"Money Monster"

[Stewball]

OK, we haven't had a liberal political movie to flail on for a while, so it looks like this one is coming along just is time. Of course global warming, sorry, CLIMATE CHANGE, is still sliding out the back door, so we return to the ever present bugaboo, capitalism, for liberals to vent their venom on. Never mind the irony of the stars and the industry that owe all they have to it, biting the hand that feeds it; like with Clooney, wearing a bomb vest at gunpoint, saying, "You came here for answers, you deserve answers."

Absolutely typical. Yes there are corrupt capitalist/bankers/brokers, but as the sub-prime mortgage crisis showed, they have to be pushed into it by government--sucking up the ill-gotten profits from it yes, but only because the government was forcing them to make idiotic loans and not enforcing the regulations against it....oh, and using our taxes to buy up the bad loans and then to bail out the banks, and then print money to pump into the stock market. Gaaaah!

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say they're not going to even try to be even-handed as Hollywood has been tending to do for a while (throwing an occasional bone to the political right to make themselves appear to be "fair", at least in their own eyes), and be as nauseatingly, piss-drinkingly, moronically wrong as possible. And they're throwing in anorexic lips Julia Roberts just to make us think that nausea is a good thing.

But now my integrity requires that I have to watch it and report on it honestly, putting me at risk of drinking my own piss (metaphorically speaking) if I'm wrong. But if I am, and this is an anti-socialist, ambush hit piece (bwahahahahah!), I'll do it gladly, again, metaphorically speaking of course. No Danger.

[Darren]

What else is there to say when someone has already figured it all out? Putting your economics degree to good use again Stewball

[Stewball]

What else is there to say when someone has already figured it all out? Putting your economics degree to good use again Stewball

Well, looks like you found something else to say after all. To bad you couldn't come up with something of substance instead of walking down that well rutted road to a degree in sarcasm. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you tried.

Edit: Just noticed you joined in 2010 and this is your second post. I'm honored. After all, it's probably hard to break the stupor and get up off of the couch.

[Stewball]

First off, they're really downplaying the expected box for the weekend to like $10-12 mil., but the theater I saw it is was packed. They could be playing us with that.

The movie is actually very good, keeping an excellent pace, fine performances (Caitriona Balfe is exceptional as the CCO), several bits of genuine humor and an interesting story (with a couple of contrivances at the end--the crowd/police issue being pretty bad). I even have to complement Jodie Foster. So I'm sitting there thinking I'm gonna have to eat crow on this one when it hits me, where's the government? Where's the SEC? Almost to the minute, on cue, Julia Robert's character sends a gofer to the SEC, on foot so they're not involved until the end and they're never on screen. That's a gaping $800 million dollar plot hole. They would either have had the "glitch" discovered inside of 30 minutes, or it would have had to be complicit along with the big bad capitalist.

So between that, the ending, the unstated assumption that capitalism is inherently evil (and the unremarkable music), I'm knocking this down from an 8 to a 6/10.