Going into this weekend, I thought for sure that my paper would be about It Lives Inside. It is a scary movie, and I saw numerous advertisements for it on Instagram, and it said that some names that were attached to other successful horror flicks were attached to this one as well, but it let me down. It was not bad, but it was nothing special. There was not really a moment where I was scared, which is the whole point of seeing a scary movie. It had some interesting points about how hard it can be to assimilate, especially in high school. The main character had to decide between embracing her culture or leaving it behind to be able to be a part of the larger student body. It also touched on depression and loneliness, because the monster fed on people feeling bad, which led to isolation, so it had some good themes, but it just did not do them in a compelling manner.
So instead, I will be talking about Dumb Money. The story follows along the Game Stop stock, and its rise and fall that occurred during the pandemic. Keith Gill had his own YouTube channel, and he was a big user of r/WallStreetBets, a page on reddit, where people went to share their stock tips. Gill saw that Wall Street was shorting Game Stop, but he felt like the stock was better than that, so he put a vast amount of his money into the stock, and then he started to blog about it. Initially there was only some traction behind this bet, but slowly more and more people got behind it, and it was no longer just about the stock. It became about beating the big money firms. One firm specifically kept doubling down on shorting the stock, but the people held behind Gill, and this caused Gabe Plotkin to lose billions of dollars and eventually his fund had to shut down. Largely no one was punished for this, and if a person sold their stock in time, they made some serious cash, in some cases millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Recently I watched The Big Short, a movie (and great book by Michael Lewis) about the housing market crash. It was up for best picture the year it came out, and it had some big names attached to it. In that story some investors found out that the banks were loaning just about anyone money to get a house and in some cases, multiple houses, and they were packing them as bonds that were still highly graded, so if they failed, if bet against, there could be some serious money to be made. The investors had to talk the banks into allowing there to be shorts on these loans. It was not something that had been done before, and the banks laughed them off thinking it would be easy money for them, but when people were no longer paying their mortgages, the people who saw this coming came out big benefiting on the biggest recession in modern times.
It was directed by Adam McKay, who like the book, was able to take a very complex subject and simplify it. It explained how the market worked well, and it explained other aspects of the stock market as well. Dumb Money did not do the same level of explaining and teaching. For the most part, the concept is straight forward into buying stocks and shorting them. Shorting a stock is a little more complex, but they briefly explained it. This movie was more about the story and the David v. Goliath elements.
The cast was the focus in this one. They had some sizeable names attached, but Paul Dano stole the show. He played Kenith Gill, the main underdog in the story. He was so likeable, and he played the nerdy role well. The one role that he did not play well was runner. I loved that he loved running, and when he was feeling stressed, he went and ran, which was super relatable, except he liked running on the track, and that is weird. They had a small story line about him almost running a 4-minute mile, but whenever he was running on the track, including the times he was trying to run fast, he was running in lane two, which if you do not know, adds more distance. A runner would not willingly choose to run in lane two, and there was no one else on the track, so he did not need to be out there.
The movie also views this Kenith character as hero, and in some instances, this is true, but it is not that cut and dry. It is easy to view the mega hedge funds as the villains, they have a ton of power, and they are the real market controllers, most of the time. In this instance, a group of rag tag investors took over this stock, but when people are the ones artificially inflating the stock, this means that there must be some losers of the group. The crux of the movie was deciding on when it was okay to sell, and if a person waited too long, they could lose their money.
If people sold at the height of the boom, they made out nicely, but if they waited like the lady America Ferrera was portraying, she kept holding, and she ended up losing it all. Honestly, I would have been one of the people that lost it all, or at least most of it. I would have kept holding and hoping it would go back up, and then I would have sold it with a small gain. Being a teacher would not have helped, because there would be hours that would go past before I noticed anything was happening.
At the end of The Big Short, they did one of the text boxes and said that many people went to jail for the fraud that was occurring on the housing market, but then it said just kidding. Only one person was penalized for the gross negligence that was occurring, and it was a minor slap on the wrist. The same can be said for Dumb Money. No one was really penalized in this story either. There was the one billionaire who lost most of their money, and the founders of Robin Hood lost a large sum because they shut down trading on Game Stop, which should have resulted in some kind of prosecution, but nothing came to light there. So again, besides the loss of money there was no judicial punishment despite making it all the way to a congressional hearing.
The movie was fun! It did not teach too much, but it was enjoyable, and that is one of the most important parts of going to the movies. The music in this movie was also great. Every time there was a needle drop, I started bopping my head. The performances by the actors were all perfectly in tune with the tone of the movie, which did not take itself too seriously. I would recommend giving this a watch. It is a quick 100 minutes, and I give it 3.5 stars!
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