The game’s in the name! I love movies and television, and I always try to look for the good in everything while also respecting the amount of work that goes into creating a piece of content. After years of reviewing for the Cape Cod Chronicle, I decided to start my own self-published review website where I can continue to build my skills and experience as a critic while also chronicling my love and appreciation for new and older films alike.
You’d think that the quirk of Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl would be a match made in heaven, meshing perfectly and complementing each artist in turn, and yet it still feels like both refuse to compromise and let the other dominate the project — an odd thing, considering Dahl has been dead for over thirty years. I think that speaks to the testament of his writing and how unique his style actually is.
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| Image courtesy of Netflix |
I should have expected it — after all, the world has been crazy enough these last few years — but it’s still surreal to see major studio releases about events that happened not only within my lifetime, but during a time when I was actively paying attention to the news. The pandemic has ensured that this has increased over the last few years, but no new release feels more familiar than Dumb Money.
Dumb Money tells the story of a group of amateur investors who were able to put a short squeeze — look it up — on two hedge funds that bet on video game retail company GameStop to fail. The effort was led by YouTuber and financial analyst Keith Gill (played in the film by Paul Dano), a financial broker from Massachusetts who led a ragtag campaign to invest in GameStop to ensure the hedge funds would not succeed in profiting from the company’s demise. The movement led to an SEC investigation and a Congressional hearing, all of which is depicted in the film.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that movies we watch as children define us and stick with us in ways that are impossible to replicate. There are others that I wish I had seen earlier, but in the end, it’s the childhood favorites that remain among my favorites to this day, oftentimes due to the nostalgia factor…more on that in a moment.
For what felt like years, I bugged my parents for years about letting me watch R-rated movies, until I had to take my fate into my own hands and find my own way to see what I wanted to see. When I hit high school, I was finally allowed to go to the theater alone and watch whatever I wanted, and I took full advantage of that. One of those films that I saw early on in high school was The Nun.
