With lack of anything else worthwhile from the back alleys of Hollywoodland, we set out to see a documentary about the guy who sticks his arm up the back of Sesame Street's Elmo. Not that I'm a big fan of the Muppet, but the puppeteer himself was going to be there and I figured that, compared to a paper cut, this couldn't possibly hurt.
At the box office, the call of distress was sounded.
"The Elmo movie is all sold out."
Apparently, there were lots of other folks in the Los Angeles area who were desperate to find anything to see at the cinema on a Saturday night.
Now tossed out like yesterday's newspaper, we needed to regroup fast. Luckily this was a multiplex so there was multi flix to choose from. There were other people in line for the movie next door, "Margin Call."
I went back to my paper cut analogy. Compared to that slit across your skin, this movie couldn't hurt that much. In we went.
Now, previously, I had read about "Margin Call," and pretty much dismissed it from my attention span. It was one of those financial melodramas which you usually need a masters in economics to follow. Plus I had read that the distributors had simultaneously released the movie to theaters and cable-on-demand outlets the very same day. Wow, that didn't sound like a vote of confidence. Is it already playing on American Airlines as well?
Imagine my surprise when, at the end of two hours, I was thoroughly entertained by "Margin Call." And, unlike my economics class in the tenth grade, I understood it.
This film is a fictional depiction of what might have happened inside one Wall Street brokerage house during the 2008 financial meltdown that ultimately gave us all a Barack Obama presidency tied up in glossy wrapping paper and a ribbon. At least, I think it was a brokerage house. Maybe it was a bank. Or a commodities exchange. I couldn't really tell. And that's what the secret of the movie's success is all about.
The filmmakers were wise not to layer the script so thickly with ten-dollar-words that would simply show off the IQ of the screenwriter but effectively confuse the shit out of the audience. It's all written in layman's terms. Or maybe that's Lehman terms?
You don't know exactly what's happening to this company that is the worst thing it will ever have to endure. You just know it's pretty bad and people are getting fired. The prop department obviously worked overtime to pull together the most packing boxes ever seen in one movie. But, as for the specifics of the dilemma at hand? Who knew? This might as well have been John Carpenter's 'The Fog." Or the first hour of "Jaws" before you saw the shark. The evil is all around, but unseen.
Like other Hollywood disaster movies, "Margin Call" sports an all-star cast and, just like in real life on Wall Street, there are no real heroes. Everyone working at this collapsing company is flawed. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker, and Demi Moore are running this whatever-it-is and they all have a hand in its upcoming demise. At the same time, they are all depicted in shades of gray. Likeable and unlikeable. Sometimes, within the space of five minutes. You hate them. You feel for them. And where in our lives doesn't that happen every single day?
Zachary Quinto comes closest to wearing the white hat in "Margin Call" as a young analyst of whatever-industry-this-is. He's one of the film's producers and get props for making this movie as entertaining and elementary as it is. He also may be the producer in town with the longest eyebrows ever as they stretch all the way from Culver City to Las Vegas.
Watching "Margin Call," one might look at the current Occupy movements all over the country and provide validation to all those slobs protesting the largesse of the big and bad Wall Street companies. Meanwhile, these schmucks are really too stupid to understand all the sides of a incredibly complex mechanism that is threatening this country every day and in every way.
These morons don't realize that there are lots of innocent folks in those ivory towers who are also losing their livelihoods to the burgeoning economic dilemmas we face every day. Nope, OccupyAssholes only understand one of the arguments. And provide no solutions either.
How dumb are they? As simple as "Margin Call" is to comprehend, even they would be addled by the plot. As for me, I got it perfectly.
Elmo, you had a worthy replacement last Saturday night.
Dinner last night: Andouille, peppers, and onion on sourdough roll.
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