Jodie Foster has made a wonderful entertaining and instructive film. She should be encouraged to making more and better films. She has chosen well her cast. There is chemistry between George Clooney and Julia Roberts. It's not the chemistry she had with Hugh Grant in 'Notting Hill', though. Clooney is a shill for companies on the stock exchanges or issuing IPOs. It is not to see his Lee Gates has much in common with that windbag Jim Cramer, who is still talking up buys and sells on NBC. (For elephants with longer memory, yes, the same Jim Cramer who went on TV urging his viewers to buy Bear Stearns within a week or so before it failed.) Gates is a showman, like a Liberace, but without substance. He's a good salesman, not a likable man, but he is at the pinnacle of his success. He knows how to read and give an oomph to the shopworn script a company gives him to hawk its stock. Roberts plays Patty Fenn his producer. She bright, spunky and knows how to keep Gates on message. She's the one's who pulls his strings behind the scenes, feeding him lines though an ear piece. (The idea is not new; it was used in 'Broadcast News'.) And then into this cozy formulaic format comes the talented Jack O'Connell, who plays Kyle Budwell and comes on the TV set upsetting this incestuous love fest of the media and companies listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ: each teasing he hard earned money from purses of the small investor and the hard working who look to make a mean life more comfortable. And then all hell breaks loose. What to many film goers produced glazed eyes in the excellent cinema version of Michael Lewis' 'The Big Short', is more accessible in Forster's 'Money Monster'. Furthermore, like Toto in 'The Wizard of Oz', it exposes the fraud committed and continues to be committed by investment banks and hedge funds. No computer glitches here; the fraud is fueled by old fashioned greed. What makes MM so on target is exposes hucksters like Gates who haven't the slightest clue as to what drives the market, the nitty gritty of the business. What say is a 'punt'? Like a trained seal, until the envelope is pushed to the maximum, might hav had a degree in economic, he didn't understand the market until his life is at stake. And even then, were it not for Fenn, resourceful and forceful, as she whispers the magic words exposing the scam on the public by a powerful corporation through an ear piece, does Gates get an up-to-speed course on algorithms and the geopolitical scheming of the giant multinational corporations. Here, it's fitting to recall Enron. And on the technical side, we see how a TV program is shot, using the camera in the same way Forster did--long shots, zooms, wide lens, so on and on. The cast is a harvest of good actors: Giancarlo Espito, the versatile Dominic West, Caitrionia Balfe, Christopher Denham and Aaron Yoo, to name a few of the fine actors. MM will make money and it should. It is intelligent, entertaining, hardly maudlin, but like TV, it is part of the news cycle and we know at the end the moral of the story is fleetingly learned until the next big scoop.
