MONEY MONSTER (US - 2016) Directed by Jodie Foster. Written by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf. Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito, Lenny Venito, Christopher Denham, Chris Bauer, Emily Meade, Dennis Boutsikaris, John Ventimiglia, Condola Rashad, Aaron Yoo, Carsey Walker Jr, Grant Rosenmeyer, Olivia Luccardi. (R, 98 mins) The kind of slick, hot-button star vehicle that was a weekly thing back in the 1990s, the George Clooney-Julia Roberts-headlined MONEY MONSTER probably could've been released 20 years ago with, say, Michael Douglas and uh, I guess Julia Roberts, and not been much different. While obviously not in the same league, it's a throwback "New York City" movie in the vein of DOG DAY AFTERNOON, but probably owes more to (and comes off better than) Costa-Gavras' forgotten 1997 flop MAD CITY, where an improbably cast Dustin Hoffman was an ambitious TV news reporter in a hostage situation instigated by an unemployed security guard played by a set of sideburns attached to John Travolta. MONEY MONSTER opens with disgruntled package service delivery driver Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell) crashing the live broadcast of the cable financial news show MONEY MONSTER, hosted by the smugly arrogant and almost buffoonish Lee Gates (Clooney). Suggesting a more roguishly handsome MAD MONEY host Jim Cramer combined with the grating, "look at me!" showmanship of Jimmy Fallon, Gates is the kind of "news-as-entertainment" jagoff who has softball interviews with money experts, mockingly dons gold chains and has choreographed routines with backing dancers, and has his snarky one-liners punctuated with cheesy horror movie clips and zany sound effects straight out of the "wacky radio morning zoo" playbook. There's a lot to suggest that the cocky, strutting Gates is regarded as a clown by Wall Street: as the film opens, a financial guru and "friend of the show" cancels their dinner plans for the seventh time and blows him off on the phone, and Gates' long-suffering director Patty Fenn (Roberts), who tells one guest "We don't do gotcha journalism here...hell, we don't even do journalism here," has accepted a job with another show and has yet to tell her boss she's leaving.
All of that gets put on the backburner when Budwell manages to get through lax security under the auspices of a package delivery. Pulling a gun on Gates on live TV and forcing him to strap on a vest bomb, Budwell wants to know why IBIS Global Capital's stock lost $800 million the day before. IBIS communications director Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe) is making the talk show rounds saying it was a "computer glitch" but that's only because CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West) is gallivanting around the world on his private jet and has been MIA for several days. He was scheduled to be on MONEY MONSTER that day, which is why Budwell brought two vests. Budwell invested his entire savings--$60,000 in insurance money he received when his mother died--in an investment that Gates and frequent guest Camby endlessly crowed was a sure thing, and he wants answers, not just for himself but for all the other investors who were victimized by a rigged system (or dumb enough to throw everything into one basket). Budwell doesn't believe that $800 million can just vanish because of a computer glitch. Of course, he's right, and Patty, whose long-dormant inner journalist is reawakened as she tries to keep Gates focused by talking to him through his hidden earpiece, directs MONEY MONSTER staffers to do some actual investigative work and look into the coincidental timing of nearly $1 billion vanishing while Camby's been off the grid and impossible to find for nearly a week.
Directed by Jodie Foster and co-written by veteran journeyman Jim Kouf (STAKEOUT, RUSH HOUR, NATIONAL TREASURE, and back in his younger, dues-paying days, THE BOOGENS and UP THE CREEK), MONEY MONSTER is more concerned with being a commercial hostage thriller than taking a serious look at stock market fraud and income inequality issues. That's not to say it doesn't make some bitter, satirical points here and there, whether it's taking aim at the vacuous nature of most cable news shows (of course, real-life news personalities like the increasingly hapless Wolf Blitzer and the increasingly loud Cenk Uygar have cameos as themselves), and the fickle, short attention span of the viewing public. One of the big mistakes MONEY MONSTER makes is in its closing minutes, tacking on a coda to give the audience one more scene with Clooney and Roberts when a perfect, hard-hitting indictment of an ending would've been the shot of the foosball game resuming in the coffee shop (no spoilers, but you'll know it when you see it).
MONEY MONSTER has some tricks up its sleeve in that nearly every time you start rolling your eyes at some hackneyed plot device or think the movie is careening off the rails with an improbable, Hollywood plot convenience, it pulls the rug out from under the audience--and its characters--and essentially confirms your feelings. Just when you think Budwell is an impossibly dumb, useless lug (British O'Connell is really chewing on that "working-class Queens schlub" accent) who's gathering the sympathy of captivated TV viewers, the movie introduces his pregnant girlfriend--played by Emily Meade in the kind of incredible, one-scene turn that got Beatrice Straight a Supporting Actress Oscar for NETWORK--to mercilessly lay into him about just how impossibly dumb and useless he is. Meade's is the best scene in the movie, with the actress practically stealing the whole show in about two minutes of screen time. It's destined to be a YouTube favorite, along with Clooney's ridiculous dancing. O'Connell (UNBROKEN) overdoes it a little too much at times, with his Budwell weighed down by a massive blue-collar chip on his shoulder about how "you tink I'm fukkin' stoopid?" and "you's rich fucks wit ya fancy edgee-cayshuns!" Clooney and Roberts are, as usual, a solid, almost comfort-food team even though they don't share the screen very much (one question: is Clooney wearing eyeliner in the climax at Freedom Hall? His eyes are all puffy and he looks completely different, like that sequence was a reshoot or maybe he was sick that day), and the supporting cast is filled out with numerous familiar, reliable character actors (Giancarlo Esposito, Lenny Venito, Christopher Denham, Chris Bauer, John Ventimiglia, and Dennis Boutsikaris, cast radically against type as the kind of sneering prick who would've been played by the late Ron Silver two decades ago). MONEY MONSTER isn't high art and it isn't very deep or analytical about Wall Street aside from obvious points that too much of the money is controlled by too few people, but it's an entertaining, straightforward movie for grown-up audiences, so enjoy this kind of thing in a theater while you still can.
Directed by George Clooney. Written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov. Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, Dimitri Leonidas, Justus von Dohnanyi, Holger Handtke, Zahary Baharov, Sam Hazeldine. (PG-13, 118 mins)
For all of George Clooney's fame and tabloid ubiquity over the last 20 years, he hasn't been in a lot of box office blockbusters other than the THE PERFECT STORM, OCEAN'S ELEVEN films and GRAVITY. He's largely chosen quality scripts over easy star vehicles (OUT OF SIGHT, SYRIANA, MICHAEL CLAYTON, UP IN THE AIR), isn't afraid to go for non-commercial material (SOLARIS, THE GOOD GERMAN, THE AMERICAN) and with his matinee idol looks, he's often described as a throwback to the Hollywood of old, a sort-of Cary Grant for today's cinema. For the most part, his directorial career also seems rooted in the past: CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (2002) was an adaptation of GONG SHOW host Chuck Barris' improbable memoirs, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK (2005) chronicled CBS News icon Edward R. Murrow and his battle against the McCarthy hearings, LEATHERHEADS (2008) was a screwball romantic comedy set in the world of 1920s football, and THE IDES OF MARCH (2011) was a thriller set in the scheming world of present-day politics but nevertheless felt like the kind of movie Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet, or Sydney Pollack would've made in the 1970s. Clooney has more than established his bona fides as an actor and director, and the WWII epic THE MONUMENTS MEN, with its motley crew of unlikely heroes going into battle, is cut from the same cloth as the grand, large-scale men-on-a-mission classics of the 1960s, like THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961), THE TRAIN (1964), THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), and KELLY'S HEROES (1970) to name just four.
The difference here is that those films didn't have a soapbox to stand on, and if Clooney has a weakness as a filmmaker, it's the need to endlessly speechify with issues of Grand Importance. I enjoyed the relatively light LEATHERHEADS and the conspiratorial suspense of THE IDES OF MARCH, but I found GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK a little too smug and self-satisfied, regardless of how remarkable David Strathairn was as Murrow. Every scene seemed to have someone stopping to mention how what they were doing was Changing the World, and some of that comes into play with THE MONUMENTS MEN. There seems to be no momentum that Clooney the director won't halt in order to allow Clooney the actor one more chance to deliver a windy treatise on The Importance of Art and how they're Preserving History. The constant invocations start to grow wearying after a while and it doesn't help that Clooney can't seem to settle on what kind of WWII movie he wanted to make. Is it lighthearted? Is it a serious memorial to the Greatest Generation? Is it a comedy? Is it transparent Oscar bait? Yes. It's all of those.
Inspired by a true story, THE MONUMENTS MEN is set in the final months of Hitler's reign before Germany's surrender. With word that Der Fuhrer has gathered and stored massive art collections pilfered during the Nazi takeover of Europe, renowned art professor Frank Stokes (Clooney) pleads with FDR to put together a team of art experts and historians to go through the war-torn areas of Europe to salvage and protect the remaining art and recover what's gone missing. This means putting together the usual ragtag group of Unlikely Heroes: Stokes' old friend James Granger (Matt Damon), architect Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), sculptor Walter Garfield (John Goodman), art experts Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville) and Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), and Frenchman Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin), plus a bonus recruit in German-speaking Jersey-based private Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas). Damon's Granger spends most of the film on his own separate mission, investigating some missing French art with curator Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett), who's been keeping a log of art stolen by her scheming, Nazi-aligned boss (Justus von Dohnanyi). For about 40 minutes or so, THE MONUMENTS MEN is moving along nicely enough, coasting on the screen presence of its stars and the no-expense-spared production design, but there's a scene with Damon and Blanchett that's so tone-deaf and wrong-headed that you can actually see the film fall on its face and consequently spend the remainder of its running time trying to regain its footing.
Claire takes Granger to a vast and seemingly endless warehouse packed with paintings, furniture, glasses, dishes, books, etc. Granger looks around in wide-eyed wonder.
Granger: "What is all of this?" Claire: "People's lives." Granger: "What people?" Claire: "Jews."
At that moment, Alexandre Desplat's maudlin, manipulative score swells and Granger's sense of wonder sinks with the saddened realization that...the Holocaust was happening? What does he mean "What people?" Where does he think all this stuff came from? How pie-in-the-sky naïve can he be? There had to be a more effective way to convey the horror of concentration camps than making Damon's character look like an idiot.
There's also little sense of camaraderie between the Monuments Men. Clooney and Damon get the bulk of the screen time, with the rest relegated to the sidelines. Sure, Murray, Goodman, and the others are onscreen a lot, but they're just there, and not really given characters to play. Campbell playfully busts Savitz's chops throughout, but they have no other defining characteristics that necessitated them being played by distinctive actors like Murray and Balaban. It's nice to see all these actors working together and there's no doubt they had a good time, but why put Murray, Balaban, and John Goodman together to have them play cardboard characters that anybody could've played? Murray's big scene involves playing a record sent from home with his granddaughter singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" as tears well in his eyes. Given the context, it's not a revealing character moment but instead comes off as the kind of cheap, heavy-handed melodrama that someone as sharp as Murray can't possibly be taking seriously.
THE MONUMENTS MEN is passable and it's never boring, but it just misses the mark. Films of this sort had a sense of fun and adventure that this is sorely lacking. They can make big statements without advertising that they're Big Statements. Clooney and writing partner Grant Heslov seem to be in such a mad rush to get to the lecturing and the pontificating that they don't bother establishing anything with the characters. Other than a scene where Campbell and Savitz get the edge on a Nazi art thief, there's rarely a sense of danger or even where they're really at. There's a lot of looking at maps and saying "We have to go here," but it never really registers. They just go from one place to another, Stokes says something like "We're Doing Something Important!" and they find some stashed art, stare at it as Desplat's score tells us to how to feel, and they move on. It looks like a classic WWII movie that belongs on TCM, but in the end, it's just pretending to be one. This was originally scheduled to be released in December 2013, but was abruptly yanked to "finish the visual effects," with the date bounced to the barren wasteland of February. That may be the case, as the film looks superb, but it's hard to ignore the sneaking suspicion that this wasn't the automatic Oscar magnet that Sony and Clooney were hoping it would be.
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Written by Alfonso Cuaron and Jonas Cuaron. Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, voices of Ed Harris, Phaldut Sharma. (PG-13, 91 mins)
Not since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) has space looked as convincingly vast and felt so real as in Alfonso Cuaron's stunning GRAVITY, a triumph of CGI done right that unquestionably raises the bar in a way that very few films do in this era. The story itself isn't very complicated: Three astronauts on a spacewalk to repair a scanner on the Hubble Telescope are hit by debris from an exploded Russian satellite. One, Shariff (Phaldut Sharma) is killed along with the crew inside the shuttle. This leaves two survivors: veteran NASA rock star Lt. Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), who's a rookie on her first mission. The shuttle and the Hubble are destroyed and the cool, experienced Kowalski, forever telling the same exaggerated stories of his personal exploits to mission control in Houston (voiced by Ed Harris), gets serious and tries to keep Stone calm while improvising a plan to drift to the International Space Station with little booster power and with both survivors running out of oxygen.
To say any more about the plot would spoil the drama that unfolds in the script by Cuaron and his son Jonas. GRAVITY has been compared to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY but it doesn't have the same philosophical depth that the Kubrick film offered. GRAVITY's strengths lie in taking CGI imagery to places unexplored until now. The term "game-changer" is thrown about with wild abandon these days, but it applies here. Opening with a continuous 17-minute shot (as CHILDREN OF MEN demonstrated, Cuaron is a master of long takes, or at the very least, seamless editing), we're introduced to the three astronauts going about their business--Kowalski and Shariff joking with each other and with mission control, Stone hard at work while battling the hangover-like lethargy of one's first time in space--the camera constantly floating around the actors and the structures, with Earth and open space lingering in the background. Cuaron and THE TREE OF LIFE cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (veteran cinematographer Michael Seresin is also credited with "additional photography") manage to make space look simultaneously vast and claustrophobic, and once communication with Houston is cut off (they continue to radio Houston "in the blind" in case they actually can hear them), there's almost no sound other than the dialogue, the actors' breathing, and the effectively eerie electronic score by Steven Price.
Clooney doesn't have to do much other than be "George Clooney," so it's Bullock who does the dramatic heavy lifting in one of her best performances. Venturing into space to cut herself as far off from humanity as possible after finding herself unable to cope with an unbearable tragedy, Bullock's Stone is aptly-named. During small-talk with Kowalski, she says her favorite thing is silence, which is initially taken as a sarcastic jab at his endless chattiness, but is eventually revealed to have a much more painful cause. As the script presents the protagonists with one increasingly difficult, life-threatening, and nerve-shredding obstacle after another, it's no surprise in a major Hollywood movie that Stone will eventually find her inner strength and summon the will to survive, but the writing isn't really meant to break any new ground (of course, this is Kowalski's "one last mission before retiring," though he never specifically states he's "getting too old for this shit"). The achievements here are of sight and sound. So much of today's CGI is slapdash and only serves to call out the artifice of the surroundings, but watching GRAVITY, it actually looks like Cuaron took his stars and a crew into space and shot on location. Of course, this only goes to show that CGI can look great if enough time and care is put into it, and it's used for legitimate purposes rather than time-saving, penny-pinching bullshit. It's amazing that such a widely-utilized technology has only been mastered by a small handful of filmmakers. Even the 3-D post-conversion looks as good as a film actually shot in 3-D, further proof that things don't have to look as crappy as they often do. Shot in 2011 and with its original fall 2012 release date delayed a year to allow Cuaron the time he needed to get it right, GRAVITY sets new standards in CGI and effects wizardry and is the kind of immersive audio/visual experience that should be seen on the largest screen possible.
