Money Monster is a great idea for a movie. Obviously, the entire idea for the screenplay came out of watching CNBC and more specifically Jim Cramer who is the star of “Mad Money”. While watching this movie I remember asking myself, could something like this happened in real life, considering the horrible year 2008 which created a “generational low” in the stock market in March 2009. The year 2000 bear market that started in March 2000 and lasted 30 months and the many so called experts that go on CNBC to give their opinions which many times are proven very wrong.

In my opinion, the advice and commentators on CNBC had a great deal to do with accelerating the insane ups and downs of the stock market since 1998 and which in the last two years have included flash crashes, where the stock market drops a thousand points or more in one day. Recently, and several times before this, billionaire Carl Icahn has gone on CNBC to make comments about stocks either positive or negative that everybody knows will have a great affect on the stock market overall as well as the stocks themselves. Recently Icahn announced that he sold all of this APPLE stock and soon after the stock went down many more points and brought the stock market down with it. Clearly, this should be considered an illegal practice because the odds are high that Icahn was either buying shares or shorting them to make money at the expense of other stockholders .

As far as Money Monster, George Clooney plays the Jim Cramer character and I think much of the over the top dancing around before this fictional financial show was a bit much, especially since Cramer himself does not dance around on his show at all. Very soon into the movie Cramer is held at gunpoint by a very angry young man who lost 60K in a stock that Clooney’s character told his audience was “as safe as a savings account”. From this point on, about 15 minutes into the movie, the rest of the film had to do with things we have seen many times before on TV police drama’s, ie. trying to get this hostage situation resolved, which in this case also included a bomb attached to Clooney’s chest. Julia Roberts is also in this movie as the producer of the financial TV show and we learn that she is going to leave the show in a few weeks, due to the problems with Clooney’s character. Jodie Foster directed this movie, which overall was just good but could have been great. The young man who holds Clooney hostage was played well by Jack O’Connell although the foul language and the overuse of the “F” word I thought were overdone. While I do recommend this movie, its a shame that many of the plot points were not believable but the acting was good and the story was compelling enough.

Money Monster – IMDB

Jim Cramer Does not beat the market

It’s relatively rare for a big star like Tom Hanks to star in a low-budget art house type of a movie but “Hologram For The King” is one of those kinds of movies. This film gives an insight into what is probably happening more and more in the Software Development/Information Technology field in the last few years, ie. more and more American’s traveling to Saudi Arabia and Dubai to sell state of the art technology to a massively expanding area of the world. It was interesting to see the hot flat desert life of so many people where despite the stifling heat, blinding sun and sand, the most construction in the world is going on. How can workers build so many huge buildings under such horrible conditions is a mystery, as well as what it must take to build the foundations of buildings in the sand to support so much massive weight. The part of Saudi Arabia where this movie was shot is in the early stages of new huge development probably which is being created because this location within Saudi Arabia wants to try and catch up with Dubai. Clearly they have a long way to go.

This movie starts in an extremely unusual way; opening with Hanks walking out of his house followed by blue puffs of smoke as his house, car and wife disappear while he walks forward narrating something about leaving things behind. This opening scene gives the viewer the impression that the rest of the movie might follow this unusual approach but it then immediately reverted back to a normal movie, which I thought ruined the strange opening of the film. Thereafter, we find Hanks traveling to Saudi Arabia where he is trying to sell Hologram software to a Saudi King who he never meets during weeks of trying to have meetings with important Saudi officials only to find out many times that these meetings were being delayed or canceled.

Hanks collaborates with 3 other members of this software company who are burdened by having to work in a tent which had no food, internet access or at a later time no air conditioning. Another unusual aspect of this movie is the sudden appearance of a huge cyst on Hank’s back which leads to a doctor’s appointment and later a love story with a Saudi doctor who like Hanks, is also getting divorced and has children. The cyst was found to be pre-cancerous and had to be surgically removed, and leads to a later scene that enhances the potential romance with the Saudi doctor.

This film has many flashbacks that include Hank’s previous employment as a Schwinn Bicycle company executive and the layoff of many employees, his divorce and various conversations with his teenage daughter who he can barely afford to send to college due to his divorce. I thought these flashbacks did fit well into the story mainly because they were short and to the point and did not affect the flow of the story other than to enhance it.

What was really not that believable was the developing love story between the Saudi doctor and Hanks which blossomed mostly at the end of the film. I thought the woman who played the doctor was really not attractive enough to have a romance with Tom Hanks and because of this I thought she was miscast in this role and the love story was not believable enough.

Due to the unusual nature of this film and the insight into some Saudi culture and the country, I do mildly recommend this movie.

IMDB – A Hologram For The King

Under the conditions of a guaranteed audience and box office from fans of previous Marvel Comic’s movies and the original comic book characters, is it even possible to come up with a coherent and enjoyable story? So far based on a string of previous Marvel comic movies recently, I would say that the odds of this are very low. It seems the executive producers who make these movies don’t really care about a great story and a script that takes a long time to write and then re-write because they already know, just like they did with the recent Batman Vs Superman movie, that the money is already there and they only care about getting it out as soon as possible to maximize their profit. Unfortunately sitting through movies like this can be long, boring, repetitive, annoying and ultimately disappointing.

The newest Marvel comic movie, Captain America: Civil War is a giant 2+ hour excuse to create a conflict and then have all the different super hero’s karate fight each other and other criminals, create explosions and show more special effects, most of which we have all seen many times before. There is nothing new or groundbreaking about this movie and the story is all over the place; almost as if so many people and actors and ideas were involved that when it was all shot, it was impossible to connect all the small stories together to make a compelling story that keeps your interest the entire 2 hours. I for one was very bored and after 90 minutes of this, I could not wait for it all to be over.

Robert Downey continues his role as Iron Man and he has to now hold the all-time record for playing a superhero in so many movies that we have all lost count. The money Downey has made playing this one Iron Man character may also be an all-time record when he has played Iron Man for the last time if he has not reached that record already. Chris Evans reprises his role as Captain America and the reason for the conflict between Captain America and Iron Man is because of a disagreement about signing a United Nations charter that would allow the UN to control the Avengers. Iron Man is for this agreement, and Captain America is against it. I thought it was a stretch to believe that this one disagreement would cause a near death battle between the 2 superheroes at the end of this movie or that the 14 super heroes would break off into 2 factions and fight each other of this one issue. Scarlett Johansson reprises her role as Black Widow and its always been hard to fully understand what her superhero powers are, other than being very good at martial arts.

Opportunities for instant death for the Black Widow and Hawkeye played by Jeremy Renner during so many long fight sequences make it implausible that they are really superheroes​ because their only skills are not skills that would make you impervious to explosions and violent conflict which you would think would be some kind of a prerequisite for being a super hero in the first place. For some reason even though just about every superhero is in this movie, the Hulk does not appear which is disappointing because he is the most interesting of all the Marvel characters in my opinion.

After over two hours of set-up and then fight scenes, mostly involving karate and explosions it was time to end this movie which is about 30 minutes too long. Just like I when reviewed Super Man vs Batman about 2 months ago, I cannot really recommend this movie because to make a good or a great movie, you need an interesting story first and this one just does not have one.

Captain America: Civil War – IMDB