Important Facts:
Release Date : 15 September, 2023
Running Time : 1 Hour 44 Minutes
Genre : Biography, Comedy, Drama
Based On : The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich
Language: English
Dumb Money Ratings & Review:
- latestmoviesreview Rating : (3/5)
- IMDb Rating : (7.2/10)
Director : Craig Gillespie
Cinematography By: Nikolas Karakatsanis
Writer: Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Angelo
Music By: Will Bates
Star Cast : Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman
Critics Reviews :
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“It’s a compelling story told in largely engaging fashion, anchored by Dano’s terrific turn as the eccentric, strong-willed Gill”-Frank Scheck: The Hollywood Reporter
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“A smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama”-Owen Gleiberman: Variety
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“The pleasant surprise of ‘Dumb Money’ is that it’s such an effective entertainment, even if it oversells the revolutionary impact of what it’s depicting”-Alison Willmore: Vulture
Synopsis
Dumb Money is the ultimate David vs. Goliath tale, based on the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall videogame store) into the world’s hottest company.
Review
The screenwriters of “Dumb Money,” an engaging portrayal of the 2021 GameStop stock mania, faced an intriguing difficulty when they had to balance two types of jargon in the conversation.
The stock price of the video game retailer GameStop, a business that seasoned investors had written off, shot up dramatically in January thanks to amateur traders who were inspired by online posts and videos. Due to a large number of purportedly inexperienced traders, hedge funds that were shorting the stock—basically betting that it will decline—ended up suffering significant losses.
The confusing memes of Reddit and YouTube users, who are shown comparing profits to chicken tenders and using the misspelling “HODL” to indicate that they don’t want to sell, are more difficult to keep comprehensible for an audience than the Wall Street speak’s obfuscatory verbiage that treats finance as a kind of secret, clubby code.
To its credit, “Dumb Money” keeps almost everything simple. The film has more than a passing resemblance to David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” both in its lighting schemes and its attempts to elicit suspense from shots of people looking at gadgets. It is based on “The Antisocial Network,” a book that author Ben Mezrich (“Bringing Down the House”) turned around in less than eight months. The editor for both movies is Kirk Baxter. Additionally, in an intriguing move, “Dumb Money” lists the real-life twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, “Social Network” characters, and the creators of a cryptocurrency exchange among its executive producers. The film’s funding came from Teddy Schwarzman, the son of Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman.)
Craig Gillespie is the film’s true director, and he approaches the subject matter with the same irreverence that he did to “I, Tonya” (2017), his dementedly humorous take on the Tonya Harding affair. Because “Dumb Money” is basically sincere, the tension is more apparent than in that movie. A group of unrelated strangers from different socioeconomic backgrounds band together to hold onto a stock even though selling it would have been extremely profitable for each of them individually in the movie. They are led by a former financial educator whose YouTube costume, as one character notes, is somewhat reminiscent of Luke Wilson’s hat from “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Although their online communities may be rife with childish humor and their users may not always be dressed to impress, they are nonetheless people who are working to support their families and settle their debts. There’s nothing jovial about it, despite the film’s best efforts to keep things interesting with a Cardi B needle drop, TikTok-inspired graphics, and expertly produced congressional grillings that give the impression that the actors are speaking with actual lawmakers. (In some news segments, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin is featured.) The phrase “dumb money” is used by Wall Street to disparage dabbling investors, hence the title is cheekily accompanied onscreen by an asterisk.
The satirical tone, which has many comparing it to “The Big Short,” isn’t as novel now as it could have been even a few years ago. The script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, two former Wall Street Journal reporters, conducts interviews with a variety of individuals who joined the GameStop bandwagon. Every one of the main characters is introduced with text stating their estimated net worth, with many of them being fictional creations aiming to replace their real-life equivalents.
Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who has a fetish for cat memes and various noms de web, is the unintentional leader of the GameStop cult. Following Gill’s online justification for why he believes GameStop is undervalued, others are motivated by his optimism. Jenny (America Ferrera), a nurse and single mother in Pittsburgh, Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold), college students in Austin, Texas, and Marcos (Anthony Ramos), a GameStop employee in Detroit who must put up with the condescending demands of his boss (Dane DeHaan), are some of his adherents who have never met.