May 2018 film review part one

MARGIN CALL (2011) D- J.C. Chandor
2008. A time of cheap money, a time when greedy banks were offering mortgages to everyone, regardless of whether their clients could ever repay them. In Manhattan, a bank executive works out that his bank has horribly overreached itself and that if they don’t do something, now, the whole institution is going to come crashing down.

The excellent Stanley Tucci plays the exec who discovers the problem while Jeremy Irons plays the smooth-as-silk CEO who realises he’s got to be utterly ruthless if he is going to save his bank. Meanwhile, his lieutenant, played by Kevin Spacey, is charged with conning the rest of the world into believing everything’s fine.

I want to say something about Kevin Spacey. Caught up in the maelstrom of moral outrage that came out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, he found his own behaviour called into question and in a heartbeat, his career was over. I’m not saying Kevin Spacey is a saint. Far from it. He likes young men, perhaps rather too much, and has behaved unacceptably towards several of them. He groped, he fiddled, he importuned, and when he was drunk found it difficult to control himself. Like a lot of people I know. But he never raped anyone, has never been charged with a crime. Nonetheless, the world has lost one of the finest acting talents in a generation as a result of the Me Too movement, and I think that’s wrong. He’s apologised, but that isn’t good enough. In this brave new world of political correctness, he has been outed as a sinner, and cast into the outer darkness. What happened to forgiveness, to reconciliation, to drawing a line under the past and moving on?

ARBITRAGE (2012) D- Nicholas Jarecki.
Wiki says ‘arbitrage’ is the buying and selling of securities and other commodities, taking advantage of differing prices for the same asset in different places. And that’s exactly how Richard Gere has made himself a billionaire in this movie. It’s all going swimmingly, until, in an incident reminiscent of Chappaquiddick, a girlfriend dies in a car he was driving. Can he keep himself out of the investigation long enough to secure a really enormous deal that’s hanging in the balance, or will everything unravel?

I talk about this film directly after Margin Call because of some rather obvious parallels, which might be summarised as: people will do almost anything to make a buck. Both films tell their seedy stories of the unacceptable faces of capitalism skilfully, and both, as in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors, illustrate how powerful people often get away with their unscrupulous behaviours.

GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999) D- Jim Jarmusch
Forrest Whittaker plays a hitman who bases his life on the principles of the Samurai warrior. He murders, but ethically. Then, after he takes out a mafioso, guess what,  they go after him. Big mistake... This guy is a kind of antecedent to John Wick, with his ability to take out everyone in a crowded room before they have a chance to react.

There’s something about Jim Jarmusch’s movies, and this is a case in point. It has a dreamy, contemplative feel, combined with hyper-violence at times, and even a dusting of pathos. It isn’t quite up to his magnum opus Down by Law, but it’s close. Give it a try, and try not to worry too much when the pace flags a little in the mid section of the movie.