BEFORE: I didn't even mention yesterday what happened to me in the morning - but it was one of those days where you get halfway through it and start wishing for a do-over, like if you knew in advance how bad things were going to go, you'd be better off just staying in bed and cancelling everything. (Next time you feel that way, consider it, because you could be right about the impending day...)
We had to take one of our cats to a vet in another part of Queens, as our local vet office didn't have the resources to do an ultra-sound scan of his organs (a substance has been building up in his liver, and they don't quite know why - as opposed to MY liver, where the reasons for any problems are very well known.) The plan was simple, leave the house at 8, get to Forest Hills before the 9 am appointment, get back in the car with the cat at 10, and be back home around 10:30, so I could leave for work in Brooklyn and still put in something close to a full day.
And everything was fine, until we got back to the car just after 10 am, to find that my wife couldn't open the driver's side door, and then once she DID open it, it wouldn't stay closed. A closer examination showed a large dent at the bottom of the door, which meant that another vehicle had either hit or backed into her car, then drove away. While she called her insurance company, I went into full on "Law & Order" mode, canvassing businesses on the block to see if anyone saw or heard one car hit another, or if anybody had a security camera with revealing footage. (Not yet, but my investigation is still open...)
Since she couldn't drive us home with one hand holding the door closed, we had to wait for a tow truck, which was supposed to take an hour, but then after 90 minutes, we were told it would take another hour. Meanwhile, our cat hadn't eaten since an early dinner the night before (he couldn't eat for 12-hours before the ultra-sound scan) so I took him back to the vet to see if they had any cat food they could spare. They did, but he was too worked up to eat it (or he wouldn't eat it because it was that "healthy" brand) so I had to take a cab home across Queens with the cat, while my wife waited another hour for the tow truck. I didn't make it in to work until about 2 pm, and if I had been delayed any longer, I might have written off the whole day. Sometimes you just need the equivalent of a sick day, only you're not sick, it's just that things seem determined to not go your way. We really need a term for this - like, can you call into work unlucky?
Taron Egerton carries over from "Robin Hood" - I don't have access to "Rocketman" yet, so I can't add that one in here, even if I wanted to. It's on iTunes, but only for purchase at $19.99, and I'm not going to spend that much for that film. I'll have to put it on the list for next year, but it may arrive on an Academy screener at the end of this year, which would be a lot cheaper for me.
THE PLOT: A group of wealthy boys in Los Angeles during the early 1980's establish a "get-rich-quick" scam that turns deadly.
AFTER: Well, if "Robin Hood" was considered a box-office bomb from 2018, here's one that completely took that concept to the extreme. The studio that released this one decided to not do any marketing or promotion, because the news had broken in 2017 about sexual harassment charges filed against Kevin Spacey, along with the #metoo scandals of that year that started with Cosby and Weinstein but extended down to Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Bill O'Reilly, Louis C.K., Brett Ratner, Al Franken, Les Moonves, Mario Batali and others. As a result, this movie with a $15,000,000 budget opened in theaters with little fanfare, and made a whopping $618 in its opening weekend. (No, I did not leave out a few digits there, that's six hundred and eighteen dollars. It played in just 12 theaters.) People either didn't know this film existed, or they stayed away in droves.
Which is a shame, because regardless of how you feel about the #metoo movement or Time's Up, or whether the people involved should be fired or removed from office and never, ever be allowed to work again, it's a case where people avoided this movie for the wrong reasons. They SHOULD have avoided it because it's a terrible movie, not because of any harassment allegations - but I suppose the results were the same at the end of the day.
The main problem, for me, is that we've all seen this exact story before, in different iterations. "The Wolf of Wall Street" most notably, but also "Boiler Room" and "The Big Short" and "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps", and that one about Bernie Madoff - "The Wizard of Lies", which I haven't seen yet, but it's on my list. There's nothing here that seems new or different in any way from "The Wolf of Wall Street" - 80's kids get high, party, defraud investors, and nobody learns a better way of doing things. This film would have you believe that Joe Hunt (another real person, just like Jordan Belfort) was the first person who came up with the idea of lying to investors, "accidentally" putting a debit in the credit column, or taking one person's investment money and handing it to another person as their dividend. Jesus, WE the audience know this is a Ponzi scheme even if the characters doing it here refuse to admit it to themselves.
Everybody wants to be well-liked, and every broker or businessman wants their investors to be happy, but at what cost? Even if you defraud them and make them think that they're earning money when they're not, or their investment is still sound when it's not, they're GOING to find out eventually, right? This film suggests that it's OK to pull a fast one and defraud people, as long as you're doing it to the people who were mean to you in high school, so they can finally treat you like one of the gang. So yeah, it seems like Joe Hunt had some issues left from his teen years, and was working them out, but still, not in an entirely legal way.
Then the movie really falls apart at the end, like I mean completely, because it portrays only ONE version of what happened to investor (and even larger con man) Ron Levin. Hell, a few hung juries in California couldn't even seem to agree what happened to him, and who did it. Some people say he was seen years later in Greece or maybe Spain, so it's possible that he skipped town in 1984 with plans to never return to the U.S. And if nobody really knows for sure what happened, maybe that's not the best case to make a movie about, just sayin'.
I didn't realize at first that this was based on a true story, and for that matter I didn't realize at first that it was set in the 1980's. One reason for that is the fact that the two leads attend an 80's theme party, and having been alive during the 80's, I can confirm that we did not HAVE 80's-themed parties back then, we only had "parties", and the ironic nostalgia for things like Mr. T. and Nancy Reagan came much later, so that all seems very out of place here. I don't think 80's parties became a thing until the early 2000's, but I could be wrong.
Overall this just felt like a story that didn't really even need to be told in the first place, so I'm left wondering why anyone bothered. Also, it's a tremendous waste of money, so many better things might have been accomplished with that $15 million budget - unless the making of this film was part of some kind of investment scam. I'm not ruling that out.
Also starring Ansel Elgort, Emma Roberts (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Kevin Spacey (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Ryan Rottman, Jeremy Irvine (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Thomas Cocquerel, Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Barney Harris, Waleed Zuaiter (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Suki Waterhouse, Billie Lourd (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Judd Nelson (last seen in "St. Elmo's Fire"), Maurice Johnson, Billy Slaughter (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Justin Arnold, Marc Mani, Carmen Illan, Kevin Bratcher, Wayne Pére (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Jayson Warner Smith (last seen in "American Made"), Bryan Batt (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), with cameos from Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"), Cary Elwes (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Jimmy Buffett (last seen in "The History of the Eagles"), and archive footage of Johnny Carson (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley").
RATING: 3 out of 10 Rollex (sic) watches
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