credit crunch
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Margin Call, a smart, taut and brutally frank portrait of the money game, asks a lot of its audience. A movie about traders as, if not quite good guys, then at least rounded guys? It’s not a trick Oliver Stone ever managed to pull off, and he tried twice. Refusing to deal in the Hollywood placebos of idealism and redemption, this is not a product that the big studios would have gone anywhere near. Scripted and shot by first-time writer-director JC Chandor, it was made on the very stringiest shoestring – a snappy little irony given the numbers its characters bandy around in the course of its Read more ...
fisun.guner
There were those who laughed and those who spat outrage when Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, said in a press interview that he was simply “doing God’s work”. Although Blankfein did have the insight to add that if he slit his wrists everyone would cheer, post-crash we would much rather our rich bankers expressed their religiosity by donning hairshirts and crawling on knees through broken glass - or at the very least stopped rewarding themselves so generously for the mess they got us in.Ian Hislop is no fan of the modern banker and last night he turned his chipper nostalgic gaze to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Meet the new Dragon, slightly different from the old Dragons. Or is she? For series nine, the squad of rich, grumpy bastards is joined by “formidable businesswoman and self-made multimillionaire Hilary Devey”, as presenter Evan Davis introduced her.Power-dressed like a Barbara Taylor Bradford heroine, or possibly the new landlady of the Rover's Return, Miss Devey (that’s De-Vay) began by beguiling us with a display of down-to-earth motherliness, as she calmed the panic attack being suffered by Georgette Hewitt, would-be internet entrepreneuse. Trying to get the Dragons fired up about her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Andy Parsons can do angry, baffled, sarky. He can have a swing and hit a bullseye. Take this, Alan Sugar. Take that, Ryanair. But you wonder, is he too happy for greatness? The title of the show he’s currently touring hints at a cheery disposition. Gruntled, leaving off the negative prefix, begrudgingly suggests an essentially contented world view. So too (without wishing to stereotype) does the loamy accent he carries with him from a childhood spent in the South West. Either I’m misreading the signs – for which I can only apologise - or he is unafflicted by neurosis, egotism and Read more ...
josh.spero
Inside Inside Job is an interesting film struggling to get out. Sadly, one has to sit through two hours of Financial Meltdown 101 to see it. Narrated by Matt Damon in his serious voice (and if you're anything like me, you'll always be thinking of his Team America caricature), the film starts with the perfect glaciers of Iceland being ravaged as the free market takes its toll. The financial engineering that brought its banks down is exposed, and it's cut to a rock song overlaying swooning shots of New York that would not be out of place in Sex and the City.These first five minutes tell us Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Jason’s toby jug of a face has been on the television screen over Christmas since the days when you had to get up and switch between three channels by hand. There was nothing ostensibly seasonal in his latest vehicle. A Yuletide entertainment for our times, Come Rain Come Shine had starring roles for three very contemporary ghosts of Christmas Present - belt-tightening, debt and social implosion. But scratch at the surface and what emerged was a neat inversion of the Scrooge tale, in which it was a big spender rather than a miser who had to learn the value of family.Jason played a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The long-delayed sequel has earned no more than a small, insignificant footnote in movie history. Psycho II, Gregory’s Two Girls and Texasville, to name only three disparate examples, were all superfluous post-scriptums to much venerated, much earlier films. There is at least a pretext for another trip to Wall Street. Since Gordon Gekko last blew the fumes of his fat Havana in your face, money has learnt to talk louder than ever. But there’s another reason why, 22 years on, Oliver Stone’s sequel to his portrait of Reaganomics in action counts as much less of a despoliation: the original was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No modern comedy worth its salt misses the chance to keep you chortling as the end credits roll. Bloopers, bleeps and assorted outtakes off the cutting-room floor generally provide the fare. In The Other Guys we take a different tack. Whizzy graphics illustrate the extent to which corporate greed has raped the American economy. It’s powerful stuff. The only wonder is what it’s doing bolted onto a film without a serious bone in its body. Take the following gag about speeding to a crime scene in a Prius. If you find it offensive, you should certainly avoid the movie and maybe the rest of this Read more ...
bella.todd
If you could boil down Robert Tressell’s brilliant socialist novel to a single observation, it would be that rich people do nothing, while the poor work their (ragged-trousered) arses off. So it’s a very clever conceit on the part of Howard Brenton’s new adaptation for the Chichester Festival, as well as a thrifty move for what must be one of its lower-budget productions, to have members of the workforce play their well-to-do exploiters. They line up near the beginning as if queuing for stewed tea or tools, and instead receive padded waistcoats and rubbery facemasks, all tusk-like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week, after a performance of Enron at the Noel Coward Theatre, I chaired a Q&A session with director Rupert Goold, writer Lucy Prebble, actor Sam West and most of the rest of the cast. What no one in the room knew then, though Goold and Prebble would have, was that at 11pm EST the show’s Broadway closure would be announced for this Sunday, only two weeks after it opened on 27 April. Enron was famously a rare beneficiary of the credit crunch. Now, at least in America, it would appear to have become a victim of it. Why? The play had been sitting on the backburner of the theatre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only time I've ever been to Detroit was in 2004, in pursuit of assorted rock stars on the Vote for Change tour. Reader, it was weird. The atmosphere in the deserted streets was deathly, as if an invading army had swarmed into town, committed hideous atrocities and then moved on. The decaying architecture from America's golden industrial age looked unsettlingly like the set for The Omega Man, in which Charlton Heston fought a solitary war against an army of nocturnal psychopaths.These feelings returned vividly as I watched Julien Temple's stupendous Requiem for Detroit?, a thrilling piece Read more ...