BEFORE: Well, originally this film was going to be the connection between "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer", or perhaps the other way around. America Ferrera is the connection now, but there were at least three connections between this film and "Oppenheimer". However I chose a different link out of that Best Picture winner, and I could only choose one. This film, however, has just as many connections - really, like 15 paths spiral out in all directions, it may even offer me more possibilities than "Barbie" did. But I just have to stay on the one that gets me to Mother's Day, which is now just 10 days away.
I know, I know, nearly every film has a mother in it somewhere, so it's not much of a challenge, but in a week or so things are going to be extremely matriarchal around here.
THE PLOT: David vs. Goliath tale about everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (the video-game store) into the world's hottest company.
AFTER: Right now, we've got college kids protesting the Gaza War, and honestly, something feels a bit familiar about that. There are tent encampments in universities like Columbia, Berkeley, and even Harvard, and I'm sure the participants would draw an analogy between their protests and the anti-war movement back in the Vietnam War era. But just a couple years ago there were the Black Lives Matter marches, and a few years before that there were the Occupy Wall Street sit-ins, which took place in the fall of 2011. This was a protest against corporate greed, economic inequality, finance's influence over politics, and I'm guessing also it was a thing to do that was more fun than studying for finals. (So let me get this straight, you're upset that the government bailed out the banks? Think for a second about how bad things would have been if they DIDN'T do that, the recession could have easily become the Great Depression II...)
Out of that Occupy movement came the desire to make it easier for people to buy stocks, and with the Robin Hood app, suddenly people didn't need to go to a broker or an investment advisor to buy stocks, they could just press a few buttons on their phone, just like you no longer need to go to a record store to buy music or a newsstand to buy a magazine, most likely there's an app for it now and unless you're a boomer, you can just do whatever it is on your phone. OK, great, I'm all for it but nobody really saw what the possible effects could be once you threw social media into the mix, just like nobody really thought about what effect phone-based sports gambling would have on sports, and we're starting to see that now with the Shohei Ohtani betting scandal.
The stock market is really just a form of gambling, after all, you buy a stock betting that it will go up in value, but there are other people betting that it will go down, so they're selling it short. Apparently these are people who take joy in other people's misery, but this is a very legal thing to do somehow. Once Keith Gill, a financial analyst in Brockton, MA, researched the GameStop company and considered that to be a very undervalued stock that Wall Street was selling short, he made YouTube videos telling other people about it, and to prove he was right, he started buying up the stock with his own money, and wouldn't you know, when the word spread, the stock started going up. It's based on simple supply and demand, of course, because buying more makes the stock more popular, and then more people buy it, which makes it go up more, and wait a second, this sounds a lot like the Winfall lottery seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large", doesn't it? When the PowerBall jackpot goes over a certain amount then the news starts reporting on it, which makes the jackpot get bigger faster.
The power of the common man buying the stock en masse, at a time when the larger investment companies were betting against it, meant that a lot of individuals got rich (on paper) very quickly, and a couple of investment capital companies lost billions just as fast. "Dumb Money" is a term for the investors who don't really know what they're doing, just buying stocks at random and not knowing when to get out, but come on, who really knows when any bubble is about to burst? And these people were believers, or else they would have sold when they doubled or tripled or quadrupled their investment, but no, they were in for the long haul because they all wanted to see just how much money they could make. This is the allure of gambling, you'll keep playing as long as you're winning, or as long as you THINK you will continue winning, and often you won't. "Let it ride" only works for a short period of time, but nobody knows just how long that will be, so the "Smart Money" sells first and cashes out when they're ahead, I guess.
Keith Gill was then seen as a genius, however the subReddit promoting the stock got shut down for "vulgar content" - show me the subReddit that doesn't have that - and also Robin Hood closed down trading on that one stock because the company realized they didn't have enough money to cover the cash-outs if the investors suddenly started panic selling. Sure, it's "buy low, sell high", but nobody tells you what constitutes "high", so really, everyone has to take a guess and they're all blind people stumbling around in a dark room at that point. I think that's how it kind of went down, though I thought maybe there were a few more twists and turns to this story. Congress did a whole investigation into how everything went down and ended up pressing no charges, because, well, you know, that's kind of their thing, doing nothing.
It's hardly a happy ending, but some people did get rich by selling their stock and others less so because they held on to their GameStop stock a little too long, but I know something about that. I had some stock in Marvel Comics years ago when it went public, I spent what I could spare, which was about a thousand bucks, and for a few years I got to go to their stockholders meetings and get Stan Lee's autograph on their stock report (which was in the format of a comic book) and somebody could really do a documentary on what went wrong after that, they bought a trading card company (Topps) so they could make their own trading cards, a toy company (Toy Biz) so they could make their own toys, and a sticker company so they could make their own stickers with their characters. They thought they were setting themselves up for success, but then they had so much debt they had to file for bankruptcy - and my shares were nearly worthless, I could have traded them in for shares in the new, reorganized company but that would have required paying in MORE money and I didn't want to throw good money after bad. I bought some shares in Disney after that, and Disney later bought Marvel, so I guess I'm still invested in comic books, I'm just not in the mood to risk any more of my money on this, I'd rather just keep it in the bank.
The capital investment firms that bet against GameStop shut down, and Robinhood never bounced back from the bad publicity of this incident, so I guess that's progress? I still really don't understand enough about how the stock market works, which just isn't going to change after watching a movie like this or "Fair Play". But I guess now the big corporations keep an eye on the internet to see what people are saying on social media, to keep all this from happening again? Really, I think the smartest guy in the whole film was the GameStop clerk who made a bundle and sold half of it, giving himself a nice little cushion but also sticking with the stock for the long haul - that's really a win win, I think, and that's food for thought. Also he was able to tell his GameStop supervisor to shove it, and that's worth something even more valuable.
NITPICK POINT: Why does the movie spend five minutes on Gill getting razzed for what beer he wants to order? Why does his friend insist on him ordering a Heineken instead of the craft beer he likes? It's true that what beer you drink says something about you, but any friend that takes issue with your beer choice is not really your friend. Two friends drinking together is a sacred moment, and this is a free country, and anybody can order any beer they want, god damn it. Either way, it shouldn't be a 5-minute argument unless the film really is running short and they needed to waste some time. There are quicker ways to show that Briggsy is an a-hole.
Also starring Paul Dano (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Pete Davidson (last seen in "The Dirt"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Myha'la, Nick Offerman (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Anthony Ramos (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Seth Rogen (last seen in "For a Good Time, Call..."), Talia Ryder (last seen in "West Side Story" (2021)), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "The 355"), Shailene Woodley (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Kate Burton (last seen in "Swimfan"), Clancy Brown (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), Rushi Kota, Larry Owens, Dane DeHaan (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Olivia Thirlby (ditto), Deniz Akdeniz (last seen in "The High Note"), David Faber (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Noel Tyler Torres, Nicolas Calero, Gerardo Rodriguez, Rosalie Berrido, Denis Ooi, Christina Brucato (last seen in "The Menu"), Brian David Tracy, Tim Hayes, Kristin Carey (last seen in "Hall Pass"), A.J. Tannen (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Ryan Hansinger, Sal Rendino, Ryan Matthew White, Teddy Day, Marcus Briddell, Damien Jimenez,
with archive footage of Stephen Colbert (last seen in "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop"), Jim Cramer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Jen Psaki, Maxine Waters.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Doordash deliveries
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