Molly's Game
The opening shot is a perfect trailer, a deluge of words, a wall of voice, a barrage of dribble. This is like a centrist Robert Redford film, but instead of focusing on a little guy, it’s some rich and privileged white chick fighting the IRS to keep some blood money.
This is the story of how the woman that laundered money for the Russian mob got way scot-free without RICO charges. She was just like little Timmy, a poor girl working at the coalface of bartending in Hollywood to try and break it into the film business, while her whole family is fucking loaded. She’s always “broke”, but like the characters in Friends, even after the IRS “stole” her money (tax is theft?), she still pays for weekly LA-NYC flights to see her lawyer charging a quarter million dollars.
This is supposed to be a roman-à-cléf, but there’s not even an attempt an pretending they will hint at the real people. Did Aaron Sorkin insert himself as a underground high-stakes poker player? Does that book say any truth at all?
The entire poker theme, and the winning American culture is extremely dull, the voluptuous main character wearing Skinemax outfits is pretty ridiculous, but she shaggy dog stories she tells herself about girlbossing her way into being a millionaire by skimming money from rich people by blackmailing them is even more preposterous.
The lawyer also brags about his pro bono work for the ACLU and SPLC, but lets a crook mingle with his child.
That scene where the lawyer asks the felon on if she is too hard on her daughter and and she answers to double down on it, and particular the scene where Kevin Costner mansplains Freudian psychoanalysis to her, oof, I guess Sorkin’s children hate him for good reason. What a blowhard dickwad.
“I don’t care if it was the leader of Hamas”, that’s a direct quote. What’a this, Taken?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.