October Offerings Part 1: Dumb Money & Fair Play

Your first cinematic selection this October is either a rousing true story from the not too distant past about average people fighting back against Wall Street, or a dark thriller about the screwed up gender dynamics between a couple who work on Wall Street. Either way, we can all agree. Wall Street = bad.

Dumb Money: This is the story of how a bunch of people on Reddit ended up buying GameStop stock and frightening a bunch of Wall Street billionaires who had shorted that stock with the expectation that the company was due to go bankrupt. Instead, Keith Gill (Paul Dano, putting in a subdued and masterful performance), a lower middle class financial analyst in Massachusetts, did a ton of research, saw that GameStop might be poised for a short squeeze, and decided to invest most of his life savings into the stock. What follows is a rousing tale of the people he inspired along the way and the fat cat Wall Street investors who had to sit up and take notice, until the whole thing eventually went all the way to Washington for an investigation into the stock market and corrupt trading practices. 

Written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, and directed by Craig Gillespie, this movie is clever and propulsive. You will root for Keith and all the working class heroes and students who want to stick it to the man. The cast is particularly stellar, featuring great performances from America Ferrera, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson, Anthony Ramos, Seth Rogen, and Nick Offerman, to name a few. This is also an excellent Covid movie, a reminder of how we all used to live during the grim times of 2020 before we had a vaccine and didn't really know what the hell was going on. It's particularly telling how all the rich guys are always portrayed as being unmasked while the servants around them are masked up and serving them in silence - future generations will have no idea what a profound commentary that is on their villainy. This is a wonderfully entertaining film, a David vs Goliath battle, where some of the Davids get to win, but of course, Goliath is still undeterred, because...capitalism. 

Fair Play: Written and directed by Chloe Domont, this is a steamy Netflix thriller about Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), two analysts who work at a fast-paced Manhattan hedge fund that is straight out of Wolf of Wall Street. The two of them have been dating for a while, and the movie opens with their engagement (5-minute spoiler alert?), but no one at work has any idea that they are a couple (in flagrant violation of every HR rule in the book). Luke wants to disclose their relationship once he gets a big promotion that's up for grabs at work. Of course, Emily gets that promotion instead, and things quickly deteriorate into a resentful paranoid hellscape.

This is a twisty movie and it's reasonably watchable for a while, commenting on a lot of familiar gender dynamics and misogyny and the general finance bro douchiness of it all. I was also distracted by a large number of British actors who were playing very staunch New Yorkers and doing the classic "English actor does accent they have learned by watching American movies." But towards the end, everything got way too disturbing and I found myself unable to root for anybody. While Luke was definitely a terrible, terrible partner, I found myself equally fed up with Emily for retaliating with bad behavior, and treating Luke like dirt in the same way that he was dismissive of her. Sometimes I fear that people think feminism means that women get to act just like men, whereas I think the whole point of feminism is that women usually have more emotional intelligence and we need to make it more acceptable for men to act like women. Unfortunately, this film just goes off a cliff with everyone being obsessed with money and status and sex and violence. But, as a positive blow for feminism, this movie does not shy away from featuring a graphic amount of period sex. Rebecca Bunch would have been proud.