You think money's gonna fix this?

Arbitrage

(2012)

Gimlet-eyed Richard Gere, sans hamster, delivers a typically focused performance as a hedge fund manager whose professional and personal lives catch up with him. As usual, the actor is given to a mildly constipated performance; you’re never quite sure if he’s a master of subdued underplaying (read, stiff) or simply bored with the whole thing. But those tiny eyes ensure that he can never simply be a nice guy. Nicholas Jarecki’s film slots comfortably into the small financial crisis subgenre, but he disappointingly favours narrative fireworks over literate analysis.

It’s not that there’s anything very wrong in having a traditional suspense structure to hang his tale on; a determined detective (Tim Roth) investigates the scene of an auto accident Gere has deserted and attempted to cover up (he leaves his dead girlfriend in the car, desperate to preserve the secrecy of his affair from his family and to ensure that the projected sale of his firm to a big bank goes ahead). The problem is that the thriller element is only so-so at best, deriving its tension from oh-so familiar plot developments and interrogations (knowing that Jarecki was inspired by the De Niro-Pacino diner scene in Heat only serves to highlight how far short of a real master class he falls here). By the time a prosecution is hanging on a piece of very obviously manufactured evidence, we’ve long since started to call into question the director’s choices.

Jarecki, as first time writer-director (he also furnished the screenplay for the lousy Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Informers), does a better job as director. He shoots clearly and precisely, and has a firm grip on the trajectory of his narrative. Jarecki’s parents worked in the investment field, meaning that he’s drawing on what he knows, so it’s a little disappointing he doesn’t develop this world more fully. We learn early on that Gere has hidden a bad investment, and that he’s attempting to keep things fudged for as long as it takes the deal to go through. But Jarecki consistently soft-pedals the intricacies of the finance world, perhaps fearful that he will lose his audience.

Margin Call had the confidence to get down to the nuts and bolts of the economic crisis. Gere’s Bernie Madoff with a twinge of conscience is consistently much too filtered through his domestic and legal problems for the exploration to be other than oblique. Jarecki has loaded the dice dramatically, and it has the effect of taking the weight off what Gere actually does for a living. It’s just some dodgy finance stuff; that’s all we really need to know. Added to that, his family hold key positions with the firm so when the truth comes out it becomes about the devastating effect this has on his daughter (Brit Marling); meaty for the actors but a cop out for the subject matter. Jarecki chooses to conclude business in the same manner, further blunting any possibilities of commentary on the capitalist machine.

There’s an expectedly fine turn from Susan Sarandon as Gere’s wife and a great one from Nate Parker as the young man Gere calls when he’s in a straight. This is actually a strong plot thread, Gere willing to use and manipulate the only black guy he knows (as Parker puts it) in order to get his own way. The problem is that it further lends weight to the feeling that Jarecki’s world is a fiction, led by plot contrivance rather than substance. Still, it’s fun to see Jimmy Grant (Angel from The Rockford Files) as Gere’s attorney.

I’m sure Jarecki will pay off on the promise he shows here in due course. He does seem to have a slightly inflated opinion of his talents, if the end result is anything to go by (he was such a whizz kid prodigy that he advised on computer hacking on Hackers, don’t you know). And resisting the urge to compare himself to Orson Welles might be wise. But if he can eschew storylines beholden to over-calculated dramatics he could come up with something special.

***

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

If this were a hoax, would we have six dead men up on that mountain?

The X-Files 4.24: Gethsemane Season Four is undoubtedly the point at which the duff arc episodes begin to amass, encroaching upon the decent ones for dominance. Fortunately, however, the season finale is a considerable improvement’s on Three’s, even if it’s a long way from the cliffhanger high of 2.25: Anasazi .

My hands hurt from galloping.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) (SPOILERS) Say what you like about the 2016 reboot, at least it wasn’t labouring under the illusion it was an Amblin movie. Ghostbusters 3.5 features the odd laugh, but it isn’t funny, and it most definitely isn’t scary. It is, however, shamelessly nostalgic for, and reverential towards, the original(s), which appears to have granted it a free pass in fan circles. It didn’t deserve one.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

I’ve heard the dancing’s amazing, but the music sucks.

Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021) (SPOILERS) At one point in Tick, Tick… Boom! – which really ought to have been the title of an early ’90s Steven Seagal vehicle – Andrew Garfield’s Jonathan Larson is given some sage advice on how to find success in his chosen field: “ On the next, maybe try writing about what you know ”. Unfortunately, the very autobiographical, very-meta result – I’m only surprised the musical doesn’t end with Larson finishing writing this musical, in which he is finishing writing his musical, in which he is finishing writing his musical… – takes that acutely literally.

Out of my way, you lubberly oaf, or I’ll slit your gullet and shove it down your gizzard!

The Princess and the Pirate (1944) (SPOILERS) As I suggested when revisiting The Lemon Drop Kid , you’re unlikely to find many confessing to liking Bob Hope movies these days. Even Chevy Chase gets higher approval ratings. If asked to attest to the excruciating stand-up comedy Hope, the presenter and host, I doubt even diehards would proffer an endorsement. Probably even fewer would admit to having a hankering for Hope, were they aware of, or further still gave credence to, alleged MKUltra activities. But the movie comedy Hope, the fourth-wall breaking, Road -travelling quipster-coward of (loosely) 1939-1952? That Hope’s a funny guy, mostly, and many of his movies during that period are hugely inventive, creative comedies that are too easily dismissed under the “Bob Hope sucks” banner. The Princess and the Pirate is one of them.

Who gave you the crusade franchise? Tell me that.

The Star Chamber (1983) (SPOILERS) Peter Hyams’ conspiracy thriller might simply have offered sauce too weak to satisfy, reining in the vast machinations of an all-powerful hidden government found commonly during ’70s fare and substituting it with a more ’80s brand that failed to include that decade’s requisite facile resolution. There’s a good enough idea here – instead of Charles Bronson, it’s the upper echelons of the legal system resorting to vigilante justice – but The Star Chamber suffers from a failure of nerve, repenting its premise just as it’s about to dig into the ramifications.

You’re going to make me drop a donkey.

Encanto (2021) (SPOILERS) By my estimation, Disney brand pictures are currently edging ahead of the Pixars. Not that there’s a whole lot in it, since neither have been at full wattage for a few years now. Raya and the Last Dragon and now Encanto are collectively just about superior to Soul and Luca . Generally, the animation arm’s attempts to take in as much cultural representation as they possibly can, to make up for their historic lack of woke quotas, has – ironically – had the effect of homogenising the product to whole new levels. So here we have Colombia, renowned the world over for the US’s benign intervention in their region, not to mention providing the CIA with subsistence income, beneficently showered with gifts from the US’s greatest artistic benefactor.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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