10 and Margin Call
This entry was posted on 1/20/2012 11:30 AM and is filed under Movies.
This week from netflix I got an old movie and a new movie. The new movie was Margin Call, which is a look at one of the big Wall Street Banks in the twenty four hours leading up to the financial melt down of '08.
I liked it. I know some folks found it dull and it is very slowly paced but I knew that going in. I found it to be suspenseful, even though I knew what was going to happen. I liked the performances of many of my favorite actors. Jeremy Irons was fun as the ruthless top man of the bank. He cheerfully admitted that brains are not what got him to his place of eminence. He said in order to win at this game, you must be first, be smartest, or cheat. He said "I don't cheat, I'm not that smart so lets be first."
I think he may have been right as far as his responsibility to try to salvage the bank. Yes, lots of people, real people got hurt but the bottom line is that the pain was inevitable. What the banks had to deal with in September of '08 was a bullet that had been fired ten years earlier finally hitting it's mark. No one gets out of that situation without shedding blood, the most you can do is try to make sure it's not your blood.
I liked Kevin Spacey's character; he didn't want to go along with the sell off because he knew they'd be wreaking havoc all over the world, destroying the bank's reputation and the career's of all their salesmen. But the choice they were faced with wasn't 'be the good guy or be the bad guy' it was 'be the bad guy who's broke or be the bad guy who's not quite broke'.
I love Zack Quinto. He played the rocket scientist who ran the numbers and saw the tidal wave approaching. He also happens to be smoking hot.
I love Stanley Tucci. Have loved him since I saw him play a bad guy in a story arc on Wiseguy, back in the eighties. He's always fun to watch. He played the head of risk-management whose research lead Z.Quinto's character to the truth. He couldn't finish the project himself because he got sacked the day before.
My favorite scene in the movie was Stanley T's character, sitting on the steps of his home in Brooklyn, describing his former career to his former boss, who had shown up to try and talk him into coming back for one day (and a mega million dollar bonus) to try and help the firm out of the mess they were in.
He described being an engineer and helping build a bridge that linked two communities in Ohio and West Virginia. This bridge spanned a river and cut 35 miles out of the commute between the towns. He calculated how many cars crossed that bridge a day, how many miles of driving were saved, not only each day, but each year since the bridge was built. He calculated how many hours behind the wheel were saved; the people of those community had saved over a thousand years of their cumulative lifetimes from behind the wheels of their cars because of that bridge.
All I could think was that environmentalists would prevent such a bridge from being built today. Even though it's obvious that over all, the bridge was a huge boon to the environment as well as the lives, livelihoods and economies of the people it served.
Jay hated the movie. He spent an hour and fifty minutes waiting for something to happen. He wanted explosions and gun fire. When it was over he told me he hated every second of it.
oh well.
The other movie I saw this week was 10, the 1979 movie that made Bo Derek a star. Well, a trivia answer, anyway. I haven't seen the movie since it came out and I remembered it as being gut bustingly funny.
It's not.
There is one very funny sequence through the middle where Dudley Moore's character is full of novacaine, pain meds and booze but aside from that it was pretty dull.
What I did find very interesting was how out of sync it was with modern cultural sensitivities.
In case you've forgotten, the movie is about a guy having a mid life crisis. Dudley Moore plays a very successful songwriter. His character has won four Oscars for his music. But something is missing. He catches a glimpse of a bride on her way to the church and becomes completely obsessed by this vision of the most beautiful woman he's ever seen.
His shrink tells him that the fact that she was decked out in her virginal white veil and gown, added to his sense of her perfection.
Got that? she was more beautiful because she looked virginal.
unable to shake his obsession, he tracks down her father to find out where she's gone on her honeymoon. Fortunately, her father is a popular Hollywood dentist so a famous songwriter had no trouble getting an appointment. Unfortunately, the dentist finds no less than six cavities in Moore's mouth and insists on filling them all.
Hence the sequence involving novacaine and pain killers.
But despite all that, Moore does find out where Virginal obsession is Honeymooning and he follows her down to Mexico.
This is where things get really (culturally) interesting. When he manages to meet her, he discovers that contrary to his dream of perfection, she's not a virgin at all. In fact her sexual code of conduct is so loose that despite being on her honeymoon she has no qualms at all about boinking this old guy she met on the beach.
At first, Dudley Moore can't believe his luck! He's climbing into bed with the girl of his dreams! But then, he's so overcome by the disgustingness of her behavior and her whole cavalier attitude towards sex that he can't go through with it. He leaves, goes home and asks his girl friend (Julie Andrews, who sings two completely forgettable songs) to marry him.
In the age of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, slimecapades masquerading as 'romantic comedies', can you even imagine a script like 10 getting a green light these days?
I'm beginning to think that culturally, we sailed off the cliff a long, long time ago. The fall is so deep that we can't tell we're falling. Occasionally, someone looks out a window and says "Are things supposed to be zooming up past us out there?" but no one listens and soon everyone goes back to what they think is normal.
And when we hit the bottom, all the king's horses won't be able to put the pieces together again.
