who’s read the book knows, cannon fodder.

Granted, these supporting characters aren’t exactly Redshirts — we know most of them from the first six movies. Still, here is one of the situations where, to my mind, the movie rubs up against the limitations of the source material. There’s a line in Red Letter Media’s worthy evisceration of The Phantom Menace where the narrator makes the very valid point: “Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi should have been combined into one character named…Obi-Wan Kenobi.” The same goes for the Potterverse.

By here in Book 7, several thousand pages into the tale of young Mr. Potter, the story is now totally crufted over with narrative stuff. Dozens of characters are running around already, and yet Hallows seems to pile on more every time our heroes get in a jam. (For example, Harry gets a tip from an old journalist friend of Dumbledores, whom we’ve never met, to go visit an old historian friend of Dumbledore’s, whom we’ve never met. Couldn’t one of these just have been Jim Broadbent’s Slughorn, from Book Six?)

We’re equally overstuffed here with magical Maguffins — Seven horcruxes and three hallows, not to mention three gifts from Dumbledore and various other wonderful toys, like Harry’s watchful mirror, Hermione’s infinite knapsack, and a steady supply of Polyjuice Potion. With so many magical items in play, the ground rules get fuzzy, and the sense of danger takes a hit. (Then again, they’re fuzzy anyway — Where can and can’t House elfs go again? And why aren’t our team using that highly convenient Room of Requirement from Book 5 to solve all of their problems?)

Still, one definite bright side of having so many populating the Potterverse is that the series continues to be a welcome full-employment program for British thespians. Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans (as Xenophilius Lovegood, Luna’s dad) are the most prominent additions to the cast, but there are other fun faces joining the party this time, including David O’Hara (Braveheart) as Harry’s face in the Ministry, Guy Henry (Extras, Rome‘s Cassius) as Voldemort’s puppet minister, and Peter Mullan (Children of Men, Red Riding) as the Death Eater head of security.

On this front, the series is now an embarrassment of riches. When the likes of John Hurt and Miranda Richardson have all of fifteen seconds of screen time, and even the House elves are voiced by names like Simon McBurney (The Last King of Scotland, The Ghost Writer,) and Toby Jones (as Kreacher and Dobby respectively), you know you’ve got a heck of a cast on your ends. And the three kids have grown up to be no slouches in this department either. I can’t tell if they’re great actors, but they’re definitely very good at being Harry, Ron, and Hermione at this point.

So, in the end and despite its narrative over-packing, Deathly Hallows is an entertaining and scary ride with some very memorable setpieces. There’s an animated sequence late in the film that’s as beautiful and entrancing as anything we’ve seen in all seven movies thus far. And I was also fond of Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s assault on the Ministry, packed as it was sly allusions to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. (Note the big statue, the gaggle of hangers-on breezing by, and Mullan being a man consumed with paperwork.) There’s still a lot of camping here, sure, but at least this time it feels less like aimless meandering and more like an urgent necessity. Let’s hope Yates and co. can land this magical bird in as fun a fashion next July.

Crime of the Century.

A tale of two financial crimes: After the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 80’s and early 90’s — a clear consequence of Reagan-era deregulation, by the way — had run its course, 1852 S&L officials were prosecuted, and 1072 of them ended up behind bars, as did over 2500 bankers for S&L-related crimes. But, when a similarly-deregulated Wall Street plunged the US economy into a much steeper recession two decades later…nobody (with the notable exception of Bernie Madoff) went to jail — In fact, it was barely even admitted by the powers-that-be that serious crimes had even occurred at all. So what happened?

That is the stark question driving Charles Ferguson’s well-laid-out prosecutorial brief Inside Job, which works to explain exactly how we ended up in the most calamitous economic straits since the 1930s. If you’ve been keeping up on current events at all, even if by comic books, stick figures, or Oliver Stone flicks, then you won’t be surprised by the frustrating tale Inside Job has to tell. But unlke the more inchoate and disorganized Casino Jack and the United States of Money earlier this year, which ultimately let its subject wriggle off the hook, Inside Job tells its sad, sordid story clearly, concisely, and well.

The central through-line of the financial crisis by now is well-known. Basically, Wall Steet banksters — relying heavily on “market innovations” (i.e. unregulated toys) like securitization, collaterized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps — spent the first decade of the 21st century engaged in a trillion-dollar orgy of avarice, criminality, and fraud. And, a few prominent casualties like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns aside, the perpetrators of these financial misdeeds mostly walked away unscathed from the economic devastation they wrought. In fact, they’re doing better than ever.

Said banksters got away with this from start to finish mainly becauset they could, thanks to thirty years of deregulation and an absolute bipartisan chokehold on the political process. So, when the bill came due in 2008, these masters of the free market just got the Fed to socialize their losses, thus handing the damage over to the American taxpayer by way of Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson (former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs) and his successor, Tim Geithner (no stranger to Wall Street himself.)

As I said recently, my thoughts on the relative necessity of TARP have shifted a good deal since 2008, but, surprisingly, Ferguson doesn’t really get into that debate here. Inside Job is more broad in its focus: It aims instead to show how Wall Street has systematically corrupted both our political process and our economics departments over the course of decades, and nobody is safe from its wrath. Sure, it was probably a tremendously bad idea to let an Ayn Rand acolyte like Alan Greenspan call the shots for the American economy for so long, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are other fish to fry.

After all, it is President Clinton and his financial lieutenants, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, who preside over the death of Glass-Steagall, the original sin that precipitates all the later shenanigans. It is also they who work to keep prescient regulators like Brooksley Born from sounding the alarm. And, after the house of cards has collapsed in 2008, and President Obama steps up to the plate promising “change we can believe in,” who does he pull out of the bullpen to lead us but…the irrepressibly porcine Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the Chair of the New York Fed? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. (But remember, folks, Obama is really an anti-business socialist.)

What goes for the US government goes for the academy as well. As Ferguson shows, Milton Friedman aficionadoes and Reagan/Bush policy guys like Marty Feldstein of Harvard and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia, who now find themselves atop prestigious Ivy League economics departments, are all too happy to give an academic imprimatur to bad bankster behavior, as long as they see a piece of the cut. (Nobody gets it worse than Columbia prof and former Fed governor Frederic Mishkin, who appears here to have walked into a battle of wits completely unarmed.)

In the meantime, Ferguson fleshes out the documentary with related vignettes on the financial crisis and those who brought us low — some work, some don’t. The movie begins with the cautionary tale of Iceland, about as pure a real-time case study into the abysmal failures of deregulation as you can ask for. (If that doesn’t do ya, try Ireland.) But the film ends as badly as it starts well, with an overheated monologue about the way forward, cut to swelling music and images of the Statue of Liberty — a cliche that serves to dissipate much of the pent-up anger of the last 90 minutes. (Perhaps Inside Job should’ve used the lightning strike.)

What’s more, at times Ferguson seems to try too hard to frame guilty men, and never more so than when he has a former psychiatrist-to-the-bankster-stars opine about cocaine abuse and prostitution all over the Street. Sure, it’s unsavory, and I see the ultimate point here — that these petty crimes could’ve been used to flip the lower-level traders if anyone had had tried to bring a RICO case against these jokers. But this sort of bad behavior, however frat-tastically douchey, is extraneous to the real crime at hand, and it seems really out of place when you’re using fallen crusader Elliot Spitzer as a witness for the prosecution.)

Still, overall, Inside Job is a very solid documentary that manages to capture its elusive quarry, and in a better world it would result in more serious consequences for the banksters who put us in this mess. Make no mistake — this is a crime story. As Massachusetts rep Michael Capuano observes in the trailer, and as Woody Guthrie put it many moons ago, “some rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” Thing is, when Pretty Boy Floyd or John Dillinger robbed banks back in the day, they got shot. When the banks rob you…well, that’s apparently another thing entirely.

Retread, Extremely Dull.

To complete the pre-election backlog at last, Robert Schwentke’s by-the-numbers action-comedy Red, which I caught a few weeks ago at the Uptown, is…really forgettable. I mean it. It can’t have been more than a month ago since I saw this flick, and yet, even with its impressive A-list cast — hey, A-listers have mortgages too — Red already has that half-remembered did-I-watch-this-on-television haze about it in my mind.

For a dumb action-comedy, Red is neither particularly action-y nor particularly funny. (It is plenty dumb, tho’.) The film’s killer app — Helen Mirren as a badass assassin — doesn’t show up till halfway through the movie, and even then is criminally underutilized. It has one of the most annoyingly intrusive, jingly-jangly Oceans’ 11-wannabe scores this side of The Informant. It can never decide on a tone, and veers from broad, Naked Gun-style antics (see, for example, everything involving bazookas) to half-hearted stabs at being taken seriously. And, with the possible exception of Bruce Willis doing the hero-walk out of his moving car (to save you money, it’s at 1:40 in the trailer), there’s just very little to write home about here…or even on GitM about, for that matter.

But, write I must, so let’s take it to the synopsis: If you just watched the aforementioned trailer, you’re already basically up-to-speed. In brief, Frank Moses (Willis, on autopilot) is an ex-CIA spook who’s not handling retirement well. He spends his days tearing up his pension checks so he has an excuse to phone up the friendly and equally lonely cubicle-rat Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker, deserving better) — They make small talk about romance novels and avocadoes and whatnot. So far, so good. Red has an off-kilter feel to it at first that seems like it might be going somewhere. Unfortunately, we’re only maybe six or seven minutes into the film, and then the bullets start raining down like a hailstorm of stupid.

Y’see, a crack team of assassins have been sent to kill Frank in the dead of night for some reason, and they end up firing so much lead into his Cleveland home that the entire structure comes tumbling down. (Wouldn’t this draw unwanted attention to your ostensibly black-ops hit? Oh, whatever.) Frank, of course, survives this demolishing unscathed. And after abducting his new friend Sarah (shades of Knight & Day here — no better way to win a lady’s heart, apparently, than by absconding with her against her will), he decides to get the old “Retired: Extremely Dangerous” band back together to figure out why he’s been targeted.

And why is that, exactly? Well, long and boring story, really, but it has something to do with an old mission in Guatemala where the current vice-president (Julian McMahon, feeling as TVish here as he did in Fantastic Four) kinda sorta lost his mind and started shooting up the place. More important for our purposes is the band in question — Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Mirren, and Brian Cox. That’s a pretty solid traveling troupe if you’re looking to do some actorly jamming for a few hours, and particularly when you have occasional fun special guests like Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfuss (who’s basically reprising his role from W) waiting in the wings.

Only problem is, it doesn’t play out like that. Freeman seems bored, and you can’t really blame him when the only thing the script calls for him to do is [spoiler] give a Shawshank-y farewell speech and die…twice. Meanwhile, Malkovich, playing an ex-agent who was dosed with LSD for decades, goes Method: He skips right over funny and lands on the creepy, off-putting-homeless-guy side of crazy. (As far as Malkovichian CIA romps go, I prefer Burn after Reading.) Mirren, as I said, is underused. And Brian Cox…well, Cox can be a very good actor (Manhunter, The 25th Hour) or, when in it for the paycheck, an absolute, William Hurt-like hambone. (The Ring, Troy.) As a vodka-swilling, back-slapping, overly-emotional ex-KGB kingpin, guess what he’s like here? When you’re even in spitting distance of out-hamming Dreyfuss in a motion picture these days, that’s no mean feat.

Oh yeah, Karl Urban (still channeling Bones from Star Trek) is skulking around in this too, as the Agency’s muscle. He’s ok, I suppose — He gets his hat handed to him by Bruce Willis decently well. But his entire character arc is laid out the first time he looks askance at his sinister, take-no-guff handler (Rebecca Pidgeon), so there’s a lot of waiting around for his inevitable crisis of conscience to take hold. In the meantime, there’re a lot of explosions and bullets and stuff, all set to that godawful, its-ok-you-can-laugh-now score.

In the end, Red is slow-witted, dull, nonsensical, and even a bit sadistic — drink every time someone gets abducted, tied up, beaten up, or interrogated. But, more than anything it’s just…forgettable. Who knows? Maybe the CIA has been hard at work on a nefarious plot to redact Red from my brain. If so, I salute them.

That Facebook Movie.

With the election at last behind us, for better or worse, I’ll hopefully be able to keep up better on the movie review front for the rest of the year. At the moment, tho’, there are two films still in the backlog. First up, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s overrated and exploitative faux-documentary Catfish.

This is a movie that’s hard to talk about without giving away its central hook: Let’s just say it’s the “true” story of a young man (Yaniv Schulman) who meets a girl on the Internet and gets more than he bargained for. If you don’t want to be spoiled any more than that, I’d go ahead and skip the rest of this post. (FWIW, there’s definitely a case to be made for having no information on this one: The two friends I went with had no clue what the film was about going in — Was it a vampire movie? A zombie movie? A human-animal hybrid movie? — and so they found it much more suspenseful than I did.) For everyone else, well, I’ll see you in the next paragraph.

Still here? Ok, well, walking out of Catfish, I had two thoughts about it. First, it was at least kinda interesting to sit through a movie about the client-side of Facebook so soon after seeing the server-side tale told in The Social Network. (If you see one movie about Facebook, tho, see The Social Network. It has its problems, but it’s a far, far better film.) Second, I thought the entirety of this movie can basically be summed up in four words: “Psycho preys on douchebag.” Now, upon further reflection, that’s obviously a very uncharitable way of talking about real, honest-to-goodness people. So let me rephrase it: Catfish is probably better described as: Deeply lonely, possibly schizophrenic Midwestern housewife preys on…douchebag.

Seriously, Yaniv, the self-satisfied, Lower East Side-hipster main character we follow here, feels like he just walked out of Cloverfield. He’s just an annoying, deeply pretentious person, and it’s not much fun to spend time with either he or the two directors, who play a larger role in the story as the film goes on and who are, basically, birds of a feather. But that isn’t even why they deserve the moniker — Ye shall know them by their deeds. These guys are douchebags because they pretty clearly set out to make a movie, and their names, by exploiting that aforementioned sad, sick housewife. Catfish spends most of its run trying to make it seem like Yaniv is the unassuming prey of an Internet fraudster. Wrong. He and the directors are the predators here.

As Catfish plays out, Yaniv first gets an e-mail from a young girl in rural Michigan who’s apparently an art prodigy — She sends him a painting of a photo he took for a magazine. Later, he falls into an online relationship with the girl’s attractive older sister. The two text, they chat on the phone, they eventually cyber But gradually, over the course of months (according to the film), Yaniv figures out that the details don’t add up. The songs he’s sent were recorded by other people, the addresses don’t match what Google Earth has to say. And, when he and the directors finally go out to Michigan to figure out the score, they find that both girls, and their many online friends for that matter, were all the figments of one desperate woman’s imagination.

A potentially intriguing story, I guess, if the protagonist was more likable. Or if, you know, the entire series of tubes was restricted only to Facebook or something. But, as Movieline‘s Kyle Buchanan well put it: “I don’t buy it at all; I think the filmmakers knew from the start what they had on their hands, and they baited a mentally unwell woman for almost a year until their film needed a climax.” That was my sense too — In fact, I found it hard to imagine any other possible conclusion.

Are we really supposed to believe that Yaniv and/or his two directors — who are even making a movie about an online relationship, for Crom’s sake — never took the time to google these Michigan girls at some point? I, and most people I know, google each other before a first date. Also, I would tend to think that child art prodigies, who are ostensibly selling paintings for a few thousand dollars a clip, tend to run up some copy in the local papers. Did Yaniv never think to look them up? Didn’t he want to see what other works of art she might have painted? In fact, why are the cameras even rolling in the first place?

One could argue, I suppose, that Catfish just shows the lengths that people — in small-town Michigan and the heart of New York City alike — will go to feel special and/or see their names in lights. But we have a universe of reality shows on television that already make that point. In the end, Catfish could have just been kinda boring. But sitting through the filmmakers and their star here (not credibly) play the dupes for eighty minutes, and then watching them try to pin down their mercurial, sad, and lonely find on camera for the last twenty or so, the experience went from unnecessary to downright unpleasant. So, congrats on that, I guess.

10,000 Megs of Harvard

As the post-Inception zeitgeist film of the fall, David Fincher’s moody, ambitious, and entertaining The Social Network, a.k.a. the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, has already been pretty well dissected by now — I wish I’d had time to get to this flick earlier.

Suffice to say, this movie is a lot like its protagonist — fast-talking, occasionally irritating, oftentimes more clever than it is smart, and ultimately endearing despite itself. In all honesty, The Social Network irked me quite a bit in the early going, but it also managed to win me back by the closing credits. The highest praise I can give Fincher’s film in the end is that I enjoyed it, would recommend it, and look forward to seeing it again, even despite the fact that, when it came to any aspect of the story I actually knew anything about, the movie was often aggravatingly, woefully wrong.

First, the story. The Social Network begins with a very Aaron Sorkin-y dispute at a bar between Erica, an attractive young BU co-ed (Rooney Mara, soon to be Fincher’s Lisabeth Salander), and Mark, her geeky-arrogant Harvard boyfriend (Jesse Eisenberg, here making a bold move to outflank his actorly nemesis, Michael Cera). For some reason, Mark is seriously sweating what Finals Club — a.k.a. the old-school, Harvard version of the fraternity scene — he might end up in, so much so that he eventually lets his disdain for his girlfriend slip out. (“Why do you keep saying I don’t need to study?” “You go to BU!“) And so Erica wisely walks out of the picture, leaving Mark stewing in the cauldron of feminine slight, status anxiety, and nerd-rage from which, presumably, world-conquering social websites are eventually born.

Having introduced Mr. Zuckerberg and his general unpleasantness, The Social Network proceeds to tell his story. How, after bad-mouthing Erica on his blog (First rule of blogging: Don’t drink and blog), he embarks on a plan of revenge against all of womanhood by coding up a Harvard “Hot or Not” knockoff called Facemash. How this stunt gains him both notoriety on campus and the attention of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), a pair of Old Money, Olympian-class rowing twins — and members of the Porcellian! — who need a coder for their website idea, “The Harvard Connection.” And how Mark, along with his kind-hearted (and wealthier) best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield, the heart of the film), may or may not steal their idea to create his own social portal, “The Facebook”– which, as we all know, eventually leads to mo’ money, mo’ problems, as a wise man once put it.

This origin story is smoothly told throughout — remarkably so, in fact. The action cuts back and forth between the shenanigans taking place at Harvard and, eventually, Silicon Valley (Enter Justin Timberlake, playing an outsized, Faustian version of Napster’s Sean Parker) and, after the millions have been made, two grim depositions: Mark is being sued separately by Eduardo and the Winklevoss twins, who he memorably dubs the “Winklevi.” And throughout, it’s hard not to appreciate how relentlessly smart the movie is. In the early going, to establish Mark’s coding prowess, there’s even an admirable attempt to explain the basics of how he puts together Facesmash: “First up is Kirkland. They keep everything open and allow indexes in their Apache configuration, so a little WGET magic is all that’s necessary to download the entire Kirkland facebook. Kids’ stuff.”

So what’s the problem? Well, I’m not a coder by any means, and I definitely wasn’t present at the birth of Facebook. But I did go to Harvard, spent more than a few hours in the crew tanks, own and have rocked the Henley jacket, and have cooled my heels in the Porc’s bike room before. And when it comes to the alma mater, the film is severely off by at least three or four decades. The Harvard of The Social Network is pre-meritocratic — It looks right but feels totally wrong. Really, who cares about Finals Clubs anymore? Slate‘s Nathan Heller already eviscerated the movie on his front, and he’s absolutely right: “I recognized their Harvard, but only from Love Story and The Paper Chase, not my experience. To get the university this wrong in this movie is no small matter.”

And so a lot of the The Social Network just felt ludicrous to me. Early on, they try to portray a party at the Phoenix, one of the Finals Clubs (in my day, probably the most ethnically diverse and least douchey of them, to boot), as the very pinnacle of exclusivity, where the beautiful people party. In the film, attractive, revealingly-dressed women bus in from all over Boston to see if they can get past the rope line. In reality, parties at the Phoenix were…well, college frat parties. The very fact that I got drunk at them occasionally doesn’t speak highly of either their exclusivity or their beautifulness. In other words, Finals Clubs are kinda sad and desiccated these days. They were glorified frats, and nobody took them at all seriously — not even the private school kids who might have a vested interest in keeping up the old appearances.

That is just one example, but it happens over and over again in The Social Network. That aforementioned sinister-seeming bus of farmed-in party girls — well, Cambridge folk know that’s the “F**k Truck”, and it was just a bus route, no more, no less. I was a regular on it for months when dating a woman out in Wellesley. But it seems like Sorkin heard the nickname and went wild with it. There’s another scene where Eduardo and others are hazed about “the Statue of the Three Lies, and some frosh flubs it wildly. But the three lies are Firstyear 101. Everyone knows ’em, and there’s no way a kid, however wasted, would blank out like that. The whole scene just seems inserted in to show off Sorkin’s Harvard research.

And don’t get me started on the crew stuff. On one hand, it’s a real kick to see the sport get some props here — One scene, set to a Reznorized version of “Hall of the Mountain King”, even shows the Winklevi competing at Henley. (Not much love for coxswains, alas.) But then the Wonder Twins meet “His Royal Highness,” the Prince of Monaco (as a friend pointed out, it’s His Serene Highness.”) And, when said prince says it’s the closest race he’s seen in 30 years, Tyler replies: “[M]ile and a half races are more commonly won by a boat length or two.” Uh, no, races come to within a few seats, or even a few bowballs, all the time. And Henley is actually a 1.3 mile race, and one that rowers would normally talk about in meters — here, 2112 — in any case.

FWIW, this inattention to detail is a recurring problem I have with Aaron Sorkin’s output — The West Wing, a show which I know is much-beloved, also had more than its fair share of aggravating errors. (To take just one example, I remember President Martin Sheen complaining in the last episode about the Founders picking the cold month of January for inauguration day. They didn’t.) And in both The West Wing and here in The Social Network, every single character speaks in exactly the same hyper-clever, overwritten voice, and that over-writing, to my mind, generally tends to be fast and sloppy (Or, to be uncharitable about it, coked out.)

Are these quibbles? Well, maybe, but they add up, and I eventually thought the minor-but-accumulating errors of truth hamstrung the overall truthiness of the project. If Harvard isn’t actually a citadel reigned over by bluebloods and subdivided into all-important Finals Club fiefdoms (and it isn’t), then the Match Point-esque status anxiety driving Zuckerberg here isn’t at all convincing.

Or, to take another problem: At the time this story begins, in the fall of 2003, I was in New York and dating someone I’d met on Friendster. But you don’t get any sense from this story that Friendster, or MySpace, or even the Columbia Campus Network were already well-established by the time Facebook was concocted.

The point being, the entire movie is constructed as if Zuckerberg et al are fighting over this ground-breaking and wonderful new idea. But, as Larry Lessig pointed out in TNR: By 2003, the idea of a social network was really nothing new at all. The origin of Facebook is really a story about execution: As Lessig writes, “In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows.”

In an effort to make the Facebook idea seem unique, Sorkin & Fincher argue here that it’s the site’s exclusivity that makes it something altogether new. Really? I don’t buy that, particularly when the worries about exclusivity theoretically driving Zuckerberg here ring so false. Don’t get me wrong — I liked The Social Network, and I had a lot of fun watching it. But, while Fincher’s film may be a very entertaining whirlwind tour through the stately pleasure domes of Harvard and the Bay, it’s also aggravatingly lacking in veritas in ways both great and small. I’d friend The Social Network, sure, but unfortunately it’s not the all-time classic that the online hype suggested.

Let the Same One In.

“If you’re looking for a quality film before the coming holiday deluge (or, if you’re like me, and can pretty much tell from afar that [the fourth] Twilight likely won’t be your bag), look no further than [Matt Reeves’] taut, eerie vampire flick [Let Me In]…A[n American remake of a] Swedish import that combines elements of the age-old vampire mythos with My Girl, My Bodyguard, and Morrissey (hence the title), [Let Me in] moves and feels like a particularly well-crafted Stephen King short story (or perhaps a bleaker version of one of Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish Civil War fairy tales), and definitely makes for a compelling nightmare before Christmas if you’re in the mood for it.”

Particularly given how far behind I am on reviews these days, I am tempted to keep playing Mad Libs with my December 2008 take on Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In — which ultimately ended up at #38 on the decade list — all the way down the pike for this one. And the shoe would fit: While watching Matt Reeves’ American adaptation of this story, I was almost irritated by how similar Let Me In turned out to be to its Swedish source material. At times, it feels like the exact same movie, to the point where, months or years down the line, one might forget which scene was in which flick.

But, upon further reflection, isn’t that exactly what you want from a remake? (I mean, decent jobs like The Ring aside, it could be and usually is worse: Even as good a director as Christopher Nolan didn’t do much with his Americanized version of Insomnia, and just think of how botched George Sluizer’s US version of The Vanishing turned out to be.) So, if you’ve never seen the original Let The Right One In, and/or if you take the extreme similarities here to the original to be a feature rather than a bug, Let Me In actually turned out rather well. It is not an embarrassment by any means.

Let me go ahead and get the “haters gonna hate” portion of the review out of the way first. The ads and end-credits note that this film was “written for the screen and directed” by “Matt Reeves, the director of Cloverfield,” (Why they’d keep bringing up that awful flick as a selling point is anyone’s guess.) Well, maybe if by “written for the screen,” you mean “transcribed the subtitles from the original.” Otherwise, that’s a pretty blatant resume-padder. Just moving the story from a socialist-style housing complex in Sweden to wintry, northern New Mexico in the 80’s does not on its own make this a deeply original enterprise.

Ok, there are a few small differences, I guess. For no particularly compelling reason, Reeves starts this version in the middle of the story, with the grim fate of “Hakan” (Richard Jenkins — The character isn’t named in this version), the long-suffering companion to and handler of the strange new girl in town, Abby (a.k.a. Eli a.k.a. Hitgirl, Chloe Moretz.) Reeves also leaves out some memorable moments from the original film (the cat-attack, Abby’s scar) and, presumably because we Yanks are a touch simple and all, spells out exactly what the eventual ending means for our young, bulliied protagonist, Oskar/Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) (Owen stumbles on some old pics at one point that close the implied circle of the story.)

Otherwise, this is basically exactly the same movie as the one that was in theaters less than two years ago, albeit now without subtitles. Reeves’ most promising new flourish is early on, when the sound drops out of Reagan’s Evil Empire speech, playing on a hospital television, at an ominous moment. (“And if America ever ceases to be good…“) And between that and the Los Alamos setting (i.e. home to the Manhattan Project), I initially thought Reeves might be trying to inject an ambitious new flavor into the story here — that Owen’s eventual love for Abby, despite her committing clearly evil deeds, is not necessarily as strange and alien to us as we would want it to be. But, no, this is really just Let the Right One In all over again, now with a goofy joke about Now and Laters.

And, y’know, in the end, perhaps that is a good thing. Sure, Reeves does not build on the original film, really. But he doesn’t sell out to the Twilight crowd either. In fact, he does an impressive job of capturing the original’s essence and distilling it for an American audience. The movie looks right and feels right. It too has a strong sense of place, and it benefits from two child actors who succeed in selling the coming-of-ageless relationship at its core. Moretz is a name at this point, and so not as innately creepy as the unknown Lina Leandersson in the original. But she’s still self-possessed enough to convey Abby’s otherworldliness. And, Smit-McPhee plays the damaged, lonely Owen as well as Kare Hedebrant in the first one. (Although, between this and The Road, I hope for his sake that Smit-McPhee isn’t as needy and whiny in real life.)

So, the upshot is this: If you caught Let the Right One In recently and are looking for some sort of value-added to sit through the remake, I would skip this one or wait for Netflix. But, if you think Swedish horror movies with subtitles are for film snobs, or happen to live in a place where the original never got any run, well, this American doppelganger version isn’t a bad adaptation by any means. It may not break any new ground, but at least this Let Me In is haunted by the same wintry sadness as its source.

Sympathy for the Devils.

Like W before it, Oliver Stone’s peppy, decently enjoyable, and ultimately far too convivial Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which I caught as the first leg of a three-film swing two weeks ago, suggests the director has moved out of the near-decade-long nadir that brought us Any Given Sunday and World Trade Center. (Rock bottom was, without a doubt, Alexander.)

Wall Street 2 turns out to be a brisk two hours, and its ability to explain some relatively complex financial goings-on in a crowd-pleasing format is admirable. Still, the movie also ends up feeling like a missed opportunity. Bringing 80’s corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) back to comment on the amoral rapacity of today’s financial sector could be a stroke of genius, and the movie is most entertaining when it shows how the greed and corruption of today’s Wall Street has outpaced anything Gekko could ever have imagined back in the American Psycho era. (“Someone reminded me I once said, ‘Greed is good.’ Now, it seems it’s legal.“)

But even more than W, a movie which treated the many foibles of our 43rd president with kid gloves, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a film that seems lacking in sufficient indignation. I mean, those venerable and self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe, the Titans of Wall Street, managed to plunge the entire American economy into a death spiral and pass the bill off to the increasingly jobless American taxpayer. And yet, they still managed to avoid any seriously damaging regulation as a consequence, and, at the end of the day, they give themselves record bonuses for two years running. And all Stone can muster up about it is this? Where’s the outrage?

To be fair, avarice and plunder are central to Stone’s story here, bubbles abound (Stone does love to beat a metaphor to death), and the film does dramatize the September 2008 collapse and subsequent bailout, with Wall Street tycoons Josh Brolin and Eli Wallach, among others, worriedly communing with Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner lookalikes in a darkly-lit Federal Reserve antechamber. The problem isn’t the content so much as the tone. Eventually, you get the sense that, despite all their bad behavior, Stone likes and looks up to these guys. (This may be because Stone’s father was a Wall Street banker, so this may be the film where a director who continually relies on characters with daddy issues is now trying to work out his own.)

As a result, Wall Street feels confused — It doesn’t really seem to know which tale it wants to tell. On one hand, we have the story I just mentioned — the obvious sickness and eventual collapse of the financial sector. But then we also have the story of our protagonist, Jake Moore (Shia LaBoeuf) — a savvier operator than Charlie Sheen ever was — who shuffles through various potential father figures (Gekko, Brolin, and, in the early going, Frank Langella) and woos the professional-blogger daughter of the fallen Gekko king (Carey Mulligan — By the way, Stone doesn’t seem to have a handle on what blogging’s about. We wear pajamas all day, and we don’t have sleek Facebook-looking offices.)

And then we have the Return of Gordon Gekko himself. Now on the CNBC book and lecture circuit, a seemingly chastened Gekko wants Jake’s help to reconnect with his prodigal daughter. In the meantime, he teaches Jake a thing or two about the way the Game is played at the top. And hewatches today’s unsustainable financial shenanigans with wry bemusement — he likes to discourse on tulips — and perhaps a little jealousy. Does Gekko want a seat at the table again? Well, he’s Gordon Gekko. What do you think? (For what it’s worth, Douglas is great fun here — let’s hope it’s not his last performance — but his character is getting a bit of the Ridley Scott’s Hannibal treatment. To my mind, Gekko makes for a better villain than he does an anti-hero.)

In any case, Stone has a lot of balls in the air throughout Money Never Sleeps and as the film goes on they become more and more clumsily handled. This flaw becomes glaringly obvious in the final reel, when the film suffers from more endings than Return of the King, including one — in front of Lady Gekko’s apartment — that comes out of nowhere and feels exceedingly cheap. (The movie even has three closing-credit sequences — one focused on time, one one family, and one on money — Four if you count all the bubbles floating around. Stone apparently couldn’t decide what his film was about.)

There’s a lot of upside to Money Never Sleeps — It’s a surprisingly fun movie at times, and the acting is solid across the board. (People like to hate on Shia LaBoeuf, but I actually think he’s a pretty good actor. Here, he even starts to seem a bit like his father from a more ill-conceived sequel, Harrison Ford — although with less finger and family issues.) Still, I wish the movie weren’t so confused about its purpose, and I definitely wish it took a more aggrieved stance towards its bankster subjects. I don’t want to watch these jokers having totally random Ducati races. I want to see them in jail. (Then again, be careful what you wish for: Gekko says several times here that it’s the next collapse we really need to worry about, and that could happen at any time…like, say, now.)