All the recent-history true story movies that sound like Michael Lewis books or Vanity Fair articles that Adam McKay is involved in (The Big Short, Vice, Winning Time, Bombshell) all either look too preachy and boring, or they've cast movie stars as real people and I won't be able to immerse myself in it. And I have no interest in the last season of The Crown - 25 years is too soon to be dramatizing Lady Diana's life and death.
Then there's Dumb Money. I saw the trailer for this in the fall and thought it looked like fun: a bunch of Wall Street weasels on the run! A few weeks ago my brother-in-law recommended it to me, so I downloaded it to my phone for my flight to Las Vegas on February 2.
I ended up loving it. The charm and specific personalities of the striving Americans who put the short squeeze on Wall Street give the movie a rude and funny vibe, like a term paper written by a hungover frat boy. All the cursing and the very raunchy music on the soundtrack ("WAP" makes me blush!) helps.
America Ferrera's single mom nurse, Anthony Ramos's retail wage slave Marcos, and the coed (Olivia Thirlby) trying to claw her way out of student debt are manning the barricades, led on this plebean revolt by Roaring Kitty (Paul Dano) a stock market analyst/hobbyist on Reddit, who inspires a nation of dumb money investors to buy up GameStop shares and hold them, and hold them, and hold them, to squeeze and bankrupt the billionaire investors (Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Vincent D'Onofrio, Sebastian Stan) trying to drive GameStop out of existence.
Maybe the best movie ever about The Internet, the movie does a terrific job of chronicling how a community can coalesce online around an idea and spark a wildfire that changes the real world in the process. Such a ridic idea is only watchable because it really happened.
- Notes: Dumb Money takes place during the 2021 lockdown, and they use that period to help place the movie in time and give the story immediacy. They only talk about COVID itself obliquely.
- Comic Relief: Roaring Kitty's brother is Pete Davidson, a reprobate with a heart of gold who delivers your Doordash fast food while sipping and nibbling off the top, while stealing/borrowing his brother's car.
- Roaring Kitty lives in Brockton, so I appreciated the Massachusetts touches, and I also appreciate they didn't try any Boston accents.
- Shailene Woodley, what are you doing? I admit I haven't seen a lot of her work, but her two movies in 2023 (this and Ferrari) both feature her as the mother leaning on the kitchen counter while the guy gets to do stuff.
On Netflix from Newark to Las Vegas on United