David vs Goliath is a Wall St smash
T“Roaring Kitty’ and his internet followers start buying up GameStop shares’
here’s no doubt Dumb Money has a great story to tell and, over the course of 100 minutes, there’s no doubt it tells it in a highly entertaining way, with great use of music and nice performances from the likes of Paul Dano and even Pete Davidson.
But Irish audiences are going to have to put a bit of work in to get the most out of it because this is very much an American real-life story. Apart from an online presence, we no longer have GameStop – the videogame and electronics shopping mall retailer at the heart of the story.
And we don’t have a financial system that encourages relatively unsophisticated investors – nurses, shop assistants and students are the examples of so-called ‘dumb money’ used here – to bet against Wall Street professionals and billionaire hedge fund managers. But maybe we should, if it results in stories as good as this reworking of David v Goliath.
Dano plays Keith Gill, by day an unremarkable financial analyst but by night a headband-wearing, drink-swilling internet financial tipster with the nickname ‘Roaring Kitty’. And Roaring Kitty likes the look of GameStop shares a lot.
So not only do his army of internet followers start buying them, he buys $50,000 worth himself. He and his wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley) definitely have ‘skin in the game’. His stoner brother, inevitably played by Davidson, is nonplussed. Regularly.
The result of this buying spree is that the share price goes up at a time when the professionals have placed huge bets on GameStop shares falling. They’ve sold the shares ‘short’ to use the jargon, but with the price going up… well, now the pros are in trouble, big trouble.
Don’t let the technicalities or the ubiquitous face masks put you off. This is a lockdown story – Wall Street believed GameStop would be hit hard by Covid – filmed at a time when lockdown rules were still in place. Which also probably explains why you’ll find the likes of Seth Rogen and Nick Offerman among the strong supporting cast. Well worth catching, particularly if you liked The Big Short.
In The Lesson, a young Irishman arrives at the semi-palatial lakeside home of one of Britain’s most successful writers. Liam (Daryl McCormack) is there to prepare the writer’s clever but truculent teenage son for his Oxford interview. But we all know he’s there to learn secrets too, because there are always secrets in houses like this.
Part of the pleasure of watching the debut feature from experienced TV director Alice Troughton unfold is that we have a pretty good idea of where we’ re heading. Clic he, coincidence and melodrama all contribute to Alex Mac Keith’ sn ever the less still absorbing and unsettling screenplay. But the main pleasure, apart from Isobel Waller-Bridge’s wonderful music, is the quality of the acting. Richard E. Grant gives his best performance for years as the toweringly vainglorious writer, Julie Delpy is quietly superb as his coolly accommodating wife and McCormack, as the tutor, lives up to all the smallscreen promise he’s demonstrated in the likes of Bad Sisters, The Woman In The Wall and Peaky Blinders. Helped by a voice cast led by Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Miranda Hart, The Canterville Ghost is a reasonably faithful cartoon retelling of Oscar Wilde’s short story about the wealthy American family who buy a crumbling English stately home only to discover that Canterville Chase comes complete with its own resident ghost.
But being thoroughly modern Americans (at least by late 19th Century terms) the Otis family aren’t remotely frightened – in fact, the first thing they do is offer Sir Simon de Canterville (Fry) some patented lubrication for his rattling chains. Making Virginia, their only daughter, a little older – she’s now a college girl rather than Wilde’s teenager – and the central character, proves an effective device.
With joke after joke falling flat, sub-standard visual effects and excessive blood and gore, I thought Expend4bles was pretty terrible. But if Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham trading one-liners and a plot about nuclear terrorism are your collective thing… well, knock yourself out. I’m passing.