MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - What does the Fed do, again?

The guy to the left is Alan Greenspan.
I've heard of him, but have no idea who he is
or what he does. I still don't, but he's in this
movie quite a bit, so he must be important.
He appears to know a lot about money which,
I know nothing about and as such, was hoping
I'd learn more about by watching this movie.
Oh, and I have absolutely no fucking idea
who that fat lady on the right is.

Money For Nothing: Inside The Federal Reserve (2013) **½
Dir. Jim Bruce

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I love watching movies about high finance, banks, the stock market and other money-related issues because, frankly, I really don't know anything about them beyond the fact that they all exist and in one way or another affect me. My favourite documentaries, like Chasing Madoff, Inside Job and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room somehow manage to make most of the messy maze clear to me because they basically place an accent on the more disreputable and downright criminal activities and finally, prove all I really need to know which is this: anyone who really gets this stuff has got to be a scumbag since they're really the only ones who gain from this knowledge. Then, there's Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story or Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott's The Corporation which not only provide basic understanding of financing and corporate scumbaggery, but do so in especially delightful and entertainingly inflammatory ways.

As for dramas, I'm pretty happy to cite The Wolf of Wall Street and just leave it at that.

I was really looking forward to seeing Money For Nothing: Inside The Federal Reserve because, though I've heard about the Federal Reserve or, "The Fed" as it's commonly referred to, I will admit to having no fucking idea what it really was until I saw this movie.

For its first half, the movie is purty durn' tootin' innerestin' since it clearly explains what the Federal Reserve actually is (and by extension and osmosis, it explained a bit closer to home what the Bank of Canada is - again, I keep hearing about it, but never bothered to figure out what it was). The Fed is the entity that prints America's money, ties it to precious metals and provides the gold standard, as it were, for the rest of the world to value its currency upon.

Good. Now I know.

The movie also delivers some reasonably helpful information about the actual history of contemporary currency and the Fed's place in all that. This too, I found extremely interesting and engaging.

Unfortunately, as the movie progresses and starts to chart more recent historical events and delves into the minutiae of economics, I must confess I started to get completely lost and this, sadly, is where the movie kind of falls flat on its face. The pacing begins to lag considerably and I felt that I was just trudging through the last half of the film - not really getting much of anything. Basically, I really had no idea what in the hell was going on and the movie did nothing to clear that up for this fella.

If the goal was to eventually take something that, to a complete and utter financial know-nothing seemed very clear and simple, and to then boggle me with so many details and permutations that virtually nothing made sense, then director Jim Bruce did a crackerjack job.

That, I don't think was the intent, though and what we're finally left with is a simple, solid and engaging 40-or-so minutes and then a thoroughly confusing and, frankly, rather dull final 40-minutes-or-so.

About the best I was able to take away from the whole affair was something I already knew: anyone who really understands this stuff has surely got to be amongst the biggest scumbags on the face of the earth.

"Money For Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve" is in limited theatrical release via Kinosmith and begins its life at Toronto's Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

CAPITAL - TIFF 2012 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Master Filmmaker Costa-Gavras who thrilled us with classics like "Z", "State of Siege", "Missing" and "The Confession" is back in action, aiming as his deft, nerve-jangling directorial magic upon the world of high finance.

Capital (2010) ****
dir. Costa-Gavras

TIFF 2012
Special Presentation

Starring: Gad Elmaleh,
Gabriel Byrne, Natacha Regnier, Céline Sallette, Liya Kebede, Hyppolite Girardot, Daniel Mesguich

Review By Greg Klymkiw

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
- Captain Ahab, in Herman Melville's classic novel of obsession, Moby Dick


The movie begins, as it should, with a jolting cut to a golfball perched on a tee. It is, after all, a game. So too is high finance. In many respects, the games are the same. The goal is to drive something forward with brute force. The motive is also the same. You play to win. Technique, grit, fortitude, strategy and mastery are everything.

Unlike golf, however, the game of finance is best played when the rules are broken. Nobody admires a cheater in golf.

And so it is, that a crisis of potentially staggering proportions occurs during this game of golf and plunges us into Capital, the new film by Maestro Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, Missing, The Confession).

The handsome, young Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh) tells us in voiceover and then, boldly, to the camera, that he's been working as a ghostwriter for the CEO of Phenix Bank, Jack Marmande (Daniel Mesguich) who has just been rushed into hospital for an emergency testicular cancer operation. Marc is appointed as Jack's replacement - though in reality, he's to be little more than a public front. The real strings of power are to be pulled by Jack and all the other members of the high-powered Board of Directors.

Marc, has other plans. Once the appointment is public and official, he makes it clear that he's running the bank - his way. He has no intention of being a CEO in name only. He's already been shamed with a take-it-or-leave-it low salary, but the pot has been sweetened with bonuses based on profits and the company's value on the stock exchange. How's an ambitious young fellow going to boost his salary?

Make money.

What's compelling about the film is watching this hot, smart, young guy make bold, but incredibly inhuman decisions (massive layoffs and firings among them) that infuriate the old fogeys around him, please the shareholders and most of all, allow us, the audience to vicariously live through his character.

We clearly get to have as much fun watching him as his character has an equal amount of fun running the company. While many of Marc's decisions are the sort that continue to give financial institutions a bad name, there's a flamboyance to this character and Elmaleh's performance that always keeps us on his side.

This is an international-breakout-star-in-the-making role for Elmaleh. He's a big comedy star in France, and though he appeared in character roles in TinTin and Midnight in Paris, it's Capital where he displays his leading man qualities to perfection. He plays the role straight, often in a deadpan that's perfect for his character. This understated quality is what allows Elmaleh to have fun with a role in which the character he plays is also having a lot of fun - even in especially tense moments.

Gavras is having fun, too. He directs the film with the sort of nerve-jangling propulsion so that this drama about banking is imbued with the qualities of a thriller. We feel the glorious power and manipulation of this world, while at the same time we sense that more can be at stake for Marc than just his job.

And it's fun!

Marc wears only the finest made-to-order suits, parades into ultra-swank fundraisers with his gorgeous wife (Natacha Regnier), attends meetings on Miami yachts outfitted with the most exquisite food, booze and women, parties with a gorgeous fashion model (played by actual super model Liya Kebede), travels to a variety of exotic locales in a private jet, gives endless media interviews where he gets off on spouting as much smart-sounding, but empty nonsense as possible and, of course, he gets to play the best game of all - high finance.

There might be some obvious comparisons between Capital and Oliver Stone's Wall Street and its lame sequel Money Never Sleeps, but the big difference is that the former Stone picture suffers from a bad case of "let's have fun watching Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko be a scumbag", then in the last third of the movie hand out an almost predictable bummer of overt, humourless moralizing, while in the latter, we're delivered the biggest tub of bull droppings imaginable as Gekko seeks (God Help Us, All) REDEMPTION!

Capital is never predictable. Gavras lays out the world Marc inhabits and details the character's brilliant machinations. Unlike the Stone pictures, we never have to feel bad about enjoying the excess. At the same time, though, said excess is so overpowering that we're pretty much allowed as an audience to make up our own minds about the moral implications of Marc's actions. The picture also allows us to experience the reality of how so few control so many and that we're all pawns in the take-no-prisoners world of finance.

We also get the pleasure of delicious villainy. Marc may be up to all manner of nasty stuff, but early on in the film, one of his chief antagonists is a dark New World Order-styled banker-as-shark. Dittmar Rigule (a zealously slimy Gabriel Byrne), rears his ugly head as a huge threat to Marc, but also to the free world as we know it. Watching Elmaleh and Byrne go head-to-head is fraught with danger, suspense and the pleasure of seeing a game player as committed as Marc facing even higher stakes and hurdles for our him to challenge.

On a strictly personal front, Capital infused me with the same spark of excitement I had as a kid during the 60s and 70s - watching great pictures by Costa-Gavras and so many other tremendous filmmakers. The privilege of being able to experience - at very tender and impressionable ages - movies that not only entertained, but were, ultimately always ABOUT something is never lost on me and is happily reinforced when I see a contemporary picture like Capital.

That said, there's nothing old fashioned about the filmmaking. Gavras was ALWAYS ahead of his time and now he's caught up with the times and made a movie that lives and breathes NOW, but like his previous work, is so expertly rendered that this and his other pictures go well beyond ephemeral pleasures.

They're so modern that they'll always feel fresh.

That's what makes classic motion pictures. That's how filmmakers with cinema hardwired into their DNA, like Maestro Costa-Gavras continue to dazzle us - now and for all time.

"Capital" is playing at the Toronto International Film Festival 2012 (TIFF 2012) Monday September 10 Cineplex Yonge & Dundas 9 3:00 PM and Saturday September 15 Scotiabank 3 8:30 PM. For tickets, visit the TIFF website HERE.