But the existence and function of the stock market itself is only lightly questioned in the film. Hedge fund bad, little guy good is a serviceable enough thesis. The film would also be richer, more nourishing if it more complexly shaded its argument. Dumb Money doesn’t need Margot Robbie giving us a mini-lecture from a bathtub, but some further explanation might have deepened the film’s instructive might. The financial mechanics aren’t carefully delineated either: we get only the basic gist of what is actually going on. In general, Dumb Money is spare in its study of motivation beyond basic wants what makes Gill tick is never made clear, while his acolytes become mere cultish addicts watching their phones with glee and, later, alarm. ![]() His gentle nerdiness is made even more gentle and whispery by Paul Dano, whose opacity-we don’t really know the why behind all this-is perhaps more a problem of script than performance. Roaring Kitty-the YouTuber and Redditor who was the first to turn the masses on to the GameStop stock opportunity. There is also, of course, Keith Gill, a.k.a. Swept up in the movement are America Ferrara as a nurse trying to get out of debt, Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder as college sweethearts who hope to earn enough to pay off their student loans, and Anthony Ramos as an enterprising GameStop store employee. Like The Big Short, Gillespie’s film, written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, is an ensemble piece, tracing an array of lives as they soar and stumble amidst these financial seisms. Perhaps the campaign it depicts-amateur day traders counteracting hedge fund short-selling of GameStop, a large video game retail chain, by driving the stock price higher and higher over the course of months mostly by using the doomed and faux-altruistic trading app Robinhood-was but a blip of disruption in the plutocrats’ hoarding what’s left of the world’s wealth. The new film Dumb Money, which premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, tries to offer hope amid all this depressing mess. ![]() It makes sense that we should want to see things that explain why this is-things that commiserate, that gaze in terrible awe at just how rigged and self-serving the whole system is. The American economy has arrived at a sick place, both fast-paced and dying (for those not at the tippy top, anyway). In the last near decade, we’ve seen projects about the boom and busts of BlackBerry and WeWork, as well as the hideous encroachment of Ox圜ontin. It’s a ripe topic for a film, especially given how popular these modern economic story-lessons have become since The Big Short. The masses were gaming the system (stopping it, briefly, too) after so many years of hedge fund predation, private equity vampirism, and short-selling cynicism. ![]() Remember “stonks”? It was a Reddit term of art that became suddenly ubiquitous during the heady, strange days of the 2021 GameStop stock craze, a so-called meme stock insurgency launched by online trolls (and some regular folks just looking to make a buck) that disrupted markets, shuttered a hedge fund, and gave Wall Street a rare fright.
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