BEFORE: Salma Hayek carries over from "After the Sunset", and this will lead to Part 2 of "Catching Up with Marvel Movies" tomorrow. I've fallen very behind on streaming TV, thanks to the second job. I'm desperately trying to avoid spoilers for the first two episodes of "Kenobi", and then there's season 4 of "Stranger Things", and I haven't even started on "Moon Knight" yet, and now "Ms. Marvel" is waiting in the wings, too. Maybe I shouldn't look for another part-time job in July, maybe I should just file for unemployment so I can catch up on streaming shows and sleep. JK.
It's the first day of the Tribeca Film Festival, so I'm working a 12-hour shift at the theater - this may post late because I'll be home after midnight.
THE PLOT: A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.
AFTER: I'm fairly out of my depth tonight, because I don't know very much about high-frequency trading, or fiber optic transmission rates, or low latency direct market access, whatever that is. Fortunately the film sees fit to have the "brain" character on the team explain the whole thing to a waitress, who's really subbing in for the audience. Every time somebody buys stocks, they do it from a broker - they may use a computer to tell another computer what price they want to buy the stock at, and then the broker's computers all race each other to offer the person that stock at that price. If one broker's computer had a faster response rate than the others, it's more likely that the buyer will take that offer, the first one that meets his buying price with the same selling price. That broker may only make ten cents of commission on that sale, but multiply that ten cents by a thousand or ten thousand transactions, and it starts to add up to real money.
I used to pull a similar trick at Penn Station in NYC, when I was taking Amtrak up to Massachusetts - most people waited by the Departures board to find out what track the train to Boston would be leaving from, but I would take a quick glance at the train's number, then move over to the Arrivals board, and look for the same train number, coming in from Washington DC. The arrivals board would have the information first, because the train has to arrive before it departs - and so I'd learn that the train from Washington was coming in on Track 8, and chances were good that it would also be LEAVING from Track 8, too, so I'd go stand by the escalator leading to track 8, while everyone waiting by the departure board still had no clue. I got a lot of great window seats on trains with this little trick.
For the characters here, Vincent Zaleski and his cousin Anton, the scheme is to build a fiber-optic line from Kansas to the New York Stock Exchange, that's a physical high-speed information exchange, buried under all the land in-between, which would theoretically shave the response time for a broker's computer down to 16 milliseconds, to confirm a bid and make the sale of stock happen - for a nickel, or a dime commission, but then ten thousand or a million times over. 16 milliseconds happens to be the length of time of ONE beat of a hummingbird's wings, a fact which really has no relevance, but they do bring it up.
To accomplish this, both men have to leave their jobs working for a company that makes trading software, and which is experimenting with doing the same thing, only relaying the information over large distances via microwave towers. And what's worse than losing two of her employees is thinking of the knowledge they may be taking with them, and possibly some of the company's coding as well.
This all sounds only slightly more legal than that scheme in ""Superman III" and "Office Space" to collect all the rounded-off fractions of pennies from millions of transactions and compiling them into six-figure payouts. Also, it takes money to buy the land rights for all the many, many pieces of property that lie on a straight line between Kansas and New York, assuming that this is a thing that could be done. So Vincent had to look for investors, people with maybe $15 or $20 million dollars to spare, who could be convinced that much more money would be available after the project was completed, and whoever was using the fiber-optic line would be first in line to sell stocks to online traders and be able to write their own ticket.
But of course there are setbacks - drilling through the Appalachian Mountains proves to be more difficult than expected, and it turns out there are Amish farmers in Pennsylvania who don't see the benefit of having messages being transmit over buried cables, and are also not motivated by the money being offered to them. And every day they don't finish the line is another day for their ex-boss to come closer to using microwaves and making the fiber-optic cables obsolete. Look, I'm no technical genius, but if the problem is covering the distance between Kansas and New York, with the emormous amount of money being invested in the fiber-optics and the land rights, it would probably just be easier to MOVE their trading computer closer to New York, wouldn't it? Am I missing something here? Hell, for the amount of money they were spending on the land rights, it would probably be easier to move KANSAS CITY closer to New York.
But that's me, always thinking outside the box when it comes to solving problems. This is a lot of what I do at my part-time job, just solve problems relating to the screenings. I don't exactly follow all of the rules of the building to the letter, I'm more likely to fix something quickly to keep the screening on track, and then worry about the consequences later. Like setting up "step-and-repeats", those are the backdrops on red carpets with the sponsor logos, and stars get their pictures taken in front of them. There are several models of them out there, some are easier to assemble than others, but I've now seen a few varieties of them, and have some experience putting them up. I'm not supposed to do this for the client, supposedly it's a liability issue, but if I can build the thing in 10 minutes, that's a lot easier than watching the client struggle with it for an hour - and me doing it keeps the event on track. So, what's the harm? I'll only be in trouble if one of these things falls over and kills me, or somebody else, and if I do it right, that's not likely to happen.
There are other problems that develop for our defatigable wanna-be trading brokers, Vincent comes down with a serious illness and hides his diagnosis, while Anton becomes something of a recluse in his hotel room, desperately trying to think of ways to get the 17 millisecond response time down to 16 milliseconds, for some reason that makes all the difference - and they never just think about whether the long trip is necessary in the first place. So eh, I'm going to take a mulligan on this film.
Also starring Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Resistance"), Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"), Michael Mando (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Johan Heldenbergh (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Ayisha Issa, Mark Slacke, Sarah Goldberg (last seen in "The Report"), Frank Schorpion (last seen in "Long Shot"), Kwasi Songui (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Conrad Pia, Julian Bailey (last seen in "French Exit"), Jessica Greco, Robert Reynolds (last seen in "Warm Bodies"), Anna Maguire, Ryan Ali, Kaniehtiio Horn (last seen in "Death Wish"), Anton Koval, Trinity Forrest, Nicolas Fransolet, Tyler Elliot Burke, Clara Nicolas, Bobo Vian (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Igor Ovadis (ditto), Jonathan Dubsky (ditto), Daniel Jun, Jude Beny (last seen in "Birthmarked"), Raphael Grosz-Harvey (last seen in "Midway")
RATING: 5 out of 10 tennis balls
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