Film Review: Money Monster (dir by Jodie Foster)

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In a perfect world, the new film Money Monster would feature a monster that was literally made out of money. Its name would be Monblar and it would shamble down Wall Street and breathe coins made of fire.

Or, if not featuring a literal Money Monster, the film would at least open with the angry spirit of Andrew Jackson springing out of a twenty and seeking vengeance over being replaced by Harriet Tubman. In order to defeat the bitter old president, it would be necessary to summon the spirits of both Tubman and currency hottie Alexander Hamilton. Seriously, that would be a great movie!

Unfortunately, Money Monster is just another boring recession thriller. I’ve lost track of how many bad movies have been released since 2008, all featuring saintly blue collar workers who are forced to resort to extreme measures as a result of losing all of their money due to corporate greed. While they seek revenge by either pulling off a tower heist or an assault on wall street, villainous CEOs sit in their offices, smoke cigars, and laugh at the evil of it all. In between the inevitable gunshots and the collapsing families and the evictions, there’s always time for a didactic speech or two. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not fan of Wall Street but I’m also not a fan of preachy movies.

George Clooney plays Lee Gates, who has a show called Money Monster where he tells people where they should invest their money. Lee is charming. Lee is glib. Lee’s show features backup dancers, clips from old movies, and a rap theme song that is just so 2002. At the start of the show, Lee even dances as Money Monster tries to convince us that Lee’s a hyperactive showman despite the fact that he’s being played one of the most laid back actors of all time. Lee is totally unaware and/or unconcerned about the people who have occasionally lost their life savings due to his advice.

One of those people is a deliveryman named Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) and we know he’s a good, honest guy because his name is Kyle Budwell as opposed to Kyle Evilguy. Kyle follows Lee’s advice to invest his family’s savings in IBIS Global Capital. (At first, I thought that the company was called ISIS Global Capital and I was like, “Hey, you betray your country, you pay the consequences…”) One week later, the IBIS stock crashes, Kyle is suddenly dead broke, The Big Short only manages to win one Oscar, and Hillary Clinton defeats Bernie Sanders in the New York primary. What other choice does Kyle have other than to go on Lee’s show, force Lee to wear a bomb vest, and demand answers!

Yawn.

There’s not a single surprising moment in Money Monster. I was going to say that you immediately know that IBIS’s CEO is evil because he’s played by Dominic West but actually, you know he’s evil because he’s a CEO and he’s appearing in a movie called Money Monster. Meanwhile, you know that Kyle isn’t really a bad guy because he looks like likable, clean-cut, and handsome Jack O’Connell. If Money Monster had any guts, it would have cast some fat 60 year-old slob with bad teeth in the role of Kyle Budwell. Money Monster ends with a twist that you’ll guess within the first few minutes of film. It’s an annoying twist, if just because it seems to assume that the audiences can’t handle moral ambiguity.

(Then again, there’s really no reason to assume that audiences can handle moral ambiguity so maybe Money Monster has a point…)

I suppose I should mention that Julia Roberts is also in the movie but there’s really no reason for her to be there. She plays Lee’s producer, Patty, and there’s nothing about the role that demands it be played by a star. There is a subplot about how, up until the Kyle takes Lee hostage, Patty had been planning on quitting her job but … well, who cares? Whenever Patty and Lee talked, I found myself cringing and thinking, “Do we really have to sit through this conversation?”

(In all fairness to Money Monster, that’s actually my reaction to most conversations…)

Money Monster was directed by Jodie Foster. It’s funny how we always assume that just because someone is a good actor that they’ll also be a good director. For instance, Angelina Jolie has directed three mediocre films and yet, with the announcement of each new Jolie-directed movie, we still continue to assume that she’s eventually going to win an Oscar for her work behind the camera. (Remember when Unbroken and By The Sea were being touted as guaranteed Oscar nominees?) George Clooney has directed five films and none of them are really that good. (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind only works because of Sam Rockwell’s performance. Goodnight and Good Luck is overrated. Leatherheads is boring. The Ides of March is tedious and The Monuments Men is one of the worst movies that I’ve ever seen.) Money Monster is Foster’s fourth film as a director and it’s almost as much of a tonal mess as The Beaver. Then again, The Beaver was at least weird. Money Monster was just boring. Foster is an incredibly compelling actress and an incredibly blah director.

That said, you would think that Foster would at least be able to get good performances out of the cast. As good as they often are, both George Clooney and Julia Roberts have actorly tics that they tend to fall back on whenever they’re working in the absence of a strong directorial vision and let’s just say that this is a very tic-filled film. Meanwhile, poor Jack O’Connell is running the risk of turning into Taylor Kitsch.

Amazingly enough, Money Monster was this week’s “big” release. Personally, I would recommend seeing Captain America: Civil War for a second or third time. Now that was a good movie!

Shattered Politics #81: Charlie Wilson’s War (dir by Mike Nichols)

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I hate to say it but Charlie Wilson’s War did not do much for me.

I hate to say that because this 2007 film is fairly well-acted, well-directed, and well-written (by Aaron Sorkin, whose scripts usually get on my last nerve). And it deals with an important subject. Taking place in the 80s, the film details how a Texas congressman (Tom Hanks), working with a profane CIA agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and an eccentric socialite (Julia Roberts), managed to create popular and political support for giving weapons to the Afghan rebels who were fighting the Soviet invasion of their country. By doing so, Wilson helps to weaken the Soviet Union but, when his efforts to provide humanitarian aide to Afghanistan are less successful, he also contributes to the subsequent rise of the Taliban.

It should have been a film that I would normally rave about but … I don’t know.

I watched Charlie Wilson’s War. I laughed at some of Tom Hanks’s facial reactions. (Hanks is playing a womanizer here who may, or may not, have been high on cocaine when he first learned about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and it’s obvious that Hanks really enjoyed getting to play someone who wasn’t a traditionally upright hero.) As I watched, I again considered what a loss we suffered when the brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman died. And, as I watched Julia Roberts, I again wonder why, despite the fact that she’s from Georgia, it is apparently impossible for Julia to sound authentically Southern.

(Of course, I’m sure some would argue that Julia wasn’t playing Southern here. She was playing a Texan. Well, I’m a Texan and I’ve never heard anyone down here sound like that. Tom Hanks, meanwhile, actually managed to come up with a decent accent. Wisely, he underplayed the accent, whereas I don’t think that Julia has ever underplayed anything in her life.)

And, at the end of Charlie Wilson’s War, I knew I had watched a good film but it was also a film that left me feeling curious detached. To be honest, I almost think the film would have been better if Hoffman’s CIA agent had been the main character, as opposed to Hanks’s congressman. Hoffman’s character, after all, is the one who nearly lost his job over his belief that the Afghan rebels should be armed. All Hanks really has to worry about is whether or not he’s going to be indicted for using cocaine in Vegas.

However, I do think that Charlie Wilson’s War does deserve praise for one very specific reason. Excluding the films made by native filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson, Charlie Wilson’s War is one of the few films that I’ve ever seen that actually portrays anyone from Texas in a positive light. Even more shockingly, it’s a positive portrayal of a Texas politician!

(I know it must have been tempting to change history and pretend that Charlie Wilson was originally elected from somewhere up north…)

But, overall, Charlie Wilson’s War didn’t do much for me. But, if you’re into military history and all that, you might enjoy the film more than I did.

(Plus, all you boys will probably enjoy Emily Blunt’s scenes….)

At the very least, you can watch it for Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Here Are The 2013 SAG Nominations!

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This morning the SAG Award nominees were announced and, perhaps not surprisingly, the story is less who was nominated and more who was snubbed. For instance, Oscar front-runner Robert Redford’s performance in All Is Lost was ignored while Forest Whitaker’s rather one-note turn in The Butler was nominated. Tom Hanks was not nominated for Saving Mr. Banks but the late and missed James Gandolfini picked up a nomination for Enough Said. Myself, I’m more surprised that Octavia Spenser was not nominated for her performance in Fruitvale Station.

As has been pointed out over at Goldderby, the SAG Awards are no longer the fool-proof Oscar prediction tool that they used to be. Getting a SAG nomination no longer guarantees you an Oscar nomination and, by that same standard, getting snubbed is no longer an automatic cause for concern.

That said, the SAG winners do typically end up receiving an Oscar nomination in January.

The film nominees can be found below:

BEST FILM ENSEMBLE
“12 Years a Slave”
“American Hustle”
“August: Osage County”
“The Butler”
“Dallas Buyers Club”

BEST FILM ACTOR
Bruce Dern, “Nebraska”
Chiwetel Ejiofor, “12 Years a Slave”
Tom Hanks, “Captain Phillips”
Matthew McConaughey, “Dallas Buyers Club”
Forest Whitaker, “The Butler”

BEST FILM ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine”
Sandra Bullock, “Gravity”
Judi Dench, “Philomena”
Meryl Streep, “August: Osage County”
Emma Thompson, “Saving Mr. Banks”

BEST FILM SUPPORTING ACTOR
Barkhad Abdi, “Captain Phillips”
Daniel Bruhl, “Rush”
Michael Fassbender, “12 Years a Slave”
James Gandolfini, “Enough Said”
Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club”

BEST FILM SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jennifer Lawrence, “American Hustle”
Lupita Nyong’o, “12 Years a Slave”
Julia Roberts, “August: Osage County”
June Squibb, “Nebraska”
Oprah Winfrey, “The Butler”

BEST FILM STUNT ENSEMBLE*
“All is Lost”
“Fast & Furious 6”
“Lone Survivor”
“Rush”
“The Wolverine”

The full list of nominees can be found here.

—-

* Isn’t it about time that stunt performers get an Oscar category all their own?

Lisa Marie Does It To Larry Crowne (dir. by Tom Hanks)

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Jeff and I have been in Baltimore since last Friday and I’ve been having a great time seeing the sights (I thought I’d found the rowhouse where they hid all those bodies on The Wire but Jeff says all condemned buildings look the same) and just getting to meet and hang out with my boyfriend’s family. We went shopping on Saturday, bonding on Sunday, and on Monday night, they took me to see the fireworks at Baltimore Harbor. And, on Tuesday, we went to the movies and saw the new Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts romcom Larry Crowne at the wonderful Harbor East Cinema. Now, I have to admit that I wanted Larry Crowne to be a really sweet, funny movie because we were seeing it not only with Jeff’s younger sister but with his mom as well.

So, imagine my horror as Larry Crowne flickered across the screen for 90 minutes and it quickly became apparent that we weren’t watching a cinematic classic. Far from it. With each flat punchline and uninspired piece of on-screen business, the feeling of despair at the pit of my stomach grew and grew. Oh my God, I thought, they’re going to think about this movie now whenever they think about me. In their heads, I will forever be equated with a bad, boring movie. In their heads, in their heads…zombie…zombie…zombie…

Suddenly, I had another terrifying thought. What if they, like a handful of other people in the audience, actually enjoyed the film? What if, during the end credits, they looked over at me and said, “Wasn’t that wonderful? That Tom Hanks really delivers.” What would I do? In my mind, I replayed all of the fun that I’d had in Baltimore up to that moment. Damn you, Larry Crowne, I thought, things were going so well!

By the time the end credits had finished, I literally felt like I was aboutto be ill.

And that’s when Jeff’s mom looked over at me and said, “Well, Tom Hanks sure did drop the ball on that one.”

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! I wanted to shout. Not only did we agree on the overall quality of the film but she also specifically went out of her way to blame Tom Hanks and not me! Seriously, I can’t begin to tell you how happy this made me.

As for Larry Crowne, it’s the story a guy named Larry (played by Tom Hanks, who also directs) who loses his retail job because he doesn’t have a college education. So, he enrolls at the local community college where, for some odd reason, he quickly captures the attention of a girl named Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who is several years younger and makes it her mission to make Larry into a cool guy. Why does Talia take such an interest in this guy? The movie never really says. It’s not for any sort of romantic reason as Talia has a boyfriend (played by Wilmer Valderamma). The only thing that she has in common with Larry is that they both drive motor scooters. In fact, Talia’s in a gang of scooter riders. And by that, I mean that there’s like 20 to 30 people in this group. We never learn any of their names or why they’re all hanging out together. Seriously, it all seems so false and cutesy that, after a good start, the entire film falls apart once Larry and Talia meet. In the end, it just seems like another case of a Hollywood film in which a down-on-his-luck caucasian is validated by the fact that a member of a minority group has developed an inexplicable interest in his life.

Anyway, one of Larry’s classes is taught by Julia Roberts and oh my God, can we just be honest here? I know all you boys love her and stuff but seriously, Julia Roberts is aging terribly and she looks just awful here. It doesn’t help that the character she’s playing here comes across as a brittle, self-centered psychotic with a drinking problem. Whenever you see Larry starting to get near her, you just want to yell out, “No, Larry — she’s crazy!” Julia’s performance gets better as the film goes on but it’s still hard to warm up to her character. Not only does she appear to have been born with a scowl on her face but she’s also not much of a teacher. Seriously, what type of public speaking professor interrupts her students while they’re giving a speech? Anyway, Tom and Julia eventually end up pursuing each other, though not because it makes any sense for their characters to feel any sort of attraction towards each other. This is the type of romantic comedy where the romance feels like an afterthought. It’s as if someone said, “Wait — both Tom and Julia are in this movie? Well, make sure they fall in love.”

Now, the frustrating thing with Larry Crowne is that it’s never actually bad enough to be a “so bad that’s it’s good” type of film. Instead, the film settles very early for a very complacent, almost lazy sort of mediocrity. As a result, the film is ultimately not terrible but instead, just very forgettable. It’s heart it is in the right place. Tom Hanks has said that this film is meant to be an “antidote to cynicism” and, if that’s the case, he can take pride that there’s not a cynical bone in the film’s body. It’s all very earnest, very well-intentioned, and finally just very, very bland.

Sometimes, a little cynicism is just what the doctor ordered.

The 10 Worst Films of 2010

Posted on December 29, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sometime during the first week of January, I’ll post my picks for the top 25 films of 2010. But for now, I’m going to go ahead and post the much more fun list, my picks for the 10 Worst Films of 2010.

10) Knight and Day — Tom Cruise gets creepier with each film.

9) Robin Hood — Sorry, but that “I declare him to be an …. OUTLAWWWWWW!” line can only carry a film so far.

8 ) Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps — Money may never sleep but Lisa Marie did. Shia LeBouf as a financial genius? Plus, any film that so completely wastes the talents of Carey Mulligan deserves to be on this list. The Other Guys got across the exact same message and was actually entertaining.

7) Eat Pray Love — Finally, a film that tells us all how to find peace, enlightenment, and happiness. First off, have a lot of money. Secondly, be Julia Roberts.

6) Solitary Man — A superb performance from Michael Douglas can’t disguise the fact that this is yet another entry in the “Men-Just-Can’t-Help-It” genre of film.

5) Hereafter — This is, quite frankly, one of the most boring films I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve seen a lot of boring films. This is also one of those films that attempts to convince you that it’s a quality production by making all the actors look as crappy as possible. Seriously, did they just pump collagen into Jay Mohr’s face?

4) Clash of the Titans — Zeus must be turning over in his grave.

3) Chloe — Great director (Atom Egoyan), great cast (Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried), terrible movie. I’m still trying to understand how this one came about.

2) The American — An homage to the French New Wave that fails because it is neither French nor new and there’s also a notable lack of waves.

1) Love and Other Drugs — What makes this film the worst of 2010? The beginning, the middle, and the end.

The Worst Female Images In A Movie

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Did you know that there’s a group known as The Women Film Critics Circle and, much like the DFW Film Critics, I am not a member despite being 1) a woman, 2) a film critic, and 3) a feminist? I swear, I am feeling so rejected right about now…

Then again, looking over their 2010 movie awards, I’m not sure I would want to be a member. Check out their selections and then see if you can guess which one has got me all annoyed and profane.

BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN
Mother And Child

BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
Winter’s Bone

BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
The Kids Are All Right: Lisa Cholodenko

BEST ACTRESS
Annette Bening/The Kids Are All Right

BEST ACTOR
Colin Firth/The King’s Speech

BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
Jennifer Lawrence/Winter’s Bone

BEST COMEDIC ACTRESS
Annette Bening/The Kids Are All Right
BEST FOREIGN FILM BY OR ABOUT WOMEN: *TIE*
Mother
Women Without Men

BEST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE
Conviction

WORST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE
Black Swan

BEST MALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE: *TIE*
Another Year
The King’s Speech

WORST MALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE
Jackass 3D

BEST THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED MOVIE BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Temple Grandin

BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES: *TIE
Another Year
Fair Game

BEST ANIMATED FEMALES
Despicable Me

BEST FAMILY FILM
Toy Story 3

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Helen Mirren

ACTING AND ACTIVISM
Lena Horne [posthumous]

*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women:
Winter’s Bone

*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: For best expressing the woman of color experience in America
For Colored Girls

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity
Fair Game

COURAGE IN ACTING [Taking on unconventional roles that radically redefine the images of women on screen]
Helen Mirren/The Tempest

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN AWARD [Performance by a woman whose exceptional impact on the film dramatically, socially or historically, has been ignored]
Q’Orianka Kilcher/Princess Kaiulani

BEST DOCUMENTARY BY A WOMAN
A Film Unfinished

WOMEN’S WORK: BEST ENSEMBLE
Mother And Child

BEST SCREEN COUPLE
Another Year: Jim Broadbent/Ruth Sheen as Tom and Gerri

Did you catch it? Yes, that’s right. With all of the demeaning, insulting, sexist crap that both the mainstream and the independent film industries have released this year, Black Swan wins the award for “Worst Female Images In A Film.”

Uhmm, really?

Yes, Natalie Portman dealing with a society that forces an unrealistic expectation of perfection on young women — this is a far more negative image than every female character in The Social Network turning out to either be a bitch, a whore, or an idiot. Natalie Portman suffering from bulimia because she knows the consequences if she doesn’t maintain the right body type — this is a far more insulting image than Anne Hathaway being charmed by Jack Gyllenhaal pretending to be a doctor while leering at her exposed breast in Love and Other Drugs. This was the year that Rebecca Hall fell in love with a man who kidnapped her in The Town while The Killer Inside Me lingered lovingly on scenes of Casey Affleck beating both Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson to death. But no, out of all this, Black Swan featured the worst images of women on screen.

What utter and total bullshit.

I am a feminist and I am proud to be fiercely pro-woman (though never blindly anti-male). I have always been very aware of the fact that, regardless of intent, most movies are basically sexist fantasies. And, like a lot of women, I’ve come to accept that as the price I pay for loving movies. It’s something that I’m more likely to laugh at than to get outraged over. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes get tired of it, that I don’t sometimes wish that just for once, I could see a movie where the female lead didn’t need to be rescued by a man or where she wasn’t expected to epitomize some sort of stereotype.

To be honest, male filmmakers are not solely to blame. Some of the most demeaning images of women have come from films that were directed by women and which were advertised as being “feminist” films. Sometimes it seems like movies are either so busy trying to either keep women down or to build women up that they forget that most of us just want to be seen as human beings.

So no, Natalie Portman is not some sort of “feminist ideal” in Black Swan. She cuts herself, she’s bulimic, she fears her own sexual desires, she’s too hard on herself, and she’s manipulated by the men around her. And you know what? That’s not a sexist fantasy. For far too many women, present and past, that’s the life that has been forced upon them by an inherently sexist society. If anything, that’s the type of life that feminism was supposed to provide an escape from.

Instead, the stridency and judgmental attitudes of far too many so-called “feminists” has simply turned into another way to trap us into that life of guilt and shame and idealized demands of perfection.

The female images in Black Swan are not negative. They’re honest and that’s why Black Swan meant more to me, as a woman, than every single self-conscious, strident “feminist” film ever made.

As for the worst female image in a movie — give that award to Eat Pray Love for being yet another movie that basically gives us a spoiled, immature, rich, elitist lead character and then insults women everywhere by trying to present her as some sort of practical model for liberation.

Julia Roberts traveling across the world without once waking up with dark circles under her eyes might be the ideal but Natalie Portman being leered at by an old pervert on the subway is the reality.

For once, this has been a good year for strong women on American film screens. Whether it was Noomi Rapace as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank, or even Angelina Jolie as Salt, this has been a year of strong female images. This has been a year of films that left me feeling empowered — not in the wishy-washy way that so many insultingly condescending films claim to empower but in an honest way that made me feel, for once, that I didn’t have to accept the idea of any limitations on my own dreams or desires.

It wasn’t just a good year to be a girl who loves movies. It was a great year.

And Black Swan was the best part of a great year.

(You can read my original review of Black Swan here.)