Other People's Money (1991)

THIS FILM IS FREE ON YOUTUBE!

Directed by Norman Jewison, Other People’s Money centers around a corporate battle for ownership of a family-owned factory that’s said to be supporting a small town’s employment needs.

Gregory Peck (what a treat that a 1940s screen icon gets such a meaty role in 1991!) plays supposed blue-collar champion Andrew Jorgensen.

His opponent, Larry the Liquidator, is Danny DeVito gleefully playing the same notes of depravity that you see as Frank in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Only he doesn’t live in filth and squalor but in a shamefully extravagant hotel suite with a staff that includes 17 lawyers. While the film is an attempt to live up to the corporate-damning messaging of the 1987 film Wall Street, this film is as much about the singular oddity of Larry that Devito establishes with such a grandiose sense of hedonism. He’s a ruthless ball of lust and greed with no filter.

I’d like to pause to talk about how I first came across this film:

In elementary school, my parents were restrictive about my TV and I used to sneak into my nanny/housekeeper’s bedroom when she went away on the weekends. But she had a broken TV and I only got one or two channels that came in clear. One was a syndicated Paramount channel that had either become or was in the process of becoming rebranded as UPN.

My ideal watching would have been TGIF-type fare or cartoons but by the time I got there after Sunday School, so my only option Paramount at the Movies. I vaguely remember Raising the Titanic, Love Potion Number 9, Arthur, Fitzwilly, The Ref, and Cyrano (the Steve Martin version. Because it was the 90s and I had no streaming options, it was all uninteresting, but I just enjoyed because being in front of the screen for an extra couple hours.

But Other People’s Money got my attention. In an early scene, Danny Devito’s character Larry the Liquidator, invites the opposing side’s corporate attorney (Andrew Jorgensen’s step-daughter, Kate, played by Penelope Ann Miller) for a business dinner and is simultaneously excited about burying her as he is about romancing her. As she gives up and leaves, the following dialogue takes place:

Lawrence: Wait, wait, wait! I got a proposition for you. You come up. We have a nice dinner. We make passionate love the rest of the night loses. The first one who comes first loses.

Kate: Loses what?

Lawrence: The deal.

Kate: [Disgusted] I think you’re serious… How do you propose we write this up?

Lawrence: Delicately. Under the heading of, “Easy Come, Easy Go.”…come on what have you got to lose your virginity. I could lose millions?

Kate: So what happens if we come together?

Lawrence: (pauses) I never thought about that.

Kate: Well, think about it honey.

Lawrence: Don’t go! I haven’t played my violin yet.

I first heard this dialogue when I was around 10 years old and I had little to no idea what sex was. I found these words highly confusing, and a little disturbing.

I wasn’t in full-fledged puberty yet, but I was in the process of realizing that girls weren’t icky and the beautiful Penelope Anne Miller was certainly helping me get there at the time. But it was something to the stylized dialogue that hooked me.

Watching it through adult eyes the other day, I can attest that the film’s uniquely charged dialogue between the two is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

When Larry offers to play the violin for her in the last exchange, for example, he means it. He wakes her up the middle of the night (inapprops!) and serenades her with his (extremely) amateur violin playing.

This is a man who spends the first 20 seconds of the meeting having locker room talk with himself, about how hot the woman in his presence is. At the same time, there’s a romantic side that exists side-by-side with his baseline female objectification. He buys her flowers and makes gestures to the point that it’s believable that underneath all the dirtiness, his heart isn’t set on a one-night stand but on a longer partner.

The only reason that his treatment of Kate isn’t appalling, is that she finds his advances amusing. Although a woman in this era shouldn’t have to endure all this sexism, there’s a very clear indication that she knows how to set boundaries for herself and hit back. In one of the strangest moments of the movie, she reacts to one of his catcalls by ordering him to look down at his penis and lecture it on being respectful to women. Yes, this is a thing that actually happens, and yes I had no idea what it meant as a 10-year-old.

(1) Other People’s Money — “Presence of a Lady” — Penelope Ann Miller x Danny DeVito — YouTube

Although the play from which this film was adapted charted a romance between the two, the casting of Danny DeVito — a balding man at least fifteen years Miller’s senior — had the creators wisely leaving the two somewhere between platonic and up-in-the-air.

Still, this is very much in the mold of a screwball comedy, and there’s definitely flirtatious energy in the air. In their constant battle of one-upmanship, Kate gets downright salacious when she’s got the edge. When she’s calling to deliver the news to him after she’s successfully filed an injunction against him, she looks like she’s on a phone sex line.

And then there’s the battle over the steel mill.

Norman Jewison has a history of socially conscious films like The Hurricane and In the Heat of the Night. He is clearly trying to say something important.

Larry’s characterization borrows from the film’s spiritual cousins Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross which all require a great corporate villain to slap us out of our entrenched love affair with capitalism.

The problem here is that Andrew Jorgensen is a dinosaur of an executive whose sense of integrity has little basis in the economic reality of the situation. His narrative arc is one of tragedy, and the eventual survival of his company has nothing to do with him.

In other words, he’s up against an amoral monster, but he’s not the hero of this story either. There’s definitely some thematic muddling going on here if it’s framed as a David v Goliath story considering David is such an idiot. Then again, one might call Kate the David but what’s the point of trying to lionize Jorgensen or even include him?

Perhaps, it’s the big speech at the end, which is one of the few things the film is remembered for.

50 Greatest Film Quotes of All Time | Orrin Konheim on Patreon

Check this out:

LARRY THE LIQUIDATOR I VIDEO — YouTube

The text:
Lawrence Garfield: Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I’m not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say “Amen” after you hear a prayer. Because that’s what you just heard — a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called “The Prayer for the Dead.” You just heard The Prayer for the Dead, my fellow stockholders, and you didn’t say, “Amen.” This company is dead. I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here. It’s too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We’re dead alright. We’re just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure. You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let’s have the intelligence, let’s have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future. “Ah, but we can’t,” goes the prayer. “We can’t because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?” I got two words for that: Who cares? Care about them? Why? They didn’t care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, “We know times are tough. We’ll lower taxes, reduce water and sewer.” Check it out: You’re paying twice what you did ten years ago. And our devoted employees, who have taken no increases for the past three years, are still making twice what they made ten years ago; and our stock — one-sixth what it was ten years ago. Who cares? I’ll tell you. Me. I’m not your best friend. I’m your only friend. I don’t make anything? I’m making you money. And lest we forget, that’s the only reason any of you became stockholders in the first place. You want to make money! You don’t care if they manufacture wire and cable, fried chicken, or grow tangerines! You want to make money! I’m the only friend you’ve got. I’m making you money. Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll be used productively. And if it is, you’ll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves. And if anybody asks, tell ’em ya gave at the plant. And by the way, it pleases me that I am called “Larry the Liquidator.” You know why, fellow stockholders? Because at my funeral, you’ll leave with a smile on your face and a few bucks in your pocket. Now that’s a funeral worth having!

Final Thoughts on 2022 in Film

-Stephen Spielberg thanked Tom Cruise for saving movies with Top Gun. You can call the film over-rated due to how big it blew up but, by that standard, a lot of things are overrated. Think of how little you expected when you walked into that theater and think of how you (most likely) were moved; how well done all of the film's elements were. Moreso, think of how this was not a Marvel film and managed to rule the Box Office for 3 weeks in the middle of Summer. It was the top grossing film of the year in an age where the only stuff thriving is superheroes and cartoons.

-Best director is likely going to two guys named Daniel. Although I don't love Oscars being used as lifetime achievement awards (like Don Ameche in Cocoon or Lee Grant in Shampoo who were indistinguishable from the rest of their casts when they won Academy Awards; I'll go to my grave saying Al Pacino did a great job in Scent of a Woman if people stop comparing it to the 70s), I tend to think it's a little embarrassing to have people who aren't particularly accomplished in that category. More than any other award, we can't tell what a director does from a single film since he relies on various craftsmen and actors to create his vision. The best director award comes close to reflecting a list of the best, but when you have the guy who directed Rocky (can't remember his name), Delbert Mann or Tom Hooper, you run a risk that the award is diluted. I'd prefer if the award went to someone with somewhat of a track record for doing big things.

-We need to just collectively admit this was not a particularly good year for American films:

*Baz Luhrmann is an erratic and polarizing guy. Whatever your opinion of him or this movie is, we should recognize this was not something that all viewers considered a success. I found it to not vary enough from the typical beats of the biopic to merit any special recognition.

*Tar is 2 hours and 37 minutes long. My friend Khari typically avoids films over two hours and while I disagree with that method of film going, this was a film that could have easily been told in an hour and 45 minutes. It's set in a highly specialized world of orchestral conducting and does little to explain why waving your arms in front of a group of classical musicians merits millions of dollars

*The Whale was gross (although that was probably the point) and a bit heavy-handed in its metaphors (the guy loves in a city with more thunder than any other). It's interesting.

*The Banshees of Inisherin is about two people who are mentally off and the film doesn't acknowledge that.  One person basically spends the whole movie whining that the other isn't his friend and the other responds in the worst way imaginable: Self-harm, not locking his door, etc. It's supposedly also about the Irish civil war and loneliness and coping, but all that stuff is muddled in the background. I could see someone reading it differently, but it didn't work for me.

-The result of the lack of decent films and the momentum behind films that were actually pretty good (at least in my opinion) like Empire of Light and Armageddon Time resulted in a bunch of foreign films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, RRR, Bardo, and Triangle of Sadness either getting nominated for BP or getting close. RRR and Triangle of Sadness I found to be terrific films but I also rarely add foreign films to my viewing diet so that was a positive effect on me.

-In spite of the Glass Onion's length, it worked as a critique of rich people. The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, and Death on the Nile also had this element which was a nice new direction. For films.

-Underrated films to me: Deep Water, The Bubble, Where the Crawdads Sing, Armageddon Time, Metal Lords, and Amsterdam

-Unfortunately, there is a sphere of entertainment-centered journalists who will always manufacture some controversy about how Hollywood doesn't properly honor people of color. They continue to attempt to drive headlines around this cause even when the facts don't support their case. This year, their double standard was highly evidence when Michelle Yeoh's broke existing campaign rules to knock down competitor Cate Blanchett.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/michelle-yeoh-deletes...

I don't think that Michelle Yeoh should be raked over the coals or even found guilty, but she violated a rule about campaigning by taking a potshot at a fellow nominee on social media.

There is no source that Andrea Riseborough directly marketed the film herself illegally (it was the director's wife who was under suspicion) and she investigated and found innocent, but her name will now be tainted because she's not really a name in the industry anyway.

That Michelle Yeoh gets all this support because of a strong double-standard here where if you're on the right side of what the identity politics crowd perceives to be social justice, you got cheered for getting on your soap box no matter what you say.

The more egregious thing here is that it's not even Andrea Riseborough's control that she was White when she had the greatest Cinderella story campaign in recent Oscars memory. The story doesn't matter: Just her skin color.

And I'm repeating myself here, but the absurdity of citing racism due to a (very probable, beforehand) snubbing of a four-time Oscar nominee dilutes the word beyond belief.

Empire of Light Review (2022)

It might be a bit overkill for the Academy to have awarded Olivia Colman three Oscar nominations in four years, but the multi-layered ball of repressed pride that Colman plays just might be the performance of the year.

The film is set in a theater in a small English town in 1981 and though it focuses on Olivia Colman's character of Hilary, there's a rich slice-of-life quality to it.

Sam Mendes has long had a knack of capturing the atmospheres of time and place: The suburban purgatory of American Beauty, the sepia-toned Depression-era Midwest of Road to Perdition, the hellish warscapes of Iraq in Jarhead and World War I in 1917.

At the same time, Mendes tries to equate a cinema in 1981 as the height of theater going, when he's at least 40 years removed from the era of movie palaces and event screenings. Although it could be argued that  Jaws and Star Wars might have jump-started a new weekened-centered craze of moviegoing, that's not what's really being portrayed (unless the original cut of Chariots of Fire had space lasers or sharks I am unaware of).  There's a curious vagueness here from a director who's generally so exacting with his settings. It's also hard to get a grip on exactly what kind of an English town this is: Vaguely somewhere that's not London is as much as I can gather.

The crust of Hilary's arc is that it throws her into two relationships: A numbing dalliance with her cheating boss (Colin Firth) and a May-December romance (Michael Ward as Stephen) that's as dreamy as the movies that Hilary and her crew never actually get around to watching (irony alert!). Colman plays the self-loathing with the former and the genuine affection with the latter beautifully.

There's also the obligatory referencing of the times (the Thatcher era) and the racism involved in Ward's character. It's a sure bet that any film that attempts to discuss race (particularly by a White director) will have loud critics whatever you do, so it's best to just ignore that: This isn't a film with any profound proscribed solutions to race, but the existence of a Black character in a more racist era than the present is dealt realistically and in a way that serves the story.

The film picks up significantly in the second act with two or three strong twists that are cleverly deployed. It's revealed halfway through the film that Hilary suffers from a certain mental illness but the foreshadowing is subtle enough to provide a true a-ha moment that pieces together the story retroactively. 

It's certainly not one of the best works of Sam Mendes but the film has a certain charm that keeps the film fresh.

Review: The VIPs (1963)

 I went into this for a project I was doing on best supporting actress winners (Margaret Rutherford), but I stayed because I love a good ensemble film.

The film follows four storylines: A dramatic love triangle involving a woman (Elizabeth Taylor) who is planning on leaving her husband (Richard Burton) for an idle playboy (Louis Jordan) but wants to dodge confrontation through a Dear John note; a Yugoslavian director (Orson Welles) needing to leave England to dodge tax laws; an Australian magnate (Rod Taylor) with assistant (a not-yet-famous Maggie Smith) who needs to head to the board of directors before his company is bought out; and a loopy Duchess (Margaret Rutherford) who is trying to raise money to save her castle.

Unlike most ensemble dramas where there are a lot of intersecting characters, there's an urgent need for everyone to go in the same direction which is out of London's Heathrow airport which means the tension gets ratcheted up to 11 in one foul sweep, when a case of fog (this is a thing?!) delays all flights.

The film is at its most compelling when focusing on the Burton/Taylor/Jordan plot which has enough heft to support its own dramatic mid-century melodrama like the Douglas Sirk or Elia Kazan film.

Burton and Taylor were a tabloid phenomenon on screen and the pair had just come out of a film shoot where they just discovered each other's bodies (TCM reported that this film was rushed into production to capitalize on the tabloid). It was over the shoot of this film that an internally tortured Burton decided to leave his wife and marry Taylor: An idealized glamour that six other men had fallen under the spell of over the course of Taylor's life. It's not hard to imagine how viewers in 1963 felt watching the two act out a heated marriage spat felt like a glimpse of the tumultuous affair between two of the most beautiful and idolized people on the planet.

But the scene-stealer here is Louis Jordan. Referred to as a "gigolo" by a jealous Richard Burton, he's the kind of idle gentleman who casually walks through life bedding women and never thinking about his next meal. He's a gambler as if there's any profession cooler than that. He's properly vulnerable with Liz Taylor and he shows an intriguing splitting of the difference between empathy and verbal one-upmanship to the man whose wife he's stealing.

The Australian magnate plot is a solid B-story with the contrasting sense of gravity by Maggie Smith (another scene stealer) and the "Oh well, my life's over, might as well have champagne" attitude of Rod Taylor. There are a couple sweet twists and the story feels emotionally robust.

The Orson Welles and Margaret Rutherford plots are mostly filler. Welles dons an Eastern European accent and some fine character affectations and Rutherford shows a penchant for physical comedy as she constantly looks lost and fiddles with her hat a lot.

The upsetting thing is with the richness of the performances of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jordan, and Maggie Smith, Rutherford walked away with the 1963 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Still, I'm glad this film won an Oscar of some sort so I had the chance to discover it.