Black Swan and Roaring Kitten – Weekend
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Craig Gillespie’s “Bad Money” is being released – a true story of a challenge to the system, presented, despite its topicality, in distinct retro tones.
“Bad money” is a condescending slang term used on Wall Street to refer to individual investors. A typical representative of this tribe is Keith Gill, who runs a channel on Reddit under the nickname Roaring Kitten: he looks younger than his already small years, wears oversized T-shirts with kittens and invariably prefers 50-cent Milwaukee beer to a five-dollar corporate Heineken. One fine day, Kitten invests his last fifty thousand in shares of the dying video game store chain GameStop. “Just for fun,” Gill’s subscribers also begin to buy shares, somewhere nearby a black swan flaps its wings, stock growth reaches nine hundred percent, the White House pays attention to what is happening, a portrait of Roaring Kitten (of course, in a matching T-shirt) appears on the cover of Forbes. Meanwhile, the capitalist sharks, who wanted to bankrupt GameStop in the meantime, are losing a billion a day. And all because of “bad money”.
Director Craig Gillespie attracted attention with his second film, the somewhat deviant rom-com “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007), where a decade and a half before “Barbie,” a very young Ryan Gosling built a relationship with a life-size doll ordered on the Internet. True, three years later, Gillespie somewhat tempered the initial enthusiasm of critics by filming an unsuccessful remake of the cult vampire “Fright Night,” but in 2021 he was completely and completely rehabilitated with “Cruella,” telling the true story of the villainess from “101 Dalmatians” in a way that is both dashing, elegant and strictly within the age limits, to the envy of Tim Burton in his heyday. But if you take a closer look at Gillespie’s filmography, it becomes clear that he is not at all such a dreamer-visionary as he might seem at first glance. He is much more interested in characters and plots from ordinary life, based, as they usually write in the credits, “on real events” – or, in extreme cases, very similar to them: a New York single mother enrolls in the mounted police (“Mounted Policeman” , 2013); a sports agent lures Indian cricketers to American Major League Baseball (Million Dollar Arm, 2014); Coast Guard officers on wooden motorboats rescue the crews of two oil tankers at once (“And the Storm Came,” 2016). The apotheosis of this approach was the biopic of the controversial figure skater Tonya Harding “Tonya Against the World” (2017), which received one of three possible Oscars and became for Margot Robbie a kind of “weight training” in front of the same “Barbie”. So, taking on the story of Roaring Kitten (the script was based on the book “Antisocial Network”, promptly written by Ben Mezrich), Gillespie clearly went about his business. As a result, “Bad Money” is interesting to watch even for those who, in terms of financial literacy, have not advanced beyond buying hotels in the game “Monopoly.” Despite the fact that the events shown took place just a couple of years ago (having earned $35 million), Gill published his last post on April 16, 2021 and has not appeared in public since then; however, as is clear from the end credits, the movement he launched continues to gain momentum, and now “bad money” has to be reckoned with) and all the necessary signs of the era are present on the screen (from the mask regime at the airport to Elon Musk on TV), the film as a whole evokes a rather nostalgic feeling.
The blessed era of the late 1980s and early 1990s rises before our eyes, the time of decline of the “yuppie in danger” genre, the first John Grisham film adaptations and AIDS instead of coronavirus. The point is not only that the stumbling block here is a dying geek video game store, crammed with media that no one needs for nothing. The soundtrack features not only Kendrick Lamar, but also Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”; settling in front of the monitor, Gill ties a red ribbon around his head – either Rambo or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. And Gill himself, along with his wife Caroline, would look great as members of the “Breakfast Club,” and Paul Dano and Shailene Woodley, who played them, could, respectively, take their places in the acting fraternity of “Xers” Brat Pack without an interview.
For those for whom this will also be alien and incomprehensible, you can offer another key to the safe where the “bad money” is stored. Everything that is happening is strikingly reminiscent of the attempt of the Joint Stock Company of Giant Plants to enter the market in Nikolai Nosov’s immortal fairy tale novel “Dunno on the Moon”: “Shares are pieces of paper, like banknotes. They can be printed in a printing house. We will spend the proceeds on the construction of the aircraft, and when the seeds are delivered, each shareholder will receive their share of the seeds. Of course, whoever has more shares will receive more seeds.” And most importantly: “The poor people themselves should give money for this work.” That is, those ferthings and santiks that the lunar shorts invested in the shares that caused a serious commotion at the “Big Bradlam” of the lunar capitalists were precisely those very “bad money”. But if on the Moon everything ultimately ended with the “zero-gravity revolution” and, apparently, the impending abolition of commodity-money relations in general, then the Roaring Kitten, although it shook the golden cage, but (even having disappeared from the radar) remained inside. Because – and this phrase is uttered both by Dano’s character and by the real Keith Gill in a fragment of the real chronicle – “I just like stocks.”
In theaters from October 5
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