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.

Mahler auf der Couch (Mahler on the Couch)

Felix and Percy Aldon's Mahler auf der Couch is well orchestrated.

They take a predictable story, let you know what's going to happen from the outset (the scores shown during the opening credits covered in prose), challenge you to pay attention anyways, and then provide a sombre, despondently energetic, physically and psychologically active rendition of a successful composer's troubled personal life, complete with a traditional Freudian (Proustian) resolution, minimalistically yet grandiosely conveyed.

The narrative follows a traditional artist who humbly employs a Highlander maxim both professionally and conjugally which simultaneously propels and curtails his development.

The film's form is noteworthy insofar as it biographically serenades the standard interviewing technique comedically nuanced in Mike Clattenburg's and Ricky Gervais's/Stephan Merchant's (Trailer Park Boys and The Office having been released contemporaneously) different mockumentary television shows, within an autobiographical soundscape, as Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) attempts to reestablish an I with Freud's (Karl Markovics) help while referencing data based upon the ways in which his psyche has internalized the potential praise/disdain/indifference/misgivings of his admirers/competitors/friends/family, thereby atonally harmonizing its classical unconscious rhythms with multiple indeterminate perspectives (while remaining ripe with emotion).

Barbara Romaner (Alma Mahler) impresses as 'she' attempts to break through.

If I've ever heard anything written by Mahler, I'm unaware.