Tom Hanks has starred in a lot of embarrassing movies for old people who are cognitively regressing, but most of them (especially my beloved Larry Crowne) are an endearing kind of embarrassing. This is just sad.
Honestly, I'm baffled by the mildly positive reception. I wanted to laugh at so many things in this movie, but I thought one of the seniors in the audience might have assaulted me with a cane if I did. The first kiss following that…
This has some interesting quirks — the inference that both of our leads are on the spectrum offers a compelling, grindhousey touch — but it's trying too hard to be dignified and workmanlike to lean into these in an engaging way. It's pretty hard to do a straight Western right at this budget level, so you might as well make a weird one. Alas, that doesn't seem like what director Brett Donowho (a very fun name to say out loud with different intonations, btw) is going for.
There are two reasons that Craig Zobel could have decided to make Compliance, both equally wrongheaded:
1) Zobel simply wanted to expose this case (and, by extension, the others like it) to the world, without any sort of greater message. While I don't buy this as the filmmaker's motivation for a second, some people have argued such, so I'll address it...
Put simply: text-based reporting, as had already been done extensively in this case (meaning, no further examination was really…
Frankly, those who argue that the film presents the Siegels as contemptible villains of the financial crisis could not misunderstand the film or the financial crisis itself any more.
The Queen of Versailles is actually about how eerily similar its subjects are to the average American: they over-borrowed and overspent themselves into oblivion, completely ignorant of and/or complacent to the fact they were being played by the banks. Sure, they may have been financing a lifestyle thousands of times more…
