Daniel Garber talks with Paul Kemp about Searching for Satoshi
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Exactly 15 years ago on Halloween day in 2008, an unknown man named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that has affected countless people’s lives. That’s the same year as the Great Recession that followed the Wall Street crash and bailout. The paper was an elegant mathematical treatise outlining BitCoin, a parallel, person-to-person crypto-currency that functions without any bank, credit corporation or national government at its helm. Satoshi Nakamoto released his design of a blockchain database for anyone to use. But a few years later, in 2011, he disappeared leaving Bitcoins now worth as much as $70 billion. Who was he? Where did he go? Why did he disappear? And is Satoshi still alive?
Searching for Satoshi: The Mysterious Disappearance of the 
Bitcoin Creator is a new documentary that looks at the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto and who he (or she?) really was. The film tracks down some of the people rumoured to be him, and tries to see whether he’s still alive. It’s the work of multi-award-winning Toronto documentarian Paul Kemp. I’ve spoken about his work many times on this show. I interviewed Drew Hayden Taylor about the series Going Native and the doc The Pretendians that Paul Kemp directed and produced, and talked about Transformer with Michael del Monte and trans bodybuilder Janae Marie Kroczaleski which Kemp produced.
Searching for Satoshi premiered earlier this week on The Passionate Eye and is currently streaming on CBC Gem.
I spoke to Paul Kemp in Toronto via ZOOM.
MassachuTIFF! Films reviewed: Dumb Money, The Holdovers, American Fiction
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
TIFF23 is over but it has ushered in Toronto’s Fall Film Festival Season. Toronto Palestine Film Fest offers film screenings, live concert performances and museum installations, starting on Sept 27th. And you can catch eight short dance films, called “8-Count” at the Hot Docs cinema on the 27th and at York U on the 28th. But this week, I’m talking about three more great movies that played at TIFF, all from the USA, all set in Massachusetts. There’s a prep school student named Tully, a novelist with the nom de plume Studd, and an online investor known as Roaring Kitty.
Dumb Money
Dir: Craig Gillespie
Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is a investment analyst in Brockton, Massachusetts who posts his financial details daily online on a sub/Reddit. He works out of his basement. One day he notices a stock he likes is undervalued, so he buys 50,000 shares and posts the recerd on YouTube. It’s GameStop, a shopping mall chain that buys and sells video games and equipment. And when it goes viral, and everyone starts buying them, the prices climb. The chain doesn’t go bankrupt and ordinary people — the dumb money of the movie title — start making good money on sites like Robinhood. That’s good for everyone, right? No — not for short sellers. Those are the wall street tycoons who make their fortunes by betting on the future price of a stock being lower than the current price. But this one is soaring exponentially,
resulting in a short squeeze where the short sellers have to buy back shares at a much higher rate than they bet on. Can Keith — and all his followers — keep GameStop shares afloat? Or will Wall Street triumph once again?
Dumb Money is a simple but very fun movie — based on a true story that happened just two years ago — about ordinary investors trying to beat Wall Street at their own game. It follows Gill, his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) his bro Kevin (Pete Davidson), and the many small investors across the country: a nurse, some college students, even a mall employee of GameStop (played by actors including America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos). They’re pitted against the Wall Street short sellers (Vincent d’Onofrio, Seth Rogan). Most of the characters never actually meet one another, but somehow it all holds together. It’s a lot like The Big Short, but the heroes and heroines are regular people not just a bunch of rich guys playing the system. There’s a warm and rustic feel to this movie — a nostalgia for last year! — with nice characters you want to get to know. Nothing spectacular but Dumb Money is highly entertaining and a hell of a lot of fun.
For some reason, I really like this one.
American Fiction
Co-Wri/Dir: Cord Jefferson
Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) known as “Monk” to his family and friends is an upper-middle writer and academic. He’s spending time with his family in Massachusetts after being unceremoniously put on leave from his college for displaying the “N word” in class — white students said it made them feel “uncomfortable”. Coming from a family of doctors (he’s a PhD), Monk has very high standards when it comes to literature. He sneers at pulp fiction. Unfortunately his novels aren’t selling. What is selling is We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by an equally upper-middle-class, college-educated writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae). Monk holds fast to his ideals: he’s a writer who is black, not a black writer. But his agent (Jon Ortiz) wonders why Monk can’t write more “black”. In a fit of pique, Monk churns 
out the trashiest novel he can imagine, full of dreadful stereotypes and contrived black slang, gangstas, single parent families and crack dealers. But to his surprise and disgust, there’s an instant bidding war for the book, finally offering him 3/4 of million dollars. (He wrote it under the pen name Stagg R. Lee, posing as a fugitive from the law.) He wants to come clean and call off the deal, but he does need the money to pay for a nursing home for her mom (Leslie Uggams). But as his mythical fame starts to grow, and Hollywood comes knocking at his door, he winders how long the truth comes out?
American Fiction is a scathing comedy about academia, literature, movies and white American attitudes toward Blacks. It’s also an interesting family drama — with his clever divorced sister Lisa, his incorrigible divorced brother Cliff (Sterling K Brown) and the family maid Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). It’s also a potential romance, when he meets Coraline (Erika Alexander) a neighbour to the family’s beach house. This is director Cord Jefferson’s first feature, but he makes a mature, clever movie. He takes what could have been a simple farce, and turns it into something bigger than that. Jeffrey Wright is perfect as Monk, never hamming or mugging, just honing his character to a sharp and pithy — but flawed — person.
Great movie.
The Holdovers
Dir: Alexander Payne
It’s December, 1969 at Barton Academy, an elite prep school in New England. Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti) the hard-ass classics teacher, is put in charge of the kids who have nowhere to go over the winter holidays. Although its Christmas, he assigns the kids homework. These boys are troglodytes and its up to Hunham to whip them into shape, or at least try to. He’s the kind of guy who drops quotes in Latin and ancient greek to no one else’s amusement. He has a glass eye and smells like old fish. Cooking and cleaning is done by Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). She works at Barton so her son can study there and go to University. But, unlike the rich kids he couldn’t afford to pay for college. So he got drafted and died in Vietnam. Mary is still at the school, because where else is she going to go? Then there’s the students — Jason, an heir to a aviation fortune but his hair is too long for his dad’s wishes; the class pot dealer, Kountse, and Alex and Ye-Joon two little kids, too far from home — their parents are in Salt Lake City and Seoul. But after an 
unexpected event, only one student is left with Mary and Mr Hunham.
Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is the smartest kid in class, gangly and arrogant, but also a trouble maker. His divorced parents are rich but neglectful, so he’s been kicked out of a long list of prestigious boarding schools. If it happens again he’ll be sent to military school, a fate worse than death. Can the three of them, Angus, Mr Hunham and Mary, form a truce and act like a makeshift family? Or will they drive each other crazy first?
The Holdovers is a remarkably good coming-of-age comedy/drama with a compelling story and fantastic acting. It tugs at your heart without ever resorting to sentimentality. Paul Giamatti is always good, in this case as an unusual anti-hero, while the other two, Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, are totally new faces (never seen them in a movie before) but they’re both so good. They are three-dimensional and real, arrogant and vulnerable, and totally believable. I went into this movie with zero expectations, and was shocked by how good it is. I’m purposely not giving away the plot — no spoilers — but I can’t see anyone not liking this movie.
All three of these movies played at #TIFF23. with American Fiction winning the People’s Choice Award, and The Holdovers the runner up. Dumb Money opens this weekend across Canada; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
#TIFF23! Capsule reviews: The Nature of Love, Anatomy of a Fall, Dumb Money PLUS Aggro Dr1ft, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, The New Boy, A Boy and the Heron
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Have you been down to King st between Spadina and University lately? If not, get down there now, because, for the weekend it’s been transformed into Festival Street. The festival, of course, is TIFF, showing world premieres of some of the best movies out there. But there are also free screens, showing classics like Farewell My Concubine by Chen Kaige (who I interviewed on this show a while back), free outdoor concerts — including Nickelback, the band everyone loves to hate — and loads of celebrities and their fans, scrambling to see them up close. There’s also yummy food and drink samples for free, various red carpets, lots of booths and games and places to pose, with sponsors including the countries of Spain and Korea, promoting their burgeoning film industries. Everything is taking place around King St W, and in the nearby David Pecaut square.
So this week I’m going to talk about movies at TIFF: movies that I haven’t seen yet, but really want to see; and some movies I know more about, but promised to keep my capsule reviews short and sweet.
TIFF Movies I’m looking forward to
Here are a few movies which I haven’t seen yet but am very much looking forward to seeing.
Aggro Dr1ft is a movie I know very little about, except that it was entirely filmed using infrared light. Harmony Korine is one of the most brilliant experimental filmmakers out there, and I’ll watch anything he does. I’m especially pleased to hear of massive walkouts at the Venice Festival screening — all the more reason to watch it in Toronto.
Another one I can’t wait to see — and which probably won’t make it to commercial theatres anytime soon — is Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, by Romanian director Radu Jude. If it’s as absurd and outrageous as his last one — Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — I’m hopping to be as confused, shocked and surprised by this one.
I’m also looking forward to The New Boy about an indigenous kid
in Australia who walks into a remote monastery to perform miracles. The director, Warwick Thornton, brought us the great Sweet Country in 2017, so eager to see what he’s up to next.
There are other categories too. Don’t miss out on some of the excellent documentaries at TIFF. There’s Silver Dollar Road about a black family in North Carolina fighting a land developer, from French director Raoul Peck; The Pigeon Tunnel by Errol Morris looks really good: it’s about the spy and
spy novelist John Le Carre; and on the lighter side, a doc about a camp for trans and non-binary kids in Alberta! It’s called Summer Qamp and it’s directed by Jen Markowitz.
Finally, although I never review short films — never enough space — there are some fantastic programs 
set up for the festival. I’ve only seen one so far, Casey Lum’s Bloom (about one woman’s strange relationship with a potted plant) but I’m sure there are lots more fascinating films where that one came from.
And, finally, can’t wait to see A Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s latest — and possibly last — animated film. He did Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and so many others, and I’m sure this one will live up to Ghibli Studios very high standards.
Now, here are some capsule reviews of movies opening at TIFF:
The Nature of Love aka Simple Comme Sylvain, is Montreal’s Monia Chokri latest, about Sophia, a happily-married university prof (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) whose life changes when she meets Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) a small-town contractor they hired to repair their cottage. She falls for him, hook, line and sinker… and he seems to feel it, too. Can this be love? Or is the life of a sophisticated Montrealer just too different from a skidoo-riding handyman? The Nature of Love is a wonderfully campy and touching sex comedy from Chokri.
Anatomy of a Fall
Dir: Justine Triet
Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a renowned German novelist who lives with her husband in the French Alps. But when their blind son finds his Dad lying dead in the snow just outside of their chalet, no one knows whether he fell, jumped out a window, or was pushed. The Anatomy of a Fall, is a gripping courtroom drama about Sandra’s trial for a murder that might not have actually happened. This won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and I can see why.
Dumb Money
Dir: Craig Gillespie
Keith Gill aka Roaring Bunny (Paul Dano) is a small town dad who talks about and posts his stock market each night online, to an ever increasing audience. But things really take off when he tries to stop short-sellers on Wall Street from driving a shopping mall chain Game Stop out of business. And when tens of thousands of regular people join him to drive up its undervalued stock, Wall Street fights back… but can ordinary folk ever beat the bigwigs? Dumb Money is a very enjoyable comedy based on events that happened just a couple years ago.
The Nature of Love, Anatomy of a Fall, and Dumb Money — and many more — are playing at TIFF this week, and opening theatrically later this year.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Histories. Films reviewed: Hollywood, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(Home recording, no music)
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
History, they say, is written by the victors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other histories still out there. This week I’m looking at two stories, a doc and a TV drama. There’s a pessimistic, economic history of the world; and an optimistic, revisionist history of Hollywood.
Hollywood
Creators: Ian Brennan, Ryan Murphy
It’s just after WWII in LA. Young people from small towns across the US are flocking to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune in the movies. People like Jack (David Corenswet), a handsome young actor who lines up each day at Ace studios on the chance of a day’s paid work as an extra. But a pretty face is no guarantee of steady work in Hollywood. So when a mysterious man named Ernie (Dylan McDermott) recruits him for a day job at a gas station he welcomes the extra income. He’s stuck in a loveless marriage with his pregnant wife who works at the famed Schwab’s Pharmacy (where actors hang out to get discovered). Camille (Laura Harrier) is a beautiful actress on contract at Ace, where she attends locution lessons to 
perfect her elegant mid-atlantic accent. Still she’s stuck playing demeaning roles as maids, simply because she’s black. Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) is a talentless but good looking actor who thinks his luck has changed when he is signed by an agent named Henry (Jim Parsons). But the power broker demands sexual favours from all his clients.
Luckily, these three actors all have love interests. Jack soon discovers his job isn’t about pumping gas. It’s a front for male sex workers to peddle their wares for Hollywood’s rich and famous. Powerful women, including an older woman named Avis (Patti LuPone), grant him a chance for a foot in the door in a real movie. At the gas station, he works beside Archie (Jeremy Pope) a black writer hoping Ace studios will produce his script about a failed actress
HOLLYWOOD
who kills herself by jumping off the famed Hollywood sign. His first client is none other than Rock Hudson, looking for male companionship. Camille is in a relationship with Raymond (Darren Criss) a director at Ace. He says he’s part-Asian but can pass as white. And he wants to direct that movie Archie wrote, bringing all the main characters of the series together in one production. But is Ace Studios – and America – ready for a multi-racial romance?
Hollywood is a TV mini-series that appears to give an insider’s view of the post-war movie industry, but actually it makes it all up. The infamous casting couch – where directors or producers forced woman to have sex with them in exchange for a part – is reversed here to make men both the victims and the objects of desire. In this fantasy world, 1940s Hollywood produces movies written by, directed by, and starring non-whites. Studios are headed by women, actors come out publicly as gay and the Academy Awards happily nominates lots of African-Americans. In reality, desegregation and repeal of 
Jim Crow laws was decades away, “miscegenation” – mixed racial marriage – was still illegal, homosexuality was a crime, and even today Hollywood (and the Oscars) are still as white as snow.
About the only true part of this series is the gas station used as a front for male hustlers. All of this was revealed in a book and a documentary featuring the late, great Scotty Bowers (I interviewed him here in 2018.) The Netflix series is the story of his career… but he’s never mentioned by name, even once. I don’t dislike the series – it’s never boring, it’s fun to watch and has beautiful production values along with many interesting new players in the cast – but, like most Netflix productions, historical accuracy applies to hairstyles but never to the script.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Dir: Justin Pemberton
Based on the book by Thomas Piketty
What is capital? How is it distributed? How has that changed over the past three centuries? These are just some of the questions dealt with in this new documentary. In the 18th Century 99% of capital – meaning wealth, money and land – was controlled by the aristocracy, less than 1% of the people. Life expectancy was low, and life for the poor was nasty, brutish and short. But revolutionis, in France and elsewhere, didn’t mean a transfer of power and weath from the top to the bottom. Government was still controlled
by those with the most money and laws were passed to ensure they didn’t lose their wealth. The rise of colonialism in the Americas, Africa and Asia led to more wealth in Europe extracted from the lands and people they now controlled. Slave-based agriculture generated even more capital – in the form of human beings – now bought, sold and traded like commodities. And people working 
in factories could be arrested even for quitting a job, and imprisoned for being poor or in debt. But, following the widespread death and destruction of WWI and the following worldwide depression, came the first signs of a transfer of power and capital from huge corporate monopolies and the very rich to the rest of the people.
Following WWII, the remaining aristocracy was heavily taxed, and wealth was transferred to the average person in the form of housing, education, health and the welfare state. People were finally rewarded for study and hard work. They were able to move up from poverty. This lasted for a few decades, until it began to unravel with new ideologies introduced by Thatcher and Reagan. 
Unions and welfare were suddenly bad. Greed was good. And once again, wealth was transferred from the poor and shrinking middle class back up to the top 1%. That’s where we are now.
How can we reverse these awful changes?
This documentary is a fascinating — and fast-moving – condensed look at economic history over the past 300 years and how it affects us today. It’s narrated by Pickety and other economists in a very accessible and easy to understand way. And it’s beautiful to look at, filled with thousands of tiny, 
quick film clips, mostly one to three seconds long, of stately homes and Victorian factories, mints printing dollar bills, Thatcher talking to schoolgirls, and people breathing through face masks in a horribly polluted Beijing. The images and music are as meticulously researched as they are lovely. Constant eye-candy.
Even the talking heads, those usually dull academics interviewed in the doc, are enthusiastic and interesting, and uniformly filmed against lavish backgrounds and scenery. And it’s filled with cool sequences. l loved one about a psychological experiment where volunteers play Monopoly without a level playing field – it favours certain players at random. These newly “rich” players are recorded acting rude, scarfing pretzels and generally behaving entitled as soon as they discovered the rules were tilted in their favour. So if you want to learn about history and economics and what to do about it, but don’t feel like reading thousands of pages, Capital in the 21st Century is a great place to feed your brain without wearing it out.
Hollywood is now streaming on Netflix; Capital opens May 8 in Toronto at the Hotdocs Virtual Theatre; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with Jennifer Deschamps about her documentary Inside Lehman Brothers
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s 2008, and Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s biggest investment banks, is riding high on the hog. With assets in the trillions, it has pioneered innovative financial products like marketing subprime loans to people who can’t otherwise afford a mortgage. And its top execs are pocketing huge amounts of cash… that is, until it all came tumbling down, plunging 
the world into an economic crisis. Everyone seemed surprised, except some insiders at Lehman Brothers… who saw it coming a mile away.
Inside Lehmann Brothers is a new documentary about the criminal activities of the financial sector that helped being about the Wall Street crash of 2008. It’s told through the eyes of the insiders, accountants, salespeople, auditors and underwriters whose warnings were ignored by both the company and by government regulators. It’s co-written and directed by noted Paris-based filmmaker and journalist Jennifer Deschamps, who has created films on topics ranging from Scientology to the Sub-Prime economic crisis.
I spoke to Jennifer Deschamps in the south of France, via telephone at CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto.
Inside Lehman Brothers plays on Sunday, Aug 25th on Documentary Channel.
Happy trails. Films reviewed: Ghost Town Anthology, Red Rover, The Hummingbird Project
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
You know, Canada makes a lot of movies. Oscar season might be over, but the Canadian Screen Awards are on at the end of March, with lots of great nominees, including Les Salopes, The Drawer Boy, What Walaa Wants, The Grizzlies and The Hummingbird Project. And for a look at next year’s possible winners the Canadian Film Fest will be showing a dozen new movies starting on Tuesday.
This week I’m looking at three new Canadian movie about people blazing new trails. There’s a man in Toronto following a path to Mars, another man constructing a straight line from Kansas City to Wall Street, and locals in northern Québec trying to block strange outsiders from entering their town.
Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues)
Wri/Dir: Denis Côté
Irénée-Des-Neiges is a mining town in Northern Quebec whose mine was shut down. The population is steadily decreasing and young people are moving south. So when Simon Dubé, one of the few young man left in the town, dies in a strange car crash everyone is devastated. His mom (Josée Deschênes) and little brother Jimmy (Robert Naylor), are hit especially hard. Was it an accident, a suicide, or something else? Whatever the cause it seems to 
spark a change in attitude in this dying town.
The Mayor Simone Smallwood (Diane Lavallée) reassures everyone that while it’s a sad event, the town will survive – we are a place for the living and will never be a ghost town. But Jimmy tells his best friend André (Rémi Goulet) his dead brother is communicating with him – so they go to visit the shack where his coffin is stored till spring (you can’t dig graves in the winter up north).
Adèle (Larissa Corriveau) a gawky young woman, prone to paranoia, is sure she hears strange noises late at night. Loulou and Robert a pair of retired busybodies thinks there might be wolves in the woods. Pierre and Camille, the attractive rich couple who own the local restaurant, see the shrinking of the town as a good thing – maybe they can renovate abandoned houses? When a grief counsellor arrives from Montreal (wearing a hijab, no less! *gasp*) the mayor sends her packing. We can take care of 
ourselves. We don’t like outsiders.
But the outsiders keep coming, including strange little kids wearing felt masks and Peruvian ponchos. Who are they and what do they want? Are they real, or just a hallucination? But when things turn really strange, the town has to make a decision – move away or get rid of these unusual outsiders with help from the outside.
Ghost Town Anthology is an eerie look at history, kinship, and mourning in small town Quebec. It’s also about the xenophobia and fear of strangers that persists long after secularism replaced Catholicism as its official religion.
Shot in beautiful, grainy 16mm film, it embraces the coldness and grey skies of a Canadian winter. With good acting and a consistently surprising story, Denis Côté continues his flirtation with magic realism in this unusual film.
Very interesting movie.
Red Rover
Dir: Shane Belcourt
Damon (Kristian Bruun) is a failed man. He’s a geologist at at a mining firm in Toronto’s financial district but his MBA boss Brad steals his research and treats him like dirt. His 
ex-girlfriend Beatrice (Meghan Heffern) dumps him the day he proposes, pushing him into the basement of the house they share. Now 
he’s forced to listen to her having sex with Mark (Morgan David Jones) a narcissist instructor from Australia she’s shacked up with. Damon is just a pudgy, depressed introvert who wallows in his misery. 
His only pastime is searching for treasure on the beaches with a metal detector.
But everything changes when he runs into a woman dressed in a space suit dancing in the 
sands. Phoebe (Cara Gee) is a singer- songwriter who is everything he is not – joyful, hopeful and full of life. She’s currently promoting Red Rover, a program to send a few people to settle on the planet mars! It’s sponsored by Gopi, a 
billionaire, who will choose the best applicants. She agrees to help Damon apply and they gradually are drawn to each other? Is it love or just a fling? Can Damon regain his self confidence? And is her really flying to Mars?
Shot in Toronto, Red Rover is a lighthearted rom-com with an unusual science fiction twist. It’s full of people telling stories and singing songs… and Cara Gee is especially appealing as the quirky love interest.
The Hummingbird Project
Wri/Dir: Kim Nguyen
Vinnie Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) is a young guy full of spit and vinegar. He works with his cousin the nerdy and neurotic Anton Zaleski (Alexander Skarsgård) a computer programmer. They work at a Wall street investment firm headed by the canny Eva (Salma Hayek). She keeps a close eye on her employees. Vinnie has a grand vision: to build a fiber optic line stretching from the Kansas City stock exchange directly to Wall street. By sending data a few milliseconds faster, the speed of one flap of a 
hummingbird’s wings. he could make billions of dollars on stock trades.
But the project is enormous. It involves digging a tunnel through mountains, under rivers in an absolute straight line, withthosands of tiny land purchase – just the width of the cable – along the way. He finds a secret investor from New Jersey to pay for it, an engineer, Mark Vega (Michael Mando) to do the physical planning, and hundreds of others to do the digging. They are 
working against time. Anton has to speed up the transmission. The investor has to keep investing, and Vinnie himself is postponing a potentially lifesaving operation to bring the project in on schedule. But can they complete the project in time, and overcome all the obstacles along the way?
The Hummingbird project is a look at the importance of the small local obstacles that can stall huge projects, and the burning ambition needed to complete it. It’s wonderfully shot in a forests and mountain ranges, with backplows, giant helicopters and sputtering drills all along the way. It’s a sometimes touching, sometimes tender story of an impossible dream. Eisenberg is great as Vinnie and Skarsgård unrecognizeable as Anton. Don’t get me wrong, I liked this movie’s energy, ambition and passion. It just seems at times that the meandering story is just an excuse for showing cool scenery and actors in hard hats.
Ghost Town Anthology opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. The Hummingbird Project opens in a week, and Red Rover is the opening night feature at the Canadian Film Fest next Tuesday night.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Shells. Films reviewed: Journey’s End, Ready Player One, The China Hustle
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s a holiday weekend filled with eggs, whether hard boiled or made of chocolate with a prize inside. So this week I’m looking at three new movies about… shells. There are VR gamers looking for a hidden easter egg, Wall Streeters investing in shell corporations, and WWI soldiers dodging mortar shells.
Journey’s End
Dir: Saul Dibb
It’s March, 1918, in the WWI trenches of northern France. Underground, where the officers stay, it’s dark, dank and smelly. Up on the surface its deadly dangerous, with snipers aiming at your head. Four British divisions rotate their stays at the front at one week per month. It’s like a lottery – with a one in four chance of dying. And the soldiers in Company C are just trying to stay sane and alive. There’s the fatherly Osborne (Paul Bettany) who everyone calls “Uncle”, the indefatigable cook Mason (Toby Jones), and the shell-shocked Hibbert.
So no one can understand why the green, idealistic Lt Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) pulls strings to join this benighted group. Why? His upper classman Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin) is stationed there and he wants to see him 
again. But he doesn’t realize the level of death and despair that has taken hold there. And that his hero, Stanhope,
is now a mean and bitter alcoholic. The soldiers there are forced to make pointless raids in daylight so as not to interrupt the dinner schedule of far-off Generals. And things reach a boiling point when 
word gets out the Germans are about to attack on Thursday, right there. They’re essentially sentenced to die at the front. How do they all handle this?
Journey’s End – based on the classic play – is a tense retelling of an old war story, exactly 100 years later. It deals with the futility of war, the rigid British class system, and the male comeradery of life in the trenches. The acting is very good, and the camera wonderfully captures a world lit only by flickering lanterns. Even so, it was hard to sympathize with the stuff-upper-lip, tally-ho language of the script. The long theatrical conversations might might work on stage but not on the screen. The main emotions I got from this movie were depression, disgust claustrophobia and fatalism. It all felt too long, too slow, and too distant, especially once you know their fate… Just die already!
Ready Player One
Dir: Steven Spielberg
It’s 2045 in Columbus, Ohio and the world is a mess. People live marginal existences in ramshackle towers beside huge corporations. Wade (Tye Sheridan) is an 18-year-old orphan who spends most of his time online in a wildly- popular VR fantasy world called Oasis. Its creator left a trillion-dollar prize to whoever can solve the puzzles hidden within this digital world. First they must complete three levels of games and collect three keys and claim the hidden easter egg. Wade he surprises the world by appearing on the boards as Player One, the top ranked player in the world. But he’s not the only gunter (egg hunter) trying to win. His closest virtual rivals are Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) a fiery red-head, Aech, a muscular giant and genius mechanic; plus Daito and Sho whose avatars look like a samurai and a ninja, respectively. Wade calls himself Parzival. Like the Wagner opera 
character, he’s searching for a holy grail. And he’s in love with the lovely Artemis. But as best-bud Aech keeps telling him: you only know her avatar – that’s not what she’s like in real life. And lurking in the shadows is the rich and evil Sorrento, (Ben Mendelssohn) the head of IOI, the corporate rival to Oasis’s company. He pretends to be a champion gamer, but he’s actually a fake who hires employees to play for him. But he’s out to win — and take over the world — at any cost. Which of the hunters will figure out the puzzle and find the easter egg? And can they defeat the villainous Sorrento?
Ready Player One is an incredibly fast-moving sci-if action movie. Oasis’s inventor, whose puzzles they’re all trying to solve, was obsessed with the 80s, so the movie feeds you a random hodgepodge of Back to the Future and Iron Giant, Gandam and Street Fighter, New Order and Van Halen, a non-stop shower of pop culture, to the point where you can’t tell self-referential jokes from cheap product placement. (Maybe they’re both?) But why would kids in the 2040s care about the 1980s? I can’t call this a good movie; it’s incredibly commercial, felt more like a theme park ride than a film, and parts were like watching a video game with someone else holding the controls. But you know what? I still enjoyed it. And it does have that classic Spielbergian look and sound.
China Hustle
Wri/Dir: Jed Rothstein
After the Subprime Mortgage crisis, American investors, pension funds, and ordinary moms and pops were looking to make some money. But where? Chinese people were making millions investing in their red-hot companies, but those stocks weren’t traded on Wall Street. Until, suddenly, they were. Hundreds of Chinese startups were being bought and sold and making big bucks. And companies like Roth Capital were holding lavish parties known as “investment conferences” to reel in buyers. They were backed by reputable auditors like 
Deloitte. It’s a win-win proposition – everyone makes money. Until, that is, some suspicious investors fly to Shanghai and looked around.
Turns out, many of these companies operate as “Reverse Mergers”. Existing Chinese corporations buy shell companies already registered in the US, take them over, change their name, and they’re open to make money.
But their books here don’t look like their books there. Idle factories in China are said to be making ten times what 
they’re actually earning. And no one’s checking up on them.
So a few maverick investors decide to short sell their stock (like in that movie The Big Short) counting on its value crashing soon. And they speed this along by publicising the corruption and questionable accounting of the parent companies back in China. The result, riches for a few, terrible losses for many.
The China Hustle is a fascinating documentary looking at the shady practices behind deregulation, auditing and investments, as told by three American short-sellers. I thought its view of China as a monolithic villain was superficial and rather one-sided; for example, it shows how these fraudulent investments affect ordinary Americans’ lives, but not how they affect ordinary Chinese.
But it does expose in detail a huge scandal I knew nothing about.
Ready Player One opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. Journey’s End and The China Hustle are in theatres and Video On Demand. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
American Dream, French Nightmare. Films reviewed: The Big Short, Joy, French Blood
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s slow season for movies
right now, but you can catch some unusual ways of seeing films, from the tiny to vast. The 9th Annual 8-Fest shows handmade super 8 films at the SPK Polish Combatants Hall. The Cineplex Great Digital Film Festival is showing classic digital 
crowd-pleasers on the big screen across Canada, including David Bowie in Labyrinth. And online myfrenchfilmfestival.com is showing new French movies around the world until mid-February.
This week, I’m looking at two dramas about the American Dream, and one about the French Nightmare.
The Big Short
Dir: Adam McKay (based on the book by Michael Lewis)
It’s the first decade of the 21st century and Wall Street is booming. Brokers are investing big in the security and stability of derivatives based on subprime mortgages. (Subprime mortgages were a new invention that let you buy a house with no money down.) Funds that cannot fall issued by merchant banks too big to fail. But a tiny collection of investors see it for what it is: a bubble about to burst.
There’s Michael (Christian Bale) a barefoot genius out west known for his investment acumen. Slimy Jared (Ryan Gosling) heads an unusual section of a big firm. He interests the exceptionally abrasive Mark (Steve Carrel) and his gang. And at the same time, two kids in their early twenties who can’t break through the glass walls of Wall Street, somehow manage to catch the eye of Ben (Brad Pitt) a reclusive former investor. We all know what happens. Wall Street crashed leaving millions of people jobless and locked out of their homes.
The movie follows these separate groups as they bet big against Wall Street, and shows us who comes out on top by selling short. And it explains, if you care to listen, some of the arcane economics behind the whole mess, propped up by fraud, deceit and corruption. The Big Short is a fast-moving entertainingly camp and educational Bro Movie.
More on this one in a minute…
Joy
Dir: David O Russell
Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is a woman who lives with a lovable but misbegotten family. Her bedridden mom (Virginia Madsen) watches TV all day. Joy’s ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez) lives in her basement, and her loving grandma helps with the kids upstairs. And now her auto-repairman dad (Robert de Niro) is moving back home too. Joy once had high hopes for her future but her time is wasted in a 
dead-end job and taking care of her dysfunctional family.
One day inspiration hits. She decides to create and sell a new mop with a removable mop-head, made from a single long loop of string. But how to make it, market it and sell it? She decides to make them in a makeshift factory her dad’s garage, with funding from his girlfriend (Isabella Rosselini) a rich widow. And through a series of lucky accidents she gets a chance to offer it on a TV shopping network. But there are still lots of bumps in the road that might ruin all her plans. Joy is a cute and watchable movie about a woman – and all her quirky friends and family’s — attempt to make it big.
Joy and The Big Short — both nominated for Best Picture Oscar, and neither of which will win — are two sides of the same coin. Both are true stories with similar themes: ordinary people, with a 
bit of luck, and a lot of perseverance and hard work can make lots of money even in these tough economic times. Stay true to your ideas, no matter how unusual, no matter what other people say. … but you have to do it within the system.
Both movies are entertaining, fast-paced and fun, with huge casts and big stars. They take risks in their methods of storytelling. The Big Short breaks the third wall with characters turning directly to the camera to “tell the truth” that the movie leaves out. And Joy features a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at a live TV set. Joy is told from a “woman’s point of view” (the home life of a mom who sells mops on TV), while The Big Short is basically an all-guy movie (men with invisible families making money at work on Wall Street). I like them both, but don’t expect to be overly challenged.
French Blood (Un Français)
Dir: Diastème
Marco, Braguette and Grand-Guy (Alban Lenoir, Samuel Jouy, and Paul Hamy) are three best friends living in a banlieu, the high rise ghettos ringing Paris. They are French skinheads, complete with Doc Martens, 
bomber jackets and neo-nazi tattoos. Hobbies include getting drunk, getting laid, and attacking strangers on the street, specifically gays, leftists and Arabs. They don’t seem to follow any strict ideology, but seem to really enjoy brawling, fighting and terrorizing immigrants. They soon join the National Front, France’s political party of the extreme right. But then their paths begin to diverge.
Braguette is shot and disabled by a leftwing activist. He quickly rises up in the ranks of the National Front. Grand-Guy is a loose cannon, given to excessive alcohol and drugs. His 
attacks on immigrants turn extreme, culminating in his horrifying torture of a random, middle-aged man. And Marco, after beating, almost to death, a rival skinhead, has a mental breakdown. An altruistic pharmacist takes him under his wing and helps him adjust to a life away from violence and racism. But these changes happen gradually, shown over decades, with the movie providing just a glimpse of their lives, once every five years. It’s up to the viewer to fill in the missing parts. And it culminates in an ultimate showdown between Marco and Braguette.
This is a very violent and disturbing — but fantastic — movie. It looks at the extreme 
right in contemporary France from the points of view of three white, working-class men. The acting is amazing, especially Lenoir, Hamy and Jouy. And it’s incredibly timely; after the terror attacks in Paris, the National Front came that close to winning the last election. I strongly recommend this movie.
The Big Short and Joy are both playing in Toronto, check your local listings; and you can watch French Blood online at myfrenchfilmfestival.com.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber interviews director JIM BRUCE about his new film Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
The world’s economy was brought to a standstill after the crash of 2008 – we’re still recovering. What 
happened? A new movie posits that it was the policies of the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan that were largely responsible for the meltdown.
This in-depth documentary explains the history of this powerful but opaque agency and how it works. It’s called Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve, (opening today in Toronto at Hot Docs). Director JIM BRUCE (editor: King of Kong) tells us more.
Crime Families? Movies Reviewed: We’re the Millers, 2 Guns, Blue Jasmine
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Something strange happened to me recently – apparently my downtown bank was robbed… while I was there! The thing is, I didn’t even know it had taken place. In fact, if a teller hadn’t handed me a mugshot photocopy and told me to circle a face, I still wouldn’t know. Meanwhile, the bank refused to say that they’d been robbed, just what do you remember, what did you see? (Truthful answer: nothing). All very strange. Nothing like the movies where someone in a mask always shouts Nobody move! I have a gun and it’s loaded! Don’t move and you won’t get hurt!
This week I’m looking at three new movies about how crime can affect the criminals themselves, their friends and their families. Two of the movies – one action, one comedy – focus on the lucrative drug trade across the US/Mexican border. And one’s a drama, set in San Francisco, about the ex-wife of a Bernie Madoff-type character.
We’re the Millers
Dir: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Dave (Jason Sudeikis) is loving the single’s life as a small- time pot dealer. But when street punks steal his money and his drug stash, he suddenly finds himself in debt to his drug boss, a goofy, but cruel, businessman who keeps killer whales for pets. So he’s forced to do a one-time smuggling run from Mexico in an RV. But, in order to fool government agents at the border, he must totally change his look, from stoner to suburban straight guy. So he recruits a fake family to accompany him. Rose, a bitter and angry stripper who lives in his apartment building (Jennifer Anniston) is now his “wife”. (She hates him). Naïve Kenny (Will Poulter) — another neighbour, who was abandoned by his mom – is his pretend son, and homeless Casey (Emma Roberts) is his wisecracking daughter.
Together they cross the border, evade vengeful Mexican druglords, and try to fit in with the lily-white Christian campers they meet on the road.
Meet the Millers is a cute, risqué road movie about a bunch of ne’erdowells who, in spite of themselves, gradually morph into the family roles they are given. The laughs come from the fact that we, the audience — but not the characters they meet – know that this suburban family is actually just a façade. The characters are all funny and sympatico, but Will Poulter (the wide-eyed kid in the UK comedy Son of Rambow) especially stands out as a goofy twerp forced to grow up.
2 Guns
Dir: Baltasar Kormákur
Stig and Bobby (Mark Wahlburg and Denzel Washington) are carefree partners in crime. They kibitz with a Mexican crime lord, knock over banks and blow up donut shops. And Bobby has a beautiful non-girlfriend, Deb (Paula Patton), who’s a fed. But when a simple bank job yields the boys $30 million in untraceable cash, the dynamic changes. There’s no honour among thieves. They turn against each other. Both of them turn out to be secretly working for competing groups – and everyone seems to know this except the two of them. Soon enough, they’re each being chased by the military, the CIA, another sinister and deadly agency, and the drug lords themselves – all of whom want to get their hands on the cash. If 
Bobby and Stig can’t trust each other, how will they survive this “war on drugs”?
If you like light action movies — with getaways, shoot-outs, explosions, disguises and chase scenes – this is a good one. Wahlburg is a very likeable comic actor. Washington seems to have a bit more trouble doing good comedy, but he’s got the weather-worn-persona down pat. And I love Icelandic director Kormákur’s constant use of stark, rusty-steel locations: all his trains, cars, industrial kitchens, rooftops, deserts… just beautiful to watch.
(One point: both 2 Guns and Meet the Millers are filled with dated, negative stereotypes of Mexicans… but, since the movies are also filled with negative stereotypes of Americans, I guess it evens out.)
Blue Jasmine
Dir: Woody Allen
Rich, blond and upper-class, New York socialite Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) arrives in San Francisco with just the shirt on her back (and some jewels and dresses in her Louis Vuitton luggage.) She’s losing it. Penniless, lost, disgraced. She can’t stop thinking about her ex-husband’s – a Bernie Madoff-type Wall Street investor who bilked his clients – fall from power. Now she has nowhere to go, so she’s forced to bunk with her sister. Frowsy but affable, working-class Ginger (Sally Hawkins) is her exact opposite – could they have come from the same womb? Snooty Jasmine insists they’re not biological relatives.
Ginger lets her stay in her messy but happy home, along with two kids 
and a boorish boyfriend. Jasmine holds that the only way for a woman to improve her lot in life is to marry up. Ginger should meet better boyfriends. (Unmentioned is the fact that it was Jasmine’s billionaire husband that broke up Ginger’s marriage when he squandered their nest egg on worthless stock.)
But impeccably good taste isn’t enough to feed Jasmine. A Vassar drop-out, she has no skills, no experience. She is forced to double- date with her sister. She takes work as a dental receptionist, wears a nametag, and deals with relentless customers and sexual harassment from her boss. But she still dreams of better days in the Hamptons, even as she recalls, through flashbacks, the events that led to her husband’s financial collapse. Can a widowed diplomat she meets pull her from this morass? And will Ginger follow suit with a newer, richer boyfriend?
Blue Jasmine is a moving character study of a mentally unstable woman forced to make it on her own. Cate Blanchett is great in the title role, and Sally Hawkins good as her sister. Alec Baldwin and Andrew Dice Clay as their respective ex-husbands, Hal and Augie, round out the cast quite nicely. But I thought this movie dragged. The dialogue is rarely witty, and often repetitive and tiresome. The characters keep having identical arguments, almost word for word: Jasmine say Ginger’s boyfriends are losers, Ginger still likes them, Augie blames Jasmine for his financial losses… While I remember the good parts in retrospect, the film felt slow and repetitive while I was watching it.
We’re the Millers opens on August 9th, and Blue Jasmine and 2 Guns open today. And coming next week, a rare appearance at the TIFF Bell Light Box by French director Leos Carax at a retrospective of his fantastic movies, including Holy Motors and Les Amants du Pont Neuf. Go to tiff.net for more information.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
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