Molly's Game (15.)
Directed by Aaron Sorkin.
Starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Bill Camp and Chris O'Dowd. 140 mins
Her game is poker and her movie replicates the game pretty closely: you can't trust anything about it; it starts well but drags on well past the point of interest, and by the end you will be lucky to break even, let alone walk away ahead. It's based on a true story, though what that story is exactly will probably involve some time on the Google afterwards. When a film's leading character is called Molly Bloom, everything is a potential bluff.
Following on from Miss Sloane, Molly is another of Chastain's heartless cow essays. The daughter of a pushy father (Costner), after narrowly failing to make the US Olympic ski team, she heads off to LA for a pre-law school gap year but stumbles into running a high stakes, celebrity-filled poker game. A decade later in New York, she is arrested by the FBI who lean on her to help them put away some Russian mobsters. Molly though has her standards and doesn't want to grass up all her clients.
Being a Sorkin enterprise it uses up plenty of gas; everybody's got plenty to say. It's entertaining patter, with plenty of sharp funny lines. A tale of Hollywood high rollers, millionaires and mafia types getting together to lose money around the poker table is always going to have that glamour and intrigue. Sorkin tries to keep it snappy and punchy, but hand after hand are played and none of them delivers a knockout. It's a film filled with unpleasant and unsympathetic people, which is fine, but the film never quite makes a convincing case for hearing their tale. It's supposed to be a great tale of American decadence, but it seems small, insignificant: it is The Big Short, shorted.
The worst moment comes quite near the end when Costner, her psychologist father, returns. Many films have a Basil Exposition figure to do some ugly but necessary information feeding to the audience. Costner is a Basil Psychological Motivation figure blurting out why she did it and though Sorkin tries to be cute about it, the scene is hideous.
I don't know what kind of Artistic Licence Sorkin has, but it must be one of the top ones because it seems to give him enormous leeway to make stuff up. For example, there is an obnoxious film star, played by Michael Cera, who is referred to as Player X. At the core of the movie and its portrait of its central character is that Molly refuses to name names. This is presented as her redeeming feature. Yet the identity of Player X is Tobey Macguire, as is revealed in her book, Molly's Game. In this film it seems like the names have been changed to invent a principle for its heroine to uphold.
Directed by Aaron Sorkin.
Starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Bill Camp and Chris O'Dowd. 140 mins
Her game is poker and her movie replicates the game pretty closely: you can't trust anything about it; it starts well but drags on well past the point of interest, and by the end you will be lucky to break even, let alone walk away ahead. It's based on a true story, though what that story is exactly will probably involve some time on the Google afterwards. When a film's leading character is called Molly Bloom, everything is a potential bluff.
Following on from Miss Sloane, Molly is another of Chastain's heartless cow essays. The daughter of a pushy father (Costner), after narrowly failing to make the US Olympic ski team, she heads off to LA for a pre-law school gap year but stumbles into running a high stakes, celebrity-filled poker game. A decade later in New York, she is arrested by the FBI who lean on her to help them put away some Russian mobsters. Molly though has her standards and doesn't want to grass up all her clients.
Being a Sorkin enterprise it uses up plenty of gas; everybody's got plenty to say. It's entertaining patter, with plenty of sharp funny lines. A tale of Hollywood high rollers, millionaires and mafia types getting together to lose money around the poker table is always going to have that glamour and intrigue. Sorkin tries to keep it snappy and punchy, but hand after hand are played and none of them delivers a knockout. It's a film filled with unpleasant and unsympathetic people, which is fine, but the film never quite makes a convincing case for hearing their tale. It's supposed to be a great tale of American decadence, but it seems small, insignificant: it is The Big Short, shorted.
The worst moment comes quite near the end when Costner, her psychologist father, returns. Many films have a Basil Exposition figure to do some ugly but necessary information feeding to the audience. Costner is a Basil Psychological Motivation figure blurting out why she did it and though Sorkin tries to be cute about it, the scene is hideous.
I don't know what kind of Artistic Licence Sorkin has, but it must be one of the top ones because it seems to give him enormous leeway to make stuff up. For example, there is an obnoxious film star, played by Michael Cera, who is referred to as Player X. At the core of the movie and its portrait of its central character is that Molly refuses to name names. This is presented as her redeeming feature. Yet the identity of Player X is Tobey Macguire, as is revealed in her book, Molly's Game. In this film it seems like the names have been changed to invent a principle for its heroine to uphold.
