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both the mentalist and dan from gossip girl had jewish surnames iirc? i was p ok w/ how muddy its politics are because i think the feeling of contempt/frustration w/'the real world' is p impt in finance and kinda worth foregrounding, and i dont think 'the audience' doesnt deserve implicating?

its sorta garbled on the technical side i think partly on purpose and partly to make it seem more 'timeless', maybe? the thing that it does really well is show the divisions and failures of the 'system' itself, and it has a good grasp on stuff like the division btw middle and front office depts. for e.g. its really more abt organizational failure than 'finance' i think?

i did like it lamp, on a movie level i though it was pretty great, and managed to make a complicated boring thing pretty gripping and comprehensible without really eliding too much

like jeremy irons gets introed as this total sharp badass that he doesn't especially turn out to be

heh i felt like this was crazy believable

i read a review that said this was about how bankers are like real people too which made it sound totally awful

ha idk i just felt 'show not tell', because there was this "don't even try it he's TOO FAST" & you totally expect a jeremy irons you don't end up getting; the sharp, calculating, laconic shark, rather than the kinda efficient but distant/brainless CEO. & i felt like that about everything else, but i'm persuaded by the idea above that it's about power & organisation more than the specifics.

i couldn't handle the 'i noticed something wrong' scrutiny scenes, though, they were frames away from 'can you enhance'

lol i love CSI so maybe im in the target market

so glad me not enjoying a finance film why because borrrring somehow seems to elevate me above appreciating genre fare

I liked Margin Call but the Spacey sequences with the dog and his boring personal life were unnecessary "character development.

i think spacey is kindof dreamy im sorry hes never in anything anymore

in any event to me the distance between irons' reputation and irons in an actual crisis was sort of "the point" or "a point." like, of course this guy who (some of) the underlings lionize as a major player/genius/shark turns out to be just as in-over-his-head as everyone

It's Wednesday after Christmas and am watching Tuesday, After Christmas.

in any event to me the distance between irons' reputation and irons in an actual crisis was sort of "the point" or "a point." like, of course this guy who (some of) the underlings lionize as a major player/genius/shark turns out to be just as in-over-his-head as everyone

My conclusions too but the dialogue given him during the first crisis meeting errs in making him too much a buffoon.

i read a review that said this was about how bankers are like real people too which made it sound totally awful

i think you might really like this? theres some neat stuff abt the importance of physical spaces and like insiders/outsiders that i can only half articulate and wasnt paying close enough to really 'get' but seemed... idk, 'composed' in a cool way? ugh

i think that's true but i also think it was a kinda cheap-in to a kind of lazy gravitas, inflating a character in an environment that's meant to be charged & barbed. tbh i think this is sort of a weird problem with a bunch of contemporary film; i remember in a single man colin firth kinda exists as a few temperamentally different, disparate guys that aren't either united by a common thread, or made to seem like conscious variants on a character. a lot of margin call felt kinda like bluster to me, like i can't really remember but i assume it was overscored & laden with this bossy post-glassian strident cello music, car window reflections &c&c&c&c&c

A Single Man had a lot of problems, the worst of which was that no one gave a shit about the novel.

a single man is one of the best movies of the last five years, everything was a surface and discrete

firth was nothing but a series of forms, a placeholder in existence

idk i just got pissed off that the painting in julianne moore's apt turned out to be something tom ford painted himself and completely wrong and jarring

ASM insulted, in order (a) Isherwood (b) gay life, especially as conceived by Isherwood (c) set design (d) Julianne Moore

julianne moore brought it on herself

yeah true. She's been unwatchable for a while.

yeah she was sorta gross in this but i didnt mind. i liked the set design as much as i liked the dead boyfriend's madras shorts which is a lot. i mean his house was like those high end magazine photo shoots of someone's impossibly packed suitcase (and why are you bringing a solid oak shoetree on vacation anyway?)

yeah i mean this was essentially a grace coddington photostory

The novel is all surface hiding depths, the movie is depth that isn't even good as surface.

I haven't seen Margin Call, phaps bcz no one in my circle knew what the hell anyone was saying.

Ever wanted to recommend a film you didn't like just for the transition into the end credits? Most of Brick from a few years ago drove me up the wall, but the song at the end, which came as a complete surprise, almost saved it.

hay just watched margin call thx 4 the recommend dudes p sweet - have to take issue w/the irons opinons itt - i dont think that he turned out to be a huge disappointment or appropriately idiotic or w/e - he was roughly as smart as everyone else which is to say smart but falible in the way humans are - if there was any sort of super human legend of his genius implied then of course he as human is not going to live up to it - i thought his character/acting was really good, cause what he had that no one else did, what you often see at the top of the totem pole is an element of inscrutability - that can sometimes be read as concealing ineptitude or shallowness, but the point is you can never quite tell, its an aspect of power - thought everyone else was good too, zachary quiznoses eyebrows were sculpted to a legit distracting extent tho

loved the conversation between a shaving mentalist and the grieving for his job junior analyst

youre going to fire me later arent you
*non committal grunt*
this is all i ever wanted to do
really?

i thought margin call was ok but it had problems, yeah

stanley tucci and kevin spacey were playing kinda the same character? and tucci seemed more interesting to me.

the frantic overnight investigation/preparation is done w/o any mention of government at all.

burying his dog was a lame scene, but the bit with spacey in the exec cafeteria, totally defeating, knowing he's chained to a rotting ship, was great

i saw the fincher 'dragon tattoo' which was not that great the more i think about it. it has an unbelievable 90s cgi bondage music video credit sequence that had me cracking up hard

tooch was great in margin call, but when has tooch ever not been great

the frantic overnight investigation/preparation is done w/o any mention of government at all

someone says that they are doing this before the fed(s) can react and try to slow them

yup by noon the feds are gonna be all over our asses slowing us down

lol i guess i meant the bailouts that actually occurred

yeah i think thats the next step if their plan doesnt work, they werent even thinking that far out

and obvs none of them want that as they were more in the bear/lehman mold of being hours from insolvency ie they were not gonna get bailed out, best they could hope for is their company gets bought for cents on the dollar w/the help of govt guarantees

btw re lamps comments abt physical space, when they were talking abt 'floors' were they talking abt trading floors, floors of a building, or BOTH

yeah

loved demi moore btw

xp i kinda took it that 'floor' is sort of an abstract area almost? like 'world' or something. idk.

flooring me w/ these insights dudes

p sure they were talking abt trading floors but they did use elevators a lot too so idk

i guess there was a bit of a disconnect w/ the sudden firing preceding sthing which was otherwise indicated as a great revelation

yeah they never explained the opening masacre, guessing prob the company realized it wasnt in the greatest spot but more based on the general economy, then the big reveal was that they were in a terrible spot based on what they were doing particularly

yeah i suppose getting rid of risk management ppl in particular was supposed to convey 'institutional denial'

yeah good call

this is a good film and movies movies movies movies readers who haven't been cajoled into seeing it by peer pressure alone, shd be mindful of seeing it just because it is a good film

havent watched it & am trying to avoid u guyz talking abt it but fyi u can "rent" it on amazon.com instant videos - four bucks

rewatched Late Spring last night with my roommate — I don't think he was impressed

suggest banshun?

wd

just watched tree of life