Money Monster

Televisual luminosity, the centripetal cynosure dazzlingly captivating your attention for a sensationally scripted surefire thirty slash sixty, making all the right moves, gimmicky ingratiation, applying the research so you don't have to, don't have to do anything, besides bask in his or her cardiovascular charisma, as he or she blows off your steam, and insulatingly ensures you make the correct decision.

But correct decisions are not always made, and if the viewer has not cultivated a cogent degree of critical awareness, tragedy can strike leaving bitter grievances pending.

Jodie Foster's Money Monster exorcizes such a scenario as Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell) loses his life savings following the guidance of Lee Gates's (George Clooney) networked investment extravaganza, and vengefully responds by taking his outputs hostage.

Live in real time.

Yet, as it becomes apparent that foul play may have been involved in the dealings of the company Gates lauded (IBIS Global Capital), the two begin to forge an investigatory friendship, hoping to reveal the truth, thereby saving both their good names.

Both!

The result is an entertaining heartwarming yet woeful examination of fraud, the broadcasters functioning like bourgeois intermediaries between the penniless and the plutocrats, impoverished angst voicing its anguish, malevolent miscalculations haunting the residue.

It had the opportunity to elaborately interrogate the dire financial predicaments many Americans find themselves in but only really touched the surface, focusing more of its attention on Gates's shock.

At one point you see Budwell passionately pleading on camera but you don't hear what he's saying as Gates's reaction is martyred.

Budwell has gone way too far but he could have been evidenced as more of a victim than a miscreant.

Should Chomsky have been consulted?

Most definitely yes.

The audiences watching Budwell's stand don't add much either. If individual members had been given personalities throughout, additional layers of reflective commentaries would have been added, like a web 2.0 factor.

Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) and Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe) do add level-headed managerial insights however, holding things together, interactively mediating and sleuthing.

Not as hard-hitting as I thought it would be, but still creatively conscious of economic crises.

Solid ethical entertainment.

Tower Heist

Was incredibly disappointed by Brett Ratner's Tower Heist. Generic films don't have to be terrible. If their writers try to at least create four or five unexpected witty provocative scenes wherein something distracting takes place they can be salvaged. But they have to hold our attention before they can affectively destream it. Tower Heist presents one boring mundane predictable scene after another, as if they were trying to mimic the aesthetic built into a swiffer wet jet ad in order to peddle jokes that make television's Whitney seem hilarious by comparison. It was like the inspiration behind this script was vacuuming or cleaning behind the fridge. Unmitigated stubborn concrete tedium disseminated by performances who are only noteworthy because they managed to successfully convince me that they were taking their work seriously, regardless of the fact that they must of wretched upon first reading over the material. There's one moment where Matthew Broderick at least looks as if he's aware that he's starring in an cup into which you spit but it's subtle enough for him to still be able to convince the powers that be that he's a team player.

I like films wherein rich assholes who steal from struggling workers are punished and I like that this happens in Tower Heist, but the execution is uniformly lacking in skill, insight and perspicacity, and the plot, racist in structure.

Don't be sucked in by the cast or the ads. Tower Heist isn't worth it and reminds me why I haven't wanted to see an Eddie Murphy film since Bowfinger.