Side Tangent - Margin Call

 
The blog and viewing have stalled - and I shut down the Twitter account associated with this blog because I'm sick of Elon Musk and his shit.   Maybe I'll open one on Mastodon for film geeks.   In any case, I rewatched this movie again for maybe the 4th time and it's one of my favorites so at least I'm writing about something.

This is a suspenseful movie that takes place over 24 hrs as a trading firm - (part of a bigger corporation) realizes circa 2008 that the party is over, so to speak, and that the Mortgage Backed Securities they've been selling are threatening to sink the company.   (Another great movie about this is The Big Short, where you get a nice overview of what happened to jumpstart the great recession)

So then comes the realizations, the concerns, and eventually the decisions that are going to be made that make up the next 24 hrs - it's hard to imagine a Wall Street movie causing this kind of tension and suspense but knowing in fact, that this stuff probably did happen somewhere, makes it even more tense for me.   It is fiction, but probably somewhere someone was the first one to jump ship.   

It's back on Netflix and I just wanted to give it a shoutout and recommend it if you haven't seen it - everyone in here kicks ass from a performance standpoint, and it's just a great movie

Someday I'll hit the Criterions again - I've been hitting a few outside of sequence anyways - so I'm not sure how that'll go down but soon I'll dive back in

RB

#148 - Ballad of a Soldier

 This one sorta got done a few days ago and slipped by me due to holidays and me starting the Expanse because I needed some good escapist Sci-Fi

An interesting Russian story about a Russian Soldier who gets a 6 day pass to go home to his mom and all the twists and turns along the way - TBH there's almost no fighting past the first 10 minutes and the rest of it all is behind the lines.

It was a nice film - I didn't get quite as much anti-war out of it as I did The Cranes are Flying but to be sure, none of these films would want to probably glorify it giving how badly the Russians took a pounding in WWII

anyways, it's done - guess it's part of the Essential Art House series as well - didn't see much for special features on the channel

RB