Film Review | Money Monster

Write it off

by Thomas Delapa

Looking for a hot insider tip on Money Monster?

Then save your eight bucks. This George Clooney/Julia Roberts Wall Street suspense satire is flat, warmed-over road kill.

While two-time Best Actress Oscar winner Jodie Foster uneasily returns to the director’s chair for her fourth feature, she strands her under-performing stars in what adds up (or down) to a low-caliber shotgun merger between Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The China Syndrome. Unless Foster has her own hedge fund, she shouldn’t look for career dividends any time soon.

Nobody yells “Attica! Attica!” or “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” out the window, but Foster’s scriptwriters borrow from so many topical 1970s dramas that they must be paying a monster interest rate. For starters, he-e-e-re’s Lee Gates (Clooney) the slick, smarmy host of a cable-TV financials show, a man so vacuously fatuous that you know he’s a sure bet for a coast-to-coast comeuppance. Next up is uninvited surprise guest Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), a Queens palooka who’s, yes, mad as hell at the damn rich since he lost his life savings on one of Gates’ bum stock tips. Standing tall, very tall, behind them is Roberts’ Patty Fenn, the show’s sharp, super-cool, alpha-female producer and Foster’s moral conscience in the vast wasteland of 24-7 tabloid TV.

Reunited from their cash-cow Ocean’s Eleven reboots, Clooney and Roberts slowly sink carrying the star ballast, though they can hardly shoulder all the blame. If Clooney once had promise as a cheeky Hollywood throwback to the likes of Clark Gable, he’s now so annoyingly mannered (cocking his head for every emphatic line), that by now his performances are all reruns. If Foster got a bum tip from her agent before buying into this project, she doesn’t do her leads any favors either, inflating the story with overwrought acting and a manic shooting style that papers over the yawning holes in the story’s junk-bond rated logic.

The net result is a cheap, remote-controlled financial thriller that chews up and spits out every populist cliché this side of Oliver Stone and Bernie Sanders. Not a few minutes into Gates’ “Money Monster” daily show, Budwell crashes the set, armed with handgun, made-for-TV hysteria, and an explosive vest designed with the now-cowering host in mind. With the whole world watching—absurdly, even in distant Iceland and Korea—Budwell shouts his million-dollar hostage demands, profanely punctuated with slogans (“The system is rigged!”) that could be coming from both the left and right in today’s angry, un-moneyed U.S. electorate.

Foster is too busy tossing mud and her camera around to seriously ask why (or even if) a blue-collar bud like Budwell would foolishly blow everything he has on a stock-market whim. Those are the sort of questions she simply runs over, content to feed us clichéd lines like those printed on Gates’ cue cards or whispered in his earpiece by his all-knowing, all-seeing producer. No, it’s enough for us to get that Gates is a boorish show-biz charlatan and behind him lurks an even bigger, villainous one—the uber-greedy CEO (Dominic West) of a shadowy finance company that suspiciously lost $800 million in stock value overnight. This guy isn’t just a capitalist pig but a chauvinist one to boot, treating his leggy staffer and mistress (Caitriona Balfe) with oily “That’s my girl” patriarchal condescension.

Foster wears her gender politics on her rolled-up left sleeve, bluntly separating not the men from the boys, but her sharp, ultra-capable females from their obvious lessers—their clueless, often-monstrous male counterparts. Not only does Roberts serve as Foster’s quietly heroic center, she’s the real power behind Gates’ chintzy Dow Jones throne, feeding him lines and keeping him and everyone else cool under crisis pressure. Her partner in distaff kickass-ness is that model-thin staffer, who instantly evolves from corporate mouthpiece and concubine into crusading detective faster you can say Erin Brockovich, digging up the dirt on her boss’ shady globe-trotting missions in his private jet. Back at the studio, the New York City SWAT cops called to the scene recklessly reach for their guns and insults first; it’s no surprise the only exception is a lowly (black) policewoman whom Foster calls to duty only to blow the whistle on her trigger-happy blue crew.

Hollywood insiders might think that with Foster, Clooney & Roberts in charge, Money Monster would be too big to fail. But that’s what they said about Enron, AIG , Lehman Brothers and Johnny Depp’s Lone Ranger.

In other words, don’t bet on a box-office bail-out. My money is on audiences bailing out.

5/14/16

American Idle: Adventures in TV Land

by Thomas Delapa



If you want to seriously study the sick state of TV in the age of Fox News, reality shows and infomercials, spend a few days semi-conscious in a hospital bed.

Some 50 years ago, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow controversially declared television to be a “vast wasteland.” That was when TV was limited to three monolithic national networks. Today, Minow’s diagnosis is no less grim, especially with the metastasizing growth of cable channels into a hundred-headed Hydra monster.

Like a reclined, reluctant tourist in Dante’s Hell, I descended into TV land, armed only with a remote control to temporarily zap the devilish dross I bore witness to. While no one can argue that network TV of the fifties was heaven on Earth, at least the networks sought to edify audiences with such notable dramatic series as Playhouse 90 and Studio One. Where have all the quality dramatic shows gone? A nation turns its lonely, bleary eyes to you, HBO.

In a bloodshot reflection of our splintered society, there’s seemingly a cable channel and program for every interest group, bias, demographic, and gender, all ubiquitously interrupted by a rising tide of noisy commercials. One of the original promises of cable was the absence of advertisements, but that pledge has long been canceled, and is unlikely to ever return in re-runs. Against the swamp of commercialism, PBS remains a lonely oasis of arts and educational fare, despite a notable drop in original content. While the History Channel is a source of informative, if sensationalized, factoid films, the Animal Planet has viciously regressed, devolving the nature documentary into when-animals-attack Darwinism.

Of course, there’s no better advertisement for America’s post-Reagan social Darwinism than the reality show, TV’s version of the Roman bread and circuses—hold the bread. In fact, there’s very little that’s “real” about these spectacles, whether the contrived settings, manipulated action or the exhibitionist participants themselves, who are pre-selected for potential on-camera ballistics. Voyeurism and exhibitionism go hand in hand on these (sur)reality shows, exposing our perverse fixation with the biggest winners of the great American game—as well as its biggest losers.

The only news about cable news is how the 24/7 format serves to both magnify and distort whatever news there is, however trivial or lurid, and often to paranoid extremes. With Fox News, MSNBC and the pioneering CNN now in ratings competition, the battle isn’t for old-school journalistic scoops anymore, but how to out-spin the other with the loudest mouths. On the feverishly right-wing Fox, a scary parade of dolled-up blond pundits march in lockstep with Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, et al., dishing out snide, cynical barbs at anything remotely liberal, intellectual or Obaman. This drone of negativity is best exacerbated when accompanied by a simplistic video prop, like the endlessly repeated disaster-cam shot of the gushing BP oil well, bleeding black gunk in the Gulf of Mexico and killing all those poor pelicans. At no point during the catastrophe did any of Fox’s slick commentators remind us of Sarah Palin’s campaign cry to “Drill, baby, drill.”

Crude is only one of the words that come to mind for most of cable-TV. Outside of the “premium” HBO (which produced the superb John Adams mini-series), the erratic AMC (home to the Emmy-winning Mad Men) and Turner Classic Movies, the small screen’s big picture is a blur of re-runs, inane game shows, old movies, cartoons, semi-pornographic music videos, televangelists, infomercials and, of course, an exhaustively wide world of sports and pseudo-sports, including NASCAR, martial-arts cage matches, and high-stakes poker—my bet as the nerdiest of televised non-events. The Bravo channel, which once merited applause for high-brow fare, has even dumbed down, going gaga for a Lady Gaga photo shoot.

Dazed and discontented viewers may well ask who took the “vision” out of television. It’s become our national id, where egos rule. For every great show like The Simpsons, there are a hundred Hell’s Kitchens or Wipeouts. But in an increasingly insular, bored, home-theater society that wants its TV and MTV, nobody today is yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going take this anymore.” Resistance seems programmed to fail. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the numbed voyeur of Being There, Americans like to watch.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 8/4/10