Two Classic Milton Friedman Video Clips 

 Click here to watch the Nobel Prize-winning economist crush three questions from a member of the audience.

And click here for his famous “greed is good” interview with Phil Donahue.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street 

A four-part Netflix docuseries

Released Jan. 4, 2023

Directed by Joe Berlinger

Starring Joseph Scotto and Ginger O’Toole

According to some financial historians, Bernie Madoff committed the biggest investment fraud in US history, cheating tens of thousands of investors out of nearly $65 billion. This series details the Wall Street billionaire’s rise to power, fraudulent investing tactics, and eventual downfall.

A stockbroker, adviser, former NASDAQ chairman, and securities company founder, Madoff helped countless clients grow their funds. But it was all a lie. As expert trial witness Bruce Debinsky says in the series, “Madoff never did any investing for his investment advisory business. It involved simply taking people’s money, telling them he was going to invest their money, and he never did.”

After his 2008 arrest, Madoff left many victims in his wake, several of whom died by suicide or suspected suicide in the aftermath of devastating financial collapse. Sentenced to 150 years in prison for 11 felony charges, he died in 2021 from natural causes. (Source: Deep Dive)

What I Liked About It 

Through archive footage, including a prison deposition given by Madoff himself during his victims’ lawsuit, interviews with Madoff employees and financial reporters, and dramatic reenactments, the series provides a lot of insight into…

* How Madoff pulled off his multi-decade swindle.

* The surprising range of people and companies that fell for it.

* The other characters you never heard about that were complicit.

* Why you should never, ever put all your eggs in one basket.

Critical Response 

The Monster of Wall Street has received mostly favorable reviews from critics. A few examples:

* “Among Mr. Berlinger’s accomplishments in The Monster of Wall Street is not making the Madoff story remotely romantic, or even a parable, while at the same time putting blood in its veins.” (John Anderson, Wall Street Journal)

* “Joe Berlinger’s pacy four-parter treats the jaw-dropping story as a financial thriller, which makes sense.” (Chitra Ramaswamy, Guardian)

* “The series is at its most compelling when it places Madoff’s monstrousness within the context of the systemic self-interest and greed that allowed him to flourish.” (Dan Einav, Financial Times)

You can watch the trailer here.

The Pale Blue Eye 

A Netflix original, released Dec. 23, 2022

Based on the novel by Louis Bayard

Directed by Scott Cooper

Starring Christian Bale and Harry Melling

Somebody recommended it. And it was listed as trending on Netflix. So, I watched it. And I absolutely loved it. Until the last 20 minutes.

Never mind.

The Pale Blue Eye stars Christian Bale as Augustus Landor, a former prosecutor recruited to solve a murder mystery at West Point in or about 1830, and Harry Melling as Edgar Allen Poe, one of the cadets attending the school.

I’m a fan of Christian Bale – but, in this story, he didn’t work for me. Harry Melling, though, who I didn’t recognize as an actor I’d seen before, was absolutely riveting. That, and the fact that I’m a fan of E.A. Poe, was more than enough for me.

There is, by the way, a good reason that I didn’t recognize Melling.

He is best-known for playing chubby little Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies. But he lost so much weight between his appearance in The Order of the Phoenix and The Deathly Hallows, Part 1 that the role was almost recast. He managed to keep the part by wearing a fat suit. “I can now shed the child actor thing, like the fat, and start a new career because no one sees me as Dudley,” he said. And that’s what he did.

Critical Reception 

* “The Pale Blue Eye holds together remarkably as a gothic piece of horror… right up to the point that it doesn’t.” (Matthew Monagle, Austin Chronicle)

* “It’s a film that, on an aesthetic level, casts an eerie spell. Shame about its story, though.” (Nick Schager, Daily Beast)

* “A stylish and smart telling of what is at heart macabre malarkey.” (Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post)

You can watch the trailer here.

Güeros 

Written and directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios

Starring Tenoch Huerta Mejía and Sebastián García

Released Feb. 7, 2014

Currently available on various streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime

Güeros is the story of three restless teenagers searching for a folk-rocker during the Mexican capital’s student strike. I picked this movie because I saw that it got four stars on RogerEbert.com. It is beautifully filmed, expertly acted, and emotionally engaging.

Critical Reception 

* “Right off the bat, Güeros captures three superlatives from this reviewer: Best debut feature I’ve seen in the last year, best Mexican film in recent memory, and best (black and white) cinematography since Pawel Pawlikowski’s equally stunning but very different Ida.” (Godfrey Cheshire, RogerEbert.com)

 * “Güeros is like a flip-book history lesson, one that evokes the pain and the comedy – the pop, the politics, the tedium, and the momentousness – of a particular moment in the endless, cyclical chronicles of youth and disillusionment.” (A.O. Scott, New York Times)

* “Güeros is brutal, ironic, madcap, and grim.” (Peter Keough, Boston Globe)

You can watch the trailer here.

Home Alone 

Directed by Chris Columbus

Written by John Hughes

Starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, and Catherine O’Hara

Released in theaters Nov. 16, 1990

Currently streaming on Disney+

Last Monday, after dinner, I cuddled up with two of my grandkids, Francis (6) and Willa (4), to watch a Christmas movie of their choosing.

I was surprised by what they picked: Home Alone. The original version.

Of course, I’d seen it several times before. But this was the first time I realized that Macaulay Culkin is not just the main character, he’s by far the central character. He’s in almost every scene. And I was reminded of how amazingly good he was. (He was 10 years old at the time.) His performance made what would have been a good movie into a great movie. I hope he got a share of the residuals. He certainly earned it!

If you’ve never seen Home Alone, you might be surprised to know that this beloved children’s movie is replete with violence. Not mild violence, but the sort that makes an adult wince. How to describe it? It’s fake. But real. It’s Laurel and Hardy plus the Three Stooges plus Wile E. Coyote. What little Kevin does to the adult thieves is illegal in about half a dozen ways. Like “Fauci on a Couchi” (see “Good to Know,” below), I would have thought it would scare Francis and Willa. It didn’t. They loved it!

Critical Reception 

* “[Culkin] is a vivid screen presence, almost incandescent with confidence.” (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian)

* “Home Alone seems to be nominating itself as a Christmas classic [and] the film does go some way toward getting the job done.” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune)

* “The whole thing is gloriously tinged with nostalgia.” (Patrick Smith, Daily Telegraph/UK)

You can watch the trailer here. 

The Wonder 

Directed by Sebastián Lelio

Staring Florence Pugh, Kíla Lord Cassidy, and Niamh Algar

In theaters Nov. 2, 2022

Currently streaming on Netflix

The Wonder is grim, stark, and depressing (GSD, as my old friend KD used to say). But it is also a very satisfying period film that is, despite a touch of retrospective moralizing, moving and compelling.

The Plot 

In 1862, an English nurse ((Florence Pugh) travels to the Irish Midlands to observe 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), a peasant girl who claims not to have eaten a bite for the past four months.

What I Liked …

The opening and closing gimmick: The Wonder opens and closes in a modern warehouse of film sets. A voice-over by Niamh Algar informs us that what we’re about to see is a story about the stories that people use to shape their world. This is a bit too “on the nose,” as they say. But it worked for me.

The music: Composed by Matthew Herbert, the score is unlike anything I’ve heard before. Like the above, it was gimmicky. But, again, it worked for me.

The acting: Especially Florence Pugh as the English nurse and Kíla Lord Cassidy as the fasting child. But really, everyone was very good.

The set design: Lush, eerie, dark, and moody – a principal character in itself.

Interesting 

The story was inspired by the so-called “fasting girls” of the Victorian era who fascinated the public with what was described as “a miraculously inspired loss of appetite.”

Critical Reception 

* “The blessing of The Wonder is how it acknowledges the things we most want to believe and still proposes, in the end, that human acts and faith in others can be the most miraculous things of all.” (Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic)

* “[A] perverse, provocative story about women, their appetites, and a world that barbarically tries to control them both.” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times)

* “Some [movies], such as this, provide a fresh reminder of the power of visual storytelling.” (John Anderson, Wall Street Journal)

You can watch the trailer here. 

The Hunger 

Directed by Tony Scott

Starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon

Released in theaters Apr. 29, 1983

Available on various streaming services, including The Criterion Channel and Amazon Prime

The blurb from The Criterion Channel promised a “sensual slice of modern gothic horror” with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as “cinema’s most stylish vampires.”

That, The Hunger delivered. And more. There was Susan Sarandon, early in her career, and a host of compellingly odd secondary characters, including a brief Christopher Walken cameo. (See if you can find him.)

The movie is based on a book of the same title, written by Whitley Strieber. I liked it. The plot is engaging. The direction and cinematography are artsy-fun and experimental. The style is high-David-Bowie. The music is great. And the sensuality – well, we are talking about Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon enraptured in bloodsucking lust!

Critical Reception 

This is not a movie for your basic horror movie fan. It was panned by almost all the critics when it came out.

* “The Hunger is an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene. Sorry, but that’s the way it is, and your reporter has to be honest.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 2004)

* “The movie reeks with chic, but never, for one minute, takes itself too seriously, nor does it ever slop over into camp.” (Vincent Canby, New York Times, Aug. 2004)

Later reviews were better. Some much better. One called it “a cinematic work of art that has stood the test of time.”

You can watch the trailer here.

Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? 

A 4-part Netflix miniseries

Directed by Andrew Renz

With John Leonard, Todd Hoffman, Michael Avenatti, and Cindy Crawford

Premiered Nov. 17, 2020

A golfing friend recommended it. He didn’t say why. But he’s a smart guy. I gave it a look.

Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? is a documentary – the story of a young man who noticed a glitch in an ad campaign for Pepsi-Cola. A glitch that he believed could make him many millions of dollars. It’s also the story of friendship and how the strongest ones are often forged in mutual struggle. I knew nothing about the history of this legal and PR battle before I watched this series. Knowing that now, I’m surprised it wasn’t better publicized at the time.

Out of four stars, I’d give it three. The major criticism I have is that it is a four-part series that would have been stronger in two.

Critical Reception 

* “Celebrity endorsements are as old as modern advertising, but as the series points out, Pepsi was taking it to a whole new level in the late 1980s and 1990s.” (Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times)

* “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? not only playfully unpacks the details of what went wrong but digs deeper to get at the core of why false advertising matters.” (Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com)

You can watch the trailer here.

From Russia with Love 

Directed by Terence Young

Starring Sean Connery

Premiered in London Oct. 10, 1963

Released in US theaters May 27, 1964

Currently available on many streaming services

The Mules opted to read two books in November: Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love and The World Is Not Enough.

The latter is a biography of Fleming by Oliver Buckton, who happens to be a professor at a local university and a friend of SL, one of the founders of The Mules. It was fascinating. But I’m not going to review it here and now. Today, I want to review From Russia with Love, the book and the movie.

From Russia with Love was Fleming’s fourth or fifth book, but it was my first James Bond. Most of the other Mules had read the Bond novels when they were young. I read less than a half-dozen books before I went off to college. Fleming’s were not among them.

I have seen almost all the Bond movies, though. And because my exposure to 007 was through those movies, I was surprised to be introduced to a very different character in this novel. He was much less amazing and more human. That made him more complex and, therefore, more interesting. But I must admit, I was a little disappointed by how much less manly he was. You may have a different feeling.

What most surprised me was the way the story was written. The Bond movie plots are exciting and suspenseful and reasonably packed with action. That’s what I expected when I read From Russia with Love. But that’s not what I got. Most of the action is interior – occurring in the mind of the protagonist in the form of perceptions, memories, worries, etc.

Likewise, in the movies, James Bond is the quintessential action hero. He faces all the challenges and resolves all the problems. In the book, he is more of a modern anti-hero. Bad things happen to him. And he has all he can do to survive them.

Don’t let these complaints keep you from reading Ian Fleming. He is a superb writer. And here’s why I say that. With my ADD, I’ve never been a fan of long literary descriptions. I tend to lose interest after just a few sentences. In From Russia with Love, a significant portion of the text is given to description. Long paragraphs describing places and faces. But I was never bored with them. On the contrary, I was smitten. I recommend this book to anyone that enjoys the literary side of storytelling.