Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Posted on December 14, 2010 at 10:00 am

Is greed still good? Does greed still, for want of a better word, work?
Twenty-three years later, Gordon Gekko is back, still played by Oscar-winner Michael Douglas and now running short on money and even shorter on what he realizes is an even more valuable commodity: time. We see him being released from prison, his personal effects including a gold money clip (empty) and his old cellular phone (the size of a shoebox). He walks out into the sunlight toward a sleek black limo only to see that it is there for someone else, the also-departing rap star.
Balzac famously said that behind every great fortune is a crime. That is literally true in Gekko’s case; he traded on inside information. But it is also true in a larger sense because the real reason for Gekko’s wealth is a fierce and unquenchable passion not for money but for winning. He has had a long time in prison to watch and think and plan his comeback. And so he leverages his notoriety into television and in-person appearances to promote his book.
The sequel is so close to the same framework as the original that at times it feels like a remake. Again there is a bright, ambitious and essentially honest young man with a lower-income parent exemplifying the current financial upheavals who gets drawn by Gekko’s gravitational pull. It’s Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who has the added complication of being engaged to Gekko’s estranged daughter (“An Education’s” Carey Mulligan, LeBeouf’s real-life love). And there is another big-time financier like the one played by Terence Stamp in the first film, Bretton James, played by Josh Brolin. Once again, there is an old guy who is the movie’s repository of wisdom and integrity (a fine Eli Wallach). Once again, the young man thinks he can hold on to his values and once again he will find Wall Street is more treacherous than he thought.
In his brilliant book on the financial meltdown, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis muses that his first expose of the wild world of Wall Street excess, Liar’s Poker was instead viewed “as a how-to manual.” The same is true for the first “Wall Street.” As the costume designer noted, the wardrobe from the first movie was selected for dramatic impact, not authenticity. But it was adopted by the real Wall Streeters, who were as thrilled with Gekko’s look as they were with his bravado, and his wealth.
While Douglas continues to be enough to make the entire movie worth watching, there is little chemistry with LeBoeuf or between LeBoeuf and Mulligan. The first film was an intriguing look at a hidden world. But today, with business news on the front pages and the editorial pages, on 24/7 news channels and thousands of websites, Wall Streeters are less often seen as dashing buccaneers than as the people most responsible for bringing the United States to the brink of economic destruction. The movie itself seems as though it cannot make up its mind what it wants from Gekko.

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Easy A

Posted on December 14, 2010 at 8:00 am

Emma Stone finally gets the breakthrough role her fans have been waiting for in “Easy A.” This is the moment that takes her into the front rank of movie stars, sub-category: America’s sweetheart.

Stone has an immediately appealing presence on screen, unpretentious but utterly charming. Here she plays Olive, a girl who doesn’t yet realize that all of the things that make her feel invisible in high school are going to make her wildly beloved for decades after. She is impatient to be “interesting” and so after a thrill-less weekend highlighted by singing along to a greeting card she impulsively tells her best friend Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka) that she had sex with her college student boyfriend. Problem #1: the sex and the boyfriend are both imaginary. This is the kind of mistake a teenager would make. Problem #2: this confession occurs in the ladies’ room at the high school, with no checking the stalls. This is not the kind of mistake anyone would make after 7th grade, but we have to kick that plot into gear, now, don’t we?

And so the whole school immediately knows and believes this scandalous news. Which is why Olive’s closeted gay friend tired of getting picked on comes to her with a proposition. Not that kind. He wants her to have noisy public pretend sex with him so that he can be definitively proven manly. And since her reputation is already shot, what can it hurt? And why not do the same favor for some other needy souls? And then, when it seems the whole school is judging her (conveniently, her class is reading The Scarlet Letter), she decides to sew a big red A on a bustier and see what it feels like to go from invisible to un-missable.

Stone is such an effortless charmer that she keeps the story aloft, even when Olive inexplicably turns her little adventure into a for-pay enterprise, insisting on gift cards(!) in exchange for making the reputation of the guys involved at the cost of her own. A side story involving Olive’s favorite teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) and his wife, the school guidance counselor (Lisa Kudrow) is also unnecessarily tawdry. Far better are the encounters with the always delectable (and just about always underused) Amanda Bynes as the school holier-than-thou abstinence proponent and the always ultra-watchable Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s deliciously off-kilter parents. Their scenes are warm, witty, and surprising, and livelier than Olive’s romantic ups and downs. In every way, it is Stone who is the heart of this movie, and she wins our hearts as well.

The Night Before Christmas…and More Classic Holiday Tales

Posted on December 13, 2010 at 6:00 pm

My very favorite DVD series for families has a wonderful holiday treat: The Night Before Christmas…and More Classic Holiday Tales. Twelve beloved family classics come to life, including the Christmas stories “The Night Before Christmas,” “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “The Clown of God,” and “Great Joy.” The collection also features the Hannukah story, “In the Month of Kislev,” and a saga of the African American holiday, “Seven Candles for Kwanzaa.” As always with Scholastic, every story is beautifully animated and narrated. This is a true treasure. And I have one to give away to the first person who emails me at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Scholastic” in the subject line and tell me your favorite holiday song. Don’t forget your address!

Despicable Me

Posted on December 13, 2010 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for rude humor and mild action
Profanity:	Some crude schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Cartoon violence including explosions, shark, crashes, peril, but no one hurt
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	July 9, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	December 14, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0042U94UQ

We usually just take it for granted that the villain wants to rule the world without worrying too much about why. But one of the many charms of this utterly delightful film is that we get a glimpse that is both funny and satisfying of what it is that makes not one but two super-villains so intent on being despicable.

We even get a flashback of our anti-hero, Gru (voice of Steve Carell with a Boris Badenov accent) as a child, confiding his dreams of being an astronaut to his mother (voice of Julie Andrews as Natasha!). She crushes his hopes with a cruel insult. So decades later, he is still trying to earn her respect, now as a super-thief. No matter how audacious his capers, however, she is still unimpressed. He has stolen the Jumbotron from Times Square and the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty (okay, those last two are the replicas from Vegas). But he still needs to make that one heist that will show her he can earn her respect. He could not be an astronaut and fly to the moon. So, maybe he could steal it.

And then there’s the anti-anti-hero, who has just adopted the villain name Vector. He may have a nifty name and even niftier equipment, his lair guarded by everything from heat-seeking missiles to buzz saws and a shark, and he may have just pulled off the theft of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but it turns out he has some trouble pleasing his parent, too.

So it’s a race between Gru and Vector to see who can steal the moon, which first involves stealing the shrink ray they need to make it small enough to carry home. And, adorably, this requires the involvement of dozens of little yellow “minions” who look like oompa-loompas made out of marshmallow peeps and three little orphan girls who live with a Miss Hannigan-style harridan as they hope someone will give them a real home. Maybe made of gummi bears.

The resilience of the three girls (the oldest voiced by Miranda Cosgrove of “iCarly” and “School of Rock”) is a sublime counterpart to the unhappiness and insecurity of Gru and his arch-rival Vector (voice of Jason Segal), showing us that even the rottenest of circumstances does not have to make you overly vulnerable or mean. When Gru brings them home as a way of getting into Vector’s compound (his security system features missiles and a shark but he can’t resist the girls’ cookies), he is so clueless he puts out candy in a dog bowl and newspapers on the floor. But as we have glimpsed in his interaction with the minions (I loved the matter-of-fact way he knows all the names of the almost-identical horde), he is susceptible to being liked and trusted. And he slowly begins to learn that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to care; he was scared to.

Brilliant production design contrasts Gru’s goth with a touch of steampunk lair in the middle of a street of identical homes with Vector’s sleek, Apple-eseque, creamsicle-colored high-tech headquarters. The expert pacing keeps things fresh, funny, and exciting. And a twist on the usual race-to-the-big-event-to-show-your-new-found-values reminds us all that the great thing about families is you can always have a second chance.

It looks like 2010 will go down in history as the year 3D animation kicked the stuffing out of all the live-action releases. Pixar opened the door and it is a thrill to see studios like Illumination showing what they have to bring to audiences ready to accept animation as art and as heart-warming family entertainment.

And here’s a special glimpse of one of the extras on the new DVD release:

Giveaway: ‘Flipped’

Posted on December 10, 2010 at 3:51 pm

I am delighted to have five copies of one of my favorite family movies of the year to give away. Flipped, directed by Rob Reiner has wonderful performances by Madeline Carroll and Callan McAuliffe in a story set in the 1960’s about two kids who meet as second graders and go through a range of feelings about each other and their families as they reach their teens.

Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com and tell me the name of your 8th grade crush (first name only!). Don’t forget your address. I will pick five names at random on December 16. Good luck!