Brief Movie Reviews from Someone Who Doesn't Get Out to the Movies Like He Used To and Is Learning to Love Video On Demand

J. C. Chandor's MARGIN CALL is an intense, compelling little movie that uses some forty-eight hours in the life of a New York investment bank as a microcosm for what's happened to the economy in the last several years. The movie, which is mostly set inside the offices of the bank, with occasional field trips when characters pile into the back seat of a limo and rush off in search of someone who has left the premises, begins with Stanley Tucci getting fired as part of a bloody round of layoffs. Tucci hands a set of numbers he's been working on to Zachary Qunito, the smart new kid in the office, tells him to see if he can finish it, and after awhile, Quito, who has stayed at his computer after almost everyone else has left at the end of the day, starts telling people, "You need to look at this." What is "this"? Since it's a safe assumption that nobody in the theater would understand him if he explained what "this" is in detail, he just keeps showing the numbers to smart people near the bottom of the totem pole, and after they make faces as if their ties were choking them, they turn to higher-up people and tell them, "You need to look at this." Since the people in the theater haven't gotten any smarter than they were when the movie started, the higher-ups all say that they can't really understand the numbers that have made them all millionaires, so just explain it to them, slowly, in syllable words of two or fewer syllables.

What it boils down to is that the firm is holding too much bad paper, in the form of mortgage-based securities, and is on the verge of going bust--or to be more precise, the firm, in terms of its actual value versus how deeply it's in over its head, has already as good as gone bust, but there may still be a few days, or hours, before everybody else notices. This leads to a lot of scrambling and the ultimate decision by the ultimate high muck-a-muck--one "John Tuld", played by Jeremy Irons, whose devotion to this project appears to have been great enough for him to arrange to have his nose broken and reset to make it look more Nixonian--to have the traders get on the phones first thing in the morning and have them start selling toxic assets as fast as they can at whatever prices they can get, before the Street wises up and word spreads that the bank is tip-toeing back from the abyss by disseminating cancerous spores through the rest of the market.

The movie is impressive largely because of what it doesn't do. Quntio's character, a genuine "rocket scientist" who packed up his brains and moved over to this field because the money's better, is shaken by what he discovers about the nature of the business, but he doesn't throw up in his hands in horror, and when, at the end, he's heading towards a promotion, the movie doesn't throw up its hands in horror that he's been "corrupted." Kevin Spacey, who might be playing the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry Glen Ross if that guy had thought big, warns Irons that he's not thinking long-term--that he'll be scorned as a crook if he carries through with his plan, and will pay a price for it, because no one will ever trust him again--but Irons assures him that he's being naive, and based on the events of recent years, the audience knows that Irons is right. The thing is, Spacey goes right ahead and gives his traders the Knute Rockne speech about how he wants them to get out there and sell, sell, sell. At the end of the day, he tells Irons he's quitting, but that's just so he can live with himself, and by the end of their conversation, he's conceding that he can't quit; he needs the money. If the movie has a mission in mind, it's to make the actions of the people who killed the economy seem understandable, if not defensible, and it does this partly be wriggling into the mindset of people who will never be able to have enough money, thanks in part to their role in creating a society where the good life, which may just defined as just owning a good house in a good neighborhood and looking forward to retirement knowing that you can cover whatever medical bills might be waiting for you around the bend, costs so damn much. Paul Bettany, the senior trader working under Spacey, has a speech where he manages to make his annual two million-plus salary sound like chump change, even if he does get to write off his hookers as entertainment expenses. Bettany has the ambiguous line of the movie, when one of the bosses, Simon Baker, tells him that he's concerned about Spacey's ability to do what has to be done--about whether he can see that dumping the assets is the right thing. Rather than take advantage of the opportunity to shaft his boss, Bettany tells Baker that he and Spacey have always had the same understanding of what constitutes the right thing. He comes across as rather noble, especially if you don't immediately recognize that what he's really saying is that Spacey's moral values are as adaptable as everyone else's.

Margin Call has a remarkable group of actors for such a small movie, but one casting choice sticks out, and not just because of the talent gap factor. Demi Moore plays the work-suit cobra who saw to it that Tucci's paperwork got buried for so long and arranged for him be canned, and who, for good measure, shut off his phone as soon as he was gone form the building. (This piece of symbolic hardball doesn't look so smart after Quinto finishes crunching Tucci's numbers and then no one can get ahold of him.) Moore never could act a lick, and she's especially vapid now that she's lost the husky voice she had when she was younger, which used to at least make her sound potentially interesting. Because she's playing with a group of people who are so far over her head, and because her career isn't what it was in the days before The Scarlet Letter and Striptease, you naturally wonder why she's in the movie at all, and I confess to finding it hard not to wonder of it's because the moviemakers wanted to show The Bitch getting it, when her character is made the sacrificial victim for the board of directors. In the overheated, ballsy atmosphere of the bank's boardroom, it would make all the ugly sense in the world if the characters zeroed in on the one powerful woman among them, but Moore's scenes would need to have been directed with more perspective, and more sympathy for her character, for them to come across that way. (It doesn't help that, aside from Mary McCormick's appearance as Spacey's ex-wife in a brief coda, there are scarcely any other women in the movie, except for the baby-face who fires Tucci and a silent cleaning woman who shares a late-night elevator ride with Baker and Moore, for purposes of ironic counterpoint.) It's enough to make you wonder if one of Chandor's formative movie experiences was Disclosure. Maybe it's just me, though: I saw this with the Missus, and she thoroughly enjoyed seeing Moore get hung out to dry.

WEEKEND: A modest but very enjoyable little movie, directed and written by Andrew Haigh, about a one-night stand (between two men, played by Tom Cullen and Chris New) that turns into a two-or-three-day stand. Considering how much of it is shot in close quarters in the one guy's apartment, it's remarkable that Haigh was able to keep it feeling fresh and unclaustrophobic. It helps that he knows how to make vibrant, eye-pleasing compositions using bright Pop colors without overwhelming the natural look of things. This also makes the title that much ballsier, since it makes me think that he's not only heard of Godard's movie of the same name, but may have even seen it.

THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975: A collection of documentary footage shot by Swedes and assembled by Göran Olsson, offered, an introduction says, not as any kind of definitive journalistic history of its times or subject, but as a record of how those times and that subject looked to one group of flmmakers from a different culture. As a documentary, it's about as shapeless as you'd expect, but the footage itself gives off a lot of heat, and as a time capsule, it's intermittently fascinating. For context, the soundtrack includes recent interviews with various interested parties. I had no idea that Questlove was such a dingbat. (At one point, he says that he doesn't think that the fact that the end of legal racial segregation constitutes any kind of progress, which would seem to indicate that he has no idea what the word "progress" means, and that it also doesn't erase thousands of years' worth of injustice, as if he thought that anyone whose head isn't up his ass is likely to give him an argument about that.)



THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (FULL SEQUENCE): Tom Six's 2009 Human Centipede sure did succeed in getting a lot of people up on their high horses. I read a lot of declarations about what it said about the current state of moral corrosion, though my big problem with it was that it seemed to be a feature length movie made for the sake of a single transgressive image, and then I didn't think the image was all that hot. The sequel is, just to end the suspense, a piece of shit, but I'll give it credit for being potent shit, much more likely than the original to either hold your attention or send you rushing to the nearest vomit receptacle. It's set in our world--the one where The Human Centipede the Elder exists--and the central character is a buglike fellow who watches it compulsively and keeps a scrapbook devoted to its wonders, a scrapbook of which he appears to practically have carnal knowledge. Inspired, he sets out to recreate the film's title creature, though whereas the mad doctor of the first film used anesthesia and the famously "accurate" surgical procedures, the unschooled Larva Boy hero konks people in the head before sawing away at them with a knife and then connecting them to each other with duct tape and a staple gun. To better mate form and content, Six has also dropped the slick, icy color photography of the first movie and shot this in security-camera black-and-white, so that the plentiful gore looks like black molasses oozing everywhere. The most interesting thing about it, aside from the "EWWWWW!!" factor, is that, having rolled his eyes at the people who denounced its predecessor as a form of social disease, Six has made a follow-up that appears to endorse the idea that violent movies can indeed inspire violent acts in the real world. Unless he's joking--or arguing that violent movies, at worst, can take root in the minds of potential sickos and give them some brain candy that may help them stay contented and docile, since the ending can perhaps be taken to mean that it was all a fantasy. Guess maybe we'll find out for sure when the promised Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) comes out, I can't wait.