Inside Job (5/5 Stars)

Witches, witches, all of them witches!

The above quote is from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a movie about a woman whose fiancé sold her womb to a coven of witches next door and had her impregnated by Satan himself. She says the line once she finally figures out that everyone, not just the neighbors, are in on it. Another couple of lines that ran through my head while watching through this documentary are from another Polanski movie, “Chinatown.” The main character, a private detective, finally figures out who is behind a murder and an even bigger crime, a complex water-working scheme that will rip-off the entire city of Los Angeles (based on a real crime). He asks the main bad guy who is already a very wealthy man:

“Let me ask you something, how much are you worth? Over ten million?”

“Oh Yes.”

“Why are you doing it? What can you buy that you can’t already afford? How much better can you eat?”

“Oh the Future Mr. Gittes, the Future!”

It is appropriate that I would think of Roman Polanski movies when I watched, “Inside Job.” Nobody has been a clearer witness to evil than Polanski (Holcaust, Helter Skelter) and this movie is one of the clearest portraits of evil I have ever seen (Right in the running with the documentary ‘Deliver Us From Evil’). It should be nearly impossible for this movie to not win the Oscar for best documentary of the year.

The Writer/Director is Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight) who could rightly be described as the Anti-Michael Moore. This documentary is not set up as a story about Charles Ferguson. He spends the entire movie off-screen and can only be heard asking questions in order to provide context for the answers of the interviewees. There are no grandstanding confrontations or “Look At Me” stunts. Instead there is an astounding amount research and knowledge, which is presented in a clear and comprehensive manner by a narrator (not Ferguson but Matt Damon). There are also no attempts at comedy although the audience which I sat with laughed in complete disbelief and astonishment at some points as brazen callousness and corruption oozed from the lips of people who should have known better than to take an interview with somebody who had done their homework. 

As with all reviews about documentaries it is impossible to try to summarize the plot in a review. The entirety of the movie consists of the explaining of the apocalyptic financial catastrophe of 2008. Ferguson has done a masterful job of limiting his explanation to two hours. It would be folly for me to list everything in two pages. But here’s a taste of what the movie has to offer:

Criminal activity is rampant in the financial sector and big banks have been convicted and fined for millions of dollars for, among other things, financing Iran’s nuclear program and laundering Mexican drug money. It is so common that bankers are allowed write off lawyer’s fees as ordinary business expenses. (That last sentence is not in the movie. I learned it in my Federal Income Tax for the Individual class)

Leverage is the ratio of the amount of debt compared to assets (Your Money!) in a bank. When a bank takes on more and more debt, it is more and more at risk of not being able to pay back creditors. The result is bankruptcy (Losing all your Money!). When deregulation allowed leverage caps to be raised, the banks did exactly that: They incurred a lot more debt without adding any more assets. Technically you do this because you would be investing the money in other companies. But no, instead the banks did this so they could pay their employees huge bonuses, all the while endangering the company and Your Money! When the banks inevitably collapsed all Your Money was lost. The officers had already been paid and didn’t lose any money at all. For lack of a better word, this is called stealing.

The securitized mortgage market is an incredible thing to behold. Joe Bob goes to a mortgage broker, a guy in a suit behind a desk. Joe Bob wants a house and asks the suit which loan is the best type for him. The suit gives him the worst mortgage possible, something with high interest rates and completely unsuitable for his income range. He does this for two reasons: One he makes more money with a high interest rate and Two: he has no risk if the loan fails. The mortgage broker gives the promissory rate to a bank. The bank has no risk because it passes the mortgage off to an investment bank. The investment bank takes the loan, couples it with several other thousand bad loans into a CDO. It gets its friends in the credit rating companies (which it pays big bucks) to give it an investment rating and sells it to a shell company, usually a LLC, which investors can invest in. A credit rating company gives it a grade from AAA (highest rating) to C. If it gets at least an AA rating, then IRA and 401ks, perhaps even Joe Bob’s retirement fund can invest in the CDO. The investment bank and the credit rating companies have no risk if the CDO fails. All the risk is with the LLC and its investors, aka Joe Bob and his retirement savings. Everyone along the chain gets paid while fobbing off all the risks. The economy goes into recession; Joe Bob loses his job, his house, and his retirement fund. The Banks get bailed out (with taxpayer money, so some of it is Joe Bob’s) so they can keep giving more loans and keep the economy from slipping into a full-blown depression. The bankers are not fired or convicted and continue to pay themselves exorbitant salaries.

But it doesn’t stop there. Do you know what a credit default swap is? A CDO and their investors can get insurance just in case that Joe Bob won’t be able to pay his mortgage (Usually from somebody like AIG). But did you know that credit default swaps allow other people to also take out an insurance policy on the same CDO. So it is very possible that Joe Bob’s mortgage has been insured not once by his CDO but 50 times by 50 different people. If you were the investment bank that handled his loan, you may have inside knowledge that Joe Bob probably won’t be able to pay back the loan. So instead of informing people of the danger and risk, you take out several insurance policies on the CDO. Once Joe Bob fails to pay the high interest rates and subsequently defaults, loses his house and his retirement fund, you get paid even more. This is exactly what Goldman Sachs did. The financial system had been so deregulated that it was legal. All it took was a complete lack of conscience and a pit of evil where a heart should be.

But what on earth could one person do with millions upon millions of bonuses and executive pay? How about hookers and cocaine? Some of the more amazing interviews involve a Wall Street Madame who tells of $1,000 a night escorts and a Wall Street therapist that tells of excessive use of cocaine by the traders. They say it was rampant and went straight to the top. It sure would make sense to me considering the other types things they were doing. If you’re going to hell, you might as well go whole hog.

And then Ferguson targets other people you wouldn’t think of targeting: Academia. He points out that some of the people in charge of deregulation now head the business schools of Columbia and Harvard. These are some of the best interviews of the movie. Apparently the professors weren’t expecting Ferguson to talk about financial conflicts of interest. One, Glenn Hubbard, gets really mad when Ferguson brings up the fact that Hubbard was paid $130,000 to write favorably about Iceland’s deregulation policies (which quickly collapsed that economy within 8 years) and declined to disclose his paycheck in the article. Here’s another somewhat paraphrased quote with the guy from Harvard.

Ferguson: If a doctor received 80% of his income from a drug he was promoting, wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest.

Harvard: Yes

Ferguson: How is this any different?

Harvard: It’s different in that…um….um….umm…um

(And then the audience and I let out an exasperated nervous disbelieving incredulous bale of laughter.)

This movie is extraordinary. Don’t let anyone tell you that the catastrophe was unpredictable or that the financial schemes are too complicated to understand. You can understand it and so did the bankers. That’s how they made so much money. And if there is one moral I can impart on you, it is that nothing has changed so you might as well become informed real quick. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the credit ratings agencies that testified before Congress and testified that their ratings were simply “opinions” for which they shouldn’t be held responsible. Allow me to interpret: That’s a polite way of saying, “It’s your own damn fault for trusting scumbags like us.” So take heed reader. There are evil people in the world and they are out for all they can steal. Act accordingly. 

The Social Network (5/5 Stars) October 6, 2010

I’ll be your friend, Mark Zuckerberg.
Well, here we are with what we call a paradox. I have given this movie five stars and I will swear that it is a “must see” movie. But at the same time, I have completely failed to come away with the impression Aaron Sorkin the writer and David Fincher the director, surely wanted to make. I didn’t know anything about Mark Zuckerberg before I watched this movie (I love Facebook, but that’s about it), but I left it with admiration and sympathy for him. Zuckerberg is my type of guy. I would love to have a beer with him any day. 

That’s a paradox because this movie wants to make Zuckerberg out to be an asshole. That’s how it starts and that’s how it ends. And although it does an incredibly good job of describing how and why Facebook works (and why it is arguably a work of genius), it is also very preoccupied with the several lawsuits that Zuckerberg withstood in the early years of his great success. One of the best things about this movie is that it dramatizes the depositions of such lawsuits. Since depositions are recorded and everything occurs under Oath there is no reason to believe that any of the dialogue in them is made up. That means Mark and everybody else actually said everything that he says in this movie. It must have been an event to be in those rooms. No doubt, Aaron Sorkin, a master of smart sharp dialogue (The American President, The West Wing) was inspired to write this movie after seeing them.

Mark Zuckerberg (portrayed here by Jesse Eisengard in a way that reminded me of Robert Downey Jr.’s take on Sherlock Holmes) is a Harvard student with great intellectual potential. He also happens to be young and stupid. One thing he is exceptionally good at is programming code for computers. One thing he is exceptionally poor at is communicating with other people. He may start off discussing a great idea but he either talks too fast, assumes to much, or is oblivious to the notion that the subject may not be interesting to the other person (like say the amount of geniuses in China). The other person gets annoyed. Zuckerberg gets frustrated. The other person becomes dismissive and Zuckerberg gets defensive. He may even say something that is mean. Not just mean but mean and effective in the way only intelligent insults can be. The girl, played by Rooney Mara walks out because he is an asshole. And he is in a way, but only in that innocent way the highly intelligent but socially ignorant can be when they know enough to be sure that they are smarter than most people (at one or several particular things) but are still ignorant of how other people will logically react when that fact is brought up. Zuckerberg doesn’t think the girl is stupid, he thinks she’s being stupid. If he can understand what he means why on earth can’t she? And why does she get so mad when he corrects her? He’s only doing it because she’s so insistent on being wrong all the time! Why, it’s enough to make one run home, get drunk, and blog about how much of a bitch she is. Which, by the way, is exactly how this movie starts. The date is completely fictional by the way but the makers are out to make a big ironic point about Mark Zuckerberg right from the start. That this guy, the creator of Facebook, the biggest social network in the world, was incapable of making friends. Oh well, neither was Michelangelo when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. 

So, what exactly are the crimes of Mark Zuckerberg that would make people want to hate him so. Well first of all there is FaceMash, a program devised by Zuckerberg that allowed the students at Harvard to compare the female students at the university to each other. Using an algorithm, the women are given a hotness rating. It’s invasive (he hacked into several houses on campus and stole the pictures), misogynistic (no men are compared), and wildly popular (It gets about 22,000 hits before it crashes the Harvard servers). In defense of Mark Zuckerberg I make three points. One, the website didn’t start anything mean that was new. We all compare people all the time whether in private just thinking about it or in public while gossiping with our friends. What Zuckerberg did was just make it much more convenient. Two, assuming arguendo that it is a misogynistic thing to compare women to each other, than Zuckerberg is guilty. But guys in general have done far worse than that before and always seem to find women who can conveniently forgive them of it. The difference is that Mark is a brilliant programmer, so when he enacted his immature revenge quite a lot of people saw it. The amount of people, not what he did, is what made it so bad. Third, although the movie doesn’t show it, I really doubt that it was only guys using Facemash. You don’t get 22,000 hits solely from dudes. Women were using it to. Don’t tell me they don’t compare as much as everybody else does. 

The second crime is the alleged stealing of the “idea” of Facebook. Now this lawsuit was complete bullshit. Mark was originally approached by a trio of well-connected Harvard students. They wanted Mark to be the programmer of their dating website, The Harvard Connection. In other words, they wanted Mark to do all of the work. It was never made clear in the movie just what these others kids would do for the site. When Mark went ahead and made his own site, they didn’t take their great idea and make a site of their own (even though they had the idea months before Mark had it), all they wanted to do was sue him. If I can make an analogy, lets say that somebody had the idea to sculpt a large statute of the biblical David, but didn't have the skill or drive to do it. So they enlist Michelangelo to do it for them. Then Michelangelo actually sculpts the damn thing, but at the end refuses to say he had any help. This somebody then claims credit saying that the idea was stolen. This is bullshit because it completely ignores the fact that the trio were incapable of ever manifesting their idea into an actual website. How infuriating. During the depositions, Mark makes a big deal of pointing out that Facebook contains completely original coding (Presumably because if Mark thought the other website was worth a damn, he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of inventing his own.) At another point he stops in the middle of the deposition and comments that it is raining outside. The high price lawyer of his adversaries asks Mark whether he deserves his full attention. Mark responds:
“You have a part of my attention – the minimum amount needed. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook where my employees and I are doing things no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually and creatively capable of doing. Did I adequately answer your condescending question?” (Did I mention how much I like this guy?)
Unfortunately as it is pointed out to him at the end of the movie, the average jury knows nothing about computer programming and coding or what actually goes into creating a website. But they do know an arrogant prick when they see one. An associate played by Rashida Jones explains to Mark that she can get a jury to hate him within 10 minutes. The crew cut douchebags walk away with a 65 million dollar settlement. 

The third crime and most serious crime is Mark’s falling out with his best friend and co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo was Mark’s roommate and the original CFO of the company. Well, sort of. He donated $1,000 of his own money and was given the job of being the business end of the entire affair. Unfortunately, although he had the best of intentions, he didn’t really seem to know what he was doing. So when Sean Parker, the mogul behind Napster played by Justin Timberlake, shows up to impart the wisdom he had already learned from the big things he had done, Mark agrees with basically everything he says. I kept thinking of the old Henry Adams saying, “A friend in power, is a friend lost.” Eduardo, because he fails to grasp exactly what facebook means and what it can mean, (let’s also not forget that he doesn’t know anything about computers or programming) is left behind and eventually forced out of the company (It is unclear exactly how involved Zuckerberg was in this). Some of the best scenes in the movie again take place in the deposition room, where the feuding best friends trade barbs that are more tinged with heartbreak than they are with anger. It is said that this settlement was for an undisclosed amount. Perhaps it was settled amicably. 

Is it fair to make a “warts-and-all” biopic about somebody who is only twenty-six years old? I can remember a time when Bill Gates was considered part devil. Now he is regarded as a saint. Who knows what we will think of Zuckerberg ten years from now. After all, he did just give 100 million dollars to charity. I have always found people like Mark Zuckerberg fascinating. They rise and fall on a trait that allows them to excel in one area and at the same time limits them in others. Jesse Eisenberg’s performance suggests a hint of Asperger’s in Zuckerberg. He is a man of intense focus and work ethic. This is great for his art and business, but when he uses that type of energy in a social relationship it becomes exhausting to talk to him. But having said that, here’s a good question to ask as you watch this movie: Which one of these characters should a guy like Mark have “connected” with? The movie shows quite a lot of elite parties. Most characters do sex and stimulants and not much else. Elite Clubs put prospective members through weird and arbitrary hazings. A kid at a lecture doesn’t realize it was Bill Gates leading it. Is it really Mark’s problem that he can’t connect with these people? This is a particularly good question concerning the women who inhabit this picture. They exist mainly in groupie form. They inhabit the background of shots mainly getting drunk or high while the programmers (almost exclusively men) work in the foreground. They bring guys into public bathrooms for blowjobs on the first date. There’s a particularly telling scene when Mark is laying out a strategy for expanding facebook and the two women in the room ask if they can help. Mark flatly tells them “No” presumably because they know absolutely nothing about computers. Contrast all of the above people to Mark who spends his time being creative, working his ass off, and building his business. Sure he has a friend in Sean Parker who is a partier, but when Sean is arrested with cocaine and underage women, do you know where Mark is? He’s still in the office working his ass off. Perhaps we should stop focusing on what’s wrong with Mark. He just needs to meet somebody as cool as him. Someone like Melinda Gates for instance. In the meantime, he can definitely hang out with me. 

The Social Network is one of the year’s best films. It is a movie made by geniuses (Fincher and Sorkin) about a genius. It should definitely get Oscar nods for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, and perhaps acting nods for Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake depending on how thick the field is. It is exceedingly interesting to watch. At times I couldn’t help but lean forward in my seat to be further engrossed in the story. At other times I was laughing and applauding while everyone else in the theater was completely silent. Above all it is the best-edited movie of the year. It moves seamlessly across several storylines with minimal confusion and great dramatic effect. It is the best David Fincher movie since “Fight Club” and the first time I enjoyed a Jesse Eisenberg performance. As for Justin Timberlake, I think it is fair to say that he has officially graduated from being a commodity crafted by marketers and sold to unsuspecting teens. He has become a legitimate actor and is evident by his willingness to take small parts in interesting movies as opposed to large parts in really dumb ones. One more thing, remember that girl in the first scene. That’s Rooney Mara and she has been cast as the next Lisbeth Salandar in Fincher’s upcoming version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I can sort of see that. Knock on Wood.

Let Me In (4/5 Stars) October 6, 2010

“I must be gone and live or stay and die. Love, Abby” 
That’s a quote from Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ a play that a twelve-year-old boy named Owen is studying at his school. It is used though by Abby in a post-it left by Owen’s bedside after a chaste night the two spent together. But it isn’t simply a sentimental romantic line. It literally is true. If Abby stayed with Owen until the dawn, the light of the sun would cause her flesh to catch fire and she would be burnt to a crisp, dead. Abby is a vampire. She’s also twelve, but she has been twelve for a very long time. 




“Let Me In” is a remake of a haunting Swedish horror movie titled, “Let the Right One In.” (see previous review). Watching this movie made me proud to be an American. We did it. Go USA. ‘Let Me In’ is on the same par and arguably even a little better than the original. The writer/director Matt Reeves has done an admirable job of keeping all that was great about the first movie especially its tone, atmosphere, and deliberate pacing. But he has also added many little details here and there that round out the character of Owen, makes clearer the relationship between Abby and her “father,” and creates much more effective scenes of violence. On top of that, we have two great performances by Chloe Moretz (500) Days of Summer) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road). But let me be clear. I don’t recommend watching “Let Me In,” instead of “Let the Right One In.” I recommend you see them both. They are especially interesting from a craft perspective. Effective storytellers need not always agree on exactly how to tell a story. The differences between these two movies are not better or worse. They are simply a matter of taste. The story itself is worthy of multiple interpretations. Just like Shakespeare. I wouldn’t mind seeing another remake of this movie. 

Poor Owen. He lives in suburban nowhere and it is the midst of winter. His parents are going through a divorce and spend all of their time arguing with each other on the phone. The class bully and his buddies have singled him out for ritual punishment. He has no friends. When he isn’t at school and in a state of perpetual terror, he is at home completely alone and bored out of his mind. He spends his free time binging on “Now and Later” candy and acting out revenge fantasies in the mirror. And then Abby moves in next door. She shows up one day in the empty and dreary courtyard where Owen usually sits alone. This is an Event. It’s not exactly love at first. It’s more like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday. She is another kid his “age,” seemingly the only other one in the entire apartment complex. And she is quiet and she is sad. Just like Owen. Perhaps they could be friends. 

I remarked in my review of “Let the Right One In,” that the story reminded me of Hitchcock in that it keeps the audience in a state of moral twilight. Watching this movie, you can’t tell if what you are hoping will happen is the right thing to be hoping for. Owen as a character couldn’t be more sympathetic. You can’t help but feel for the kid. Abby, by definition, is a mass murderer. But strangely, because she is Owen's only friend, she is also sympathetic simply by association. In one scene, Owen asks Abby if she will go steady with him. I heard several people in the theater audibly sigh as if they were watching the cutest scene in the world. But pay attention to the implications and take notice of your feelings when you watch this. Sure, it’s nice that Owen has fallen in love, but is it a good thing for him to fall in love with a vampire who needs blood to live? The single best scene in the movie (which isn’t in the original) comes shortly after Owen realizes that not only is Abby a vampire but that her “father” was his age when he first met her. Owen calls up his own father and asks him, “Do you think there is such a thing as evil? Can people be evil?” His father is distracted and less than helpful but take notice of what Owen is really asking: Can the only person in the world who is kind to me be completely bad? Would you be able to forgive a killer if they were your only friend? What about the last scene? Is it mass murder? Is it an act of kindness? Could it possibly be both? How do you feel about what happened? How should you feel about it? 

The A-list for children movie stars is a very short list. Child Actors are understandably notorious for not being incredibly reliable or professional. So, a child who proves that they can carry a movie is special indeed. Here, both Chloe and Kodi have proven they are very capable of pulling off challenging roles. (This romance is iconic. I wouldn’t mind having the picture shown above as a wall poster.) Every casting director who has a difficult part for a child will surely notice them. In fact, Chloe has been cast as the lead in Martin Scorsese’s next movie. Welcome to the A-List.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (4/5 Stars) October 1, 2010

Oliver Stone: Angry no more
In 1978 a movie came out called ‘Midnight Express.’ It told the true story of Billy Hayes, a young American who had attempted to smuggle a small amount of hashish out of Turkey in order to fund his university studies. It was a stupid thing to do and he was caught and sentenced to a draconian four years in a hellish Turkish prison. In his final year, Hayes appealed only to be resentenced to an astounding 20 more years. The laws had changed in the meantime and the Turkish Constitution had no ex post facto provision. What followed was one of the most incredible scenes I have ever seen in a movie. The Young American is given a chance to speak to the court at the end of his trial. He has apparently given his fate much thought and he speaks of justice and mercy with much eloquence and intelligence. But as he gets to the end of the speech, he can’t help himself; he also has this to say: “For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny that you don’t eat them. Christ forgave the bastards, but I cannot! I hate! I hate you! I hate your country! And I hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs! You’re all pigs!” The world of cinema had just witnessed the debut of a great new talent. It was the writer Oliver Stone and come Oscar night he would holding a golden statuette for the first screenplay he had ever written. 


If we assume that Hatred is an emotion that arises from ignorance, than it must follow that Education has a soothing effect on such strong emotion. Correctly done, education should promote understanding, which should naturally lead to empathy and wisdom. Thus it can be assumed (and frequently witnessed) that Angry People are usually inarticulate, wild, and plainly mistaken. But every once in awhile there comes a person who can intelligently articulate such strong emotion. They have been educated. They certainly have a vague notion that anger is not the mature response. But they cannot help themselves. They have been Hurt and they Hate too much. 

Oliver Stone was raised in a conservative Republican family. His father was a stockbroker. When Vietnam broke out, Oliver didn’t wait to be drafted. He signed up for the Army because he wanted to serve his country. He completed two tours of duty in Vietnam and there something bad must have happened. From then on he was a fire-breathing liberal, he moved to New York, and he started making movies that all had a common thread in them. Almost all of them were about young men who were betrayed and/or had rejected their father figures or country (Scarface, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK) Perhaps the most formidable of all of Stone’s dastardly fathers was Gordon Gekko, the investment banker played by in an Oscar-winning role by Michael Douglas in the original Wall Street (1987). He was brilliant, ruthless, and merciless. He broke companies not because he wanted the money because he liked breaking people, dominating them and wringing out the weak. He glorified himself as the pique of evolution and justified his treatment of others as a sort of natural selection. The point of the game is to beat the other guy, right? Well, then a hostile takeover of a business that ends up in the liquidation of thousands of employees but garners the maximum possible return is not simply a means to greed; it is the point in and of itself. The more people you push around, the bigger the victory. Wall Street wasn’t about greedy people. It was about assholes. 
That sort of thing is pretty much absent in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. There aren’t any real jerks in this movie. Gekko gets out of prison, but is now against the system, not for it (He just wrote a book, Is Greed Good?). His new protégé’s, played by Shia Lebouf, main goal is to marry Gekko’s daughter and finance a green energy company. This contrasts greatly with Bud Fox in the original who wanted to be a player in the game and lusted after a glamorous gold-digger. There aren’t any real victims in this movie either. The biggest injustice is the failure of a big bank and the suicide of its CEO, played by Frank Langella. This plot point draws a close parallel to the fall of Bear Stearns in real life. But who would think of the financial collapse of 2008 and think that the biggest victim was the CEO of Bear Sterns. The original Wall Street had an ordinary victim. He was Fox’s father and Gekko got him fired in a hostile takeover. This movie never really leaves Manhattan. We don’t see any of the catastrophic results of a decade of very wrong banking practices. There is no populist rage. All we have is Gekko wisely musing about bubbles from a historical perspective. Yeah, I know about the Dutch tulips. We think its funny now sure, but we forget that it completely ruined lives back then like every other bubble has done since. (It is actually kind of amazing how many people in this movie declare that they don’t care about the money. I suspect it is really because they are all well off and don’t have to.) 
The movie does do a very good job of not dumbing anything down. We hear technical language about credit default swaps, short sales, stock rising and falling etc. Lebouf at one point even takes the time to explain his fusion energy project that captures energy from seawater (He gets it right too. I studied that in high school Academic Decathlon). Then there are several scenes that take us into the boardrooms of the Federal Reserve during the point in the crisis where the bankers stared into the abyss and finally asked the government to bail them out. These seem to be about right too, but they are distracting because they take place in a fictional movie. Descriptions of these historic moments really ought to be in a documentary. I kept wondering if they got it right. 
Of course the big question is whether prison actually had any impact on Gekko’s ruthless personality and whether this father figure, so vilified in the original, would be any different this time around. He is, more or less. The new Oliver Stone is older and wiser and his villains now are more often “mixed bags” as Gekko relates himself to at the movie’s end. I liked particularly how Stone coaxed Gekko over to the good side in ways that weren’t righteous or melodramatic. He presents the choice as a business decision with Gekko’s most important asset being time. It makes sense even if you intend on remaining a greedy bastard. If anything else, this movie should not inspire a generation of jerks like the last one did. That happens when you refuse to tell stories about those types of people.
In the last half of Stone’s career, he stopped telling stories about betrayed youth and started telling stories about tragic leaders (Nixon, Any Given Sunday, Alexander, W). Perhaps it as his way of trying to understand that which he has had a lifelong distrust of. The movies are sad and the subjects are flawed but Stone is more empathetic than judgmental of the old graying patriarchs. One movie in particular, World Trade Center, was striking for its whole-hearted patriotism. Perhaps with that movie he had finally forgiven his country. And with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with its wiser more sympathetic Gekko, perhaps Stone has finally forgiven his father. There very well may be a movie out there someday that portrays exactly how we felt about the financial crisis, but it won’t be made by Oliver Stone. He is angry no more. Perhaps he should start making comedies. I wonder what an Oliver Stone comedy would look like.

Dinner for Schmucks (3/5 Stars) September 9, 2010

What a freak show.
Dinner for Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as an up-and-coming midlevel executive at some sort of financial business. He is in line for a promotion. The catch is that he has to take part in a dinner party where the various invitees, all top level executives in the company, compete as to who can bring the biggest idiot along as a guest. Rudd serendipitously happens upon Barry, played by Steve Carell. Barry’s hobby is taxidermy and he specializes in scavenging mice road-kill and inserting them in the place of humans in intricate dioramas of artistic masterpieces, or as he calls them “mousterpieces.” What an idiot, Rudd thinks, and decides to take him to the party. Now you may be thinking: inviting people to dinner party just to make fun of them. Isn’t that a bit mean? Yes it is, and the movie agrees. So there is a strange dichotomy here. We are presented with a freak show and than asked to empathize with the freaks and dislike the people who laugh at them. As a consequence the movie isn’t as funny as it should be because it suggests that we would be assholes if we thought it was. This movie was based on a French film called, “The Dinner Party.” I heard that one was much meaner than this one. It was probably funnier too. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be nice and funny at the same time. May I suggest a way that this movie could have done exactly that? First though I feel I have to discuss what exactly makes us laugh. 



These aren’t my ideas. They are Freud’s and they come from a book aptly titled “Jokes and their Relationship to the Subconscious.” Very good book, I suggest it if you take being funny seriously. I will try to briefly summarize. There are mainly three things that make us laugh. They are Economy, Misdirection, and Aggression. 

I’ll skip the first two. What mainly concerns us here is Aggression, or Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get from other people’s misery. We all have aggressive natural instincts. Your boss may be a nice guy, but his pain is easy to laugh at because deep down you are unhappy that you have to take orders from anybody. To some degree we all want autonomy. There doesn’t even have to be an “actual joke” associated with it. If there is a person you feel routinely bullies you and then one day somebody else stands up to them or simply says, “Fuck that guy” behind his back, you would probably feel visceral pleasure and laugh. It is an outlet for the aggression you would normally act upon on if you weren’t suppressing it to say keep your job. The same goes for sex. When a guy calls a woman a slut (or construction dudes catcall) the words are an outlet for sexual aggression. The problem isn’t necessarily that the woman is being sexually active as much as who she’s not being sexually active with, namely the guy who is insulting her. The holy triumvirate of comedy is Religion, Sex, and Politics. Why? Because God, the Government, and Women (or Men) are the main players in the world who are limiting your natural inclination to do whatever the fuck you want. 

The problem with this movie is that Barry is completely harmless. There’s absolutely no reason why you would feel intimidated by him. He controls nothing. He doesn’t get the women. He’s a fantastic artist but certainly not somebody you would find yourself in competition with. If he’s funny at all in this movie, it’s because Steve Carell has him say funny things along the levels of Economy or Misdirection. He doesn’t even make you feel guilty for existing. (I bring this up because I’m sure we’ve all heard people rant about homeless people or other unpopular but completely powerless groups. I fear sometimes that people are so hostile because the insulter feels that the simple presence of societal decay on the streets impugns all of society and declares us all guilty. Thus the resentment.) Barry is clueless but not pitiable. He likes his art and is very good at it. Normal people may ostracize him but he is happy in his mind. Thus his solitude is blest and makes it almost impossible to make fun of him. Really, you would have to have some sort of grudge against happy harmless people. (i.e. you would have to be a total asshole.) 

Because of this it is perhaps a not so good thing that the movie spends so much time on Barry. It would be better if we spent more time with the odious company executives. They are the type of huge arrogant jerks we all know too well. Two of them are played by Ron Livingstone (Office Space) and Larry Wilmore (The Daily Show). Certainly they are capable of more comedy than what we see here. 

The executives should have at least gotten as much character development as the only truly villainous person in the story. That character is Thermen, played by Zach Galifinakis. Thermen works at the IRS (Booo!), stole Barry’s wife (Boo!! Hiss!!), and controls Barry via mind control (Boo- wait what?) Oh what a jerk. Zach’s presence marks the funniest scenes in the movie. It’s a visceral pleasure watching Barry take him down in the climax. There is no reason why the executives couldn’t have been made as ugly as Thermen. You don’t have to give them weird hobbies. Watch or read “American Psycho.” That’s how you go about making fun of rich, good-looking people. 

Steve Carell is still pretty funny here but most of the jokes seem to come from non-sequitors and throw-away lines. Here is an example of a particularly good exchange he has with Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) who plays a psychotic modern artist as they sit and overlook a goat ranch:

Clement: Have you ever spent five months living with a herd of goats as one of them?
Barry: No
Clement: That surprises me. The thing about a goat is, it never denies itself what it wants.
Barry: A goat eat'll anything. It could probably eat a bike. 
Clement: A goat could eat itself, it was driven to it. I'm just a goat halfway through eating itself.
Barry: Just to be clear, what exactly are we talking about?
Clement: Everything.

Most of the humor in this movie is like that. Paul Rudd essentially plays a straight character. He also has a girlfriend who isn’t funny at all and an assistant, played by very funny Kristen Schall, who is sorely underused. Then there is a psychotic ex-girlfriend who is just too weird to be funny. People need a reason, no matter how tenuous, to be truly crazy. Perhaps they should have made her a religious zeolot on a mission from God, or addicted to LSD, or just a diagnosed schizophrenic. Then she would have made sense and probably would have been funnier. I can’t say I completely recommend this movie, but I am still interested in seeing the French version. So take that for what it’s worth.

p.s. If you go to an AMC movie theater before noon, the movie costs $6. It’s like 1998 student prices all over again!

Machete (4/5 Stars) September 6, 2010

He knows the score. He gets the women. He kills the bad guys. 

Above all things, “Machete” is a joke. It first appeared as a fake movie trailer shown before writer/director Robert Rodriguez’s classic zombie movie “Planet Terror.” It was perhaps one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen. Among other ridiculous things the trailer promised, was the first starring role for iconic badass Danny Trejo as a Mexican day laborer who is setup and betrayed by anti-immigrant bad guys, a gun toting priest played by Cheech Marin, a threesome romp with the head bad guy’s wife and daughter, and a hell of lot of fatal revenge by machete. It ended with Trejo installing a machine gun turret on a motorcycle, jumping it off a ramp while something very explosive goes off in the background, and unloading a massive hail of bullets at the bad guys. Then the voiceover helpfully informed us that “They Just Fucked with the wrong Mexican!” Apparently I wasn’t the only one who really wanted to see that movie because here we are, two years later, with the feature length version. 



The genre of Machete is Grindhouse. It’s the kind of cheap movie that used to be shown in run down theaters and drive-ins and proudly offered little more than sex and violence (or as they say in the business, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) Most of these movies really sucked, but the attitude of them was inspiring to several now prominent filmmakers like Tarantino and Rodriguez. Because Grindhouse movies were cheap to make and the audience was content as long as there was fighting and nudity, directors and writers (if there were any) were very free to be, let’s say, provocative. No suit from the studio was there to tell them they couldn’t do something. Thus, there are no rules of decorum in a Grindhouse movie. And this movie, Machete, is no different. The prologue consists of Machete, as a Federale in Mexico, breaking into a drug lord’s house in order to rescue a kidnapped woman. The guards are dispatched by machete. It’s a credit to Rodriguez imagination that every single one is killed in a different way. The woman, when Machete finds her, is completely naked because “it’s too hot out for clothes.” No matter, he throws her over his shoulder and proceeds to make his escape by killing more bad guys. But then the woman double-crosses Machete and shoots him. As Machete is writhing on the floor she takes a very small cell phone out of the only place you can hide something when you’re naked and relays her success. The drug lord played by Steven Seagal shows up. He chides Machete for being a righteous troublemaker, shoots the naked lady for some reason, and then brings out Machete’s wife whom he decapitates with a katana. He explains that the only honorable way for Machete to die is if he cut off his head also (because apparently this Mexican drug lord also moonlights as a samurai) but that Machete has no honor. So what Steven Seagal does is light the house on fire (remember this is the drug lord’s house). Presumably Machete escaped because three years later he is an illegal immigrant in America looking for gardening work. The movie never explains exactly how. The rest of the plot is just as ridiculous.

Almost by definition a Grindhouse movie can’t be a good movie in the ordinary sense (i.e. realistic action, believable characters, decent editing, production value) but they can succeed, and often do, in never being boring and this is what Machete, by and large, accomplishes. There are plenty of funny one-liners, gratuitous nudity, and violence which is often and outrageous. The high point of gruesomeness occurs when Machete escapes from a hospital by cutting open a bad guy’s stomach, grabbing his intestine, and using it like a rope to lower himself out a window. (Machete is not the type of guy who bothers to open windows before going out them.) When a scene is that unbelievable I don’t think it can possibly be scary. The correct reaction is WTF and lots of nervous laughter. I had the good fortune of being in an audience that appreciated the audaciousness of such a moment. They applauded and cheered. Quite frankly, I liked it too. And I must admit I also enjoyed watching incredibly hot scantily clad women striking fierce poses and shooting semiautomatic machine guns. This movie has more of that than any I’ve ever seen. We’ve got Jessica Alba, Michele Rodriguez, the Crazy Babysitter Twins, and Lindsay Lohan doing exactly that at regular intervals. A bad movie? Sure you can definitely argue that. Boring? I don’t think so. 

There are also huge political overtones in this movie. Whether it is serious or not is anyone’s guess but either way but it does do a great job of illustrating the old maxim that the best way to make somebody feel foolish is to zealously agree with them. There is a rabid anti-immigrant senator played by Robert De Niro, his corrupt corporate backer played by Jeff Fahey, and a border vigilante played by Don Johnson. Illegal aliens are compared to cockroaches and terrorists. There is a plan to build an electric fence. The Senator is afraid that Illegals will try to take over his country, and then goes on to clarify that term as Texas. And you know what? The Senator is right. The Mexicans in this movie really are organized and have been hoarding arms and munitions in preparation of a race war. At the climax of the movie, a “code” is sent out to “The Network” and every single dishwasher, gardener, and maid in the state stops working and forms an army to confront the vigilantes. They parade down the street in hysterically stereotypical tricked-out cars with hydraulics. They’re armed with guns and gardening tools. Loud Mariachi music is trumpeted in the background. Is this what were afraid of when we talk about an illegal invasion? Because that would be ridiculous. Your enjoyment of this movie will probably depend on your view of Mexican immigration in general. I tend to be more liberal when it comes to that thing. I can't say I know enough about the subject to give a truly educated argument, but on a gut level I'm at least convinced that this summer’s “anchor baby” debate was purely idiotic. Surely any woman who has the courage and spirit to hike 100 miles across a dangerous desert while pregnant should be granted citizenship on the spot. That type of backbone is what this country needs. Besides they make good tacos. 

My enjoyment of this movie was also greatly enhanced by the fact that I am a huge fan of Robert Rodriguez and am familiar with most of the actors. I loved the fact that Danny Trejo finally got a starring role. This will probably be the only one he ever gets. I fondly remember Tom Savini, the Crazy Babysitter Sisters, and the Doctor from Planet Terror and am glad they all showed up again. Cheech Marin is consistently funny as a gun-toting priest that tapes confessions and drinks communal wine. And it’s about time somebody put an eye-patch on Michele Rodriguez, dressed her in black leather, and gave her a big fucking gun. What I missed however was a cameo by Quentin Tarantino. Ever since his stand-out role in “Planet Terror” as Rapist #1 I’ve had a renewed appreciation for his acting ability, at least in roles where he’s a psycho villain. It would have been cool if say, he played the Mexican/Samurai drug lord instead of Steven Segal, who didn’t do that hot of a job in this movie. Jessica Alba wasn’t very impressive either although she did have this one great line where she climbed a jalopy and proclaimed to a crowd of Mexican day laborers, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” Does that line make sense? Could this possibly be considered “good” writing? Maybe, maybe not. But she shouted it with such fervor and gusto that it was certainly entertaining to watch. It wasn’t boring.

The Girl who Played with Fire (3/5 Stars) August 22, 2010

This is only half of what might be a great movie.

The second installment of the Millenium Trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is not a stand-alone movie. It follows in the footsteps of other sequels that have already planned and written third pictures like ‘Matrix Reloaded’ and ‘Back to the Future II’ in that it sets up much more than it is willing to pay off. There is much exposition introduced into the plot here, amongst them a clandestine sex ring, a corrupt police force, and a considerable amount of names and locations that don’t have the called-for impact on the climax of the story. I would almost recommend that you don’t see this movie until the third installment comes out on DVD, and then you should watch the two movies together as a double feature. I say ‘almost’ because I don’t know yet whether the third installment will pay-off the buildup of the second. I hope so. We will see shortly. The third movie comes out this fall.

The movie starts off a year later after the first movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, ended. Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace, returns to Sweden from vacation only to realize that someone has framed her for triple-murder. One victim was her guardian from the original movie and the other two were new members of her journalist buddy Mikael Blomkvist’s team. The journalists were investigating a sex trafficking ring. Apparently all three of the murders were related and most of the movie consists of Salander and Blomkvist trying to find out who did it. The movie stays true to the realistic journalistic procedures that were on display in the first movie. Having said that, this is where the movie bogs down for a while. Many Swedish names are thrown about and lots of people are introduced. At times it was hard to keep track of everybody and the fact that everything was in Swedish did not help much. 

Another disappointing thing about this movie is that Lisbeth and Blomkvist spend the entire movie completely apart from each other. I especially liked their dynamic in the original and felt it was missed here. The new bad guys also don’t rise to the devilish of the family of Nazis in the first, but are still pretty scary. One of them is this huge blonde bodybuilder who has a rare disease that makes him impervious to pain. The other is Lisbeth’s dad. You may remember him as the guy she lit on fire in the flashback at the end of the first movie. What do you call it when a daughter wants to kill her father? It’s not an Oedipal complex. Did the Greeks have a name for that?

Lisbeth Salander continues to be one of the most compelling characters I have ever seen and Noomi Rapace’s performance, from the movies I have seen this year, should garner a couple of Oscar nominations. So much of the movie consists of Lisbeth investigating alone that most of Rapace’s acting is silent facial expressions. Now since Lisbeth Salander is such a stoic character, Rapace has a very tough job. She has to convey what Salander is feeling while at the same time keeping the character very controlled. Somehow she does perfectly. That face! It is one of the most captivating things I’ve ever watched. You know what Screen Presence is: When the character has a nude scene and I’m still more interested in what’s going on with her eyes. Now, that’s Screen Presence. The best performance by an actress I have seen so far this year is Rapace in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The second best performance by an actress I have seen so far this year is Rapace in “The Girl Who Played with Fire.” 

The movie does a rather cool thing in that it allows its heroine to not only be small but also look small. This is a rare thing in movies. Sure you have diminutive actors like Tom Cruise and Matt Damon running around, but the movie will usually employ some tricks to make them look taller than they actually are. For instance you can lower the camera, use close-ups instead of long shots, or cast an even shorter side-kick or bad guy. If the love interest is not a head shorter than the hero, he’s a small guy. That’s how you tell. In contrast, this movie seems to want to make it a point as to how small Salander is. They shoot her in wide shots so you can see all of her, they cast a taller woman to be her love interest, and the bad guy is an even bigger hulk. They even show her sitting on a kitchen counter in one scene. Her feet don’t touch the ground for chrissakes. (That’s no way to treat an action hero!) Actually I really like this and I like the look in Rapace’s eyes when she is about to fight a guy twice her size. There’s understandable fear not macho zeal there. This makes the movie all the more suspenseful. We feel afraid with Salander and wonder how she is going to get out of the mess she’s in. The fact that the heroine is small and knows it just makes the character that much braver and thus more likable. Perhaps we can allow male action heroes to look small someday. But I ask too much. 

The climax of the story reminded me of a bloodied, sweaty, and dirty Bruce Willis walking down the hallway screaming “Hans!” in the original ‘Die Hard.’ Like in that movie, the heroine here is allowed to (dare I say) not look pretty for a scene. Again I really liked it. That Noomi Rapace! She’s such a badass! The next movie comes out this fall. I eagerly await it. 

p.s. Rooney Mara has just been cast in the American version. That she is unknown is perhaps for the best.

The Other Guys (4/5 Stars) August 12, 2010

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay (Talladega Nights, Anchorman, and Step Brothers) is a stereotypical action adventure movie about an odd couple of N.Y.P.D cops. One is a take charge tough guy played by Mark Wahlberg, and the other is a nerdy desk mammal played by Will Ferrell. They are known as the Other Guys as opposed to The Popular Guys who are played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Those Guys specialize in the types of car chases and action packed machismo you see in run of the mill superhero/cops movies. Wahlberg, relegated to being Ferrell’s partner because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter, bemoans his sorry existence and takes it out on his partner. He calls Ferrell a “fake cop,” kidnaps him at gunpoint, hijacks his Prius and they both head out into the world to fight crime like The Popular Guys. Can Will Ferrell man-up and stop being such a pussy? Watch and find out!

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is a sly social commentary that isn’t as much a parody of regular cop movies as it is a veiled insult to the entire demographic the earlier paragraph (and this movie’s marketing campaign) would appeal to. Out on the beat fighting petty crime, Ferrel and Wahlberg stumble assbackward into something much bigger. The only problem is that they have no idea what it is. It involves a sleazy Wall Street type played by Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) and a huge investment bank named Llendl Corporation. Llendl’s company motto is “Were into Everything.” Wahlberg persistently assumes that drugs are involved. But as the movie points out, he only does this because he’s an idiot. It is the Will Ferrell character that figures out that they are witnessing a $32 billion dollar theft from unwitting investors in order to make solvent the huge investment bank. (In contrast, that high speed chase involving the Popular Guys at the beginning of the movie achieved nothing but the arrest of a couple of Jamaican’s selling marijuana). The Will Ferrell character is routinely bullied by the other cops (Rob Riggle amongst them) and called a pussy, a queer, a bitch, and several other epithets. His Prius, which gets great mileage, is also routinely derided for its unmanliness. This is all done in Ferrell/McKay style. So the insults are clever and we are invited to laugh at Ferrell. But then the movie’s plot does something quite extraordinary. It gives Ferrell’s character a smoking hot wife played by Eva Mendes and has him almost single-handedly solve an enormous crime that has as much complexity as the scheme in “Chinatown.” So was it wrong to laugh at Ferrell? Am I the idiot for having done so? 

The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is an absurdist comedy where realism is abandoned at every whim in order to get laughs. This is most evident in the presence of several ridiculous characters. One is a mild-mannered police chief played by Michael Keaton who moonlights at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and inexplicably quotes song lyrics from TLC. Another is Dirty Mike and the boys, a gang of homeless men that like stealing Priuses and having orgies in the back of them (“Soup Kitchens” I believe they’re called). There are also a host of very funny comic situations like a whisper fight at a funeral, Ferrell’s back-story as an accidental pimp, and the deaths of the Popular Guys via mind-blowing stupidity. Finally there is plenty of funny dialogue, the best of which is an argument about whether a lion or a tuna would win in a fight. The big question though is whether you can still take a movie seriously once the writer/director casts himself as Dirty Mike. Does Adam McKay want us to think? Or is this all for shits and giggles?

Perhaps this movie’s biggest fault is that it is intent on being all three movies. This makes the movie feel like it is constantly interrupting itself. Near the end when one of the movies becomes a little more interesting than the others (for me it was the social commentary) it seemed like a distraction when it changed course again. The parts of this movie are all very good, but there are too many parts and makes the movie seem overlong at points. This is a small complaint though. I would rather a movie gave me too much than too little and there is quite a lot here. 

Given the movies that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay have collaborated on, one might get the impression that they specialize in portraying arrogant alpha males behaving badly, but that would be an oversimplification. Alpha People are entitled to be arrogant to a certain degree if they actually know what they’re doing and are better at it than most people. What Ferrell and McKay are particularly good at conveying is Overconfidence. They know inside and out the type of guy who acts like he’s Alpha without actually being better. This type of guy is oftentimes confused with the Alpha Male because, at first impression, they both display a stunning amount of confidence. But there is usually a way you can tell them apart. In my opinion the main giveaway is if the guy equates his ignorance and stupidity with being manly. For example, it is common overconfident man-knowledge that the manliest beer in the bar is always the worst tasting god-awful swill you can find. Now if you knew anything about beer you might confidently point to a better brand. But it certainly takes more confidence to adamantly proclaim that the worst is the best. You may even go so far as to say that anyone who likes his alcohol to taste good is a pussy or fag. By the way, just the act of calling a guy a pussy is also very bold. Pussy, as we all know signifies feminine traits. So to call a guy a pussy in a derogatory sense is like insulting every woman in the room. If the main goal of your night out drinking is to get laid it should follow that you wouldn’t go out of your way to insult women. BUT, wouldn’t it also signify the enormity of your self-confidence to do exactly that and then be as forward as possible. I mean only someone who is truly better than other people, an Alpha Male, could get away with that sort of thing. So the logic goes around like this: You aren’t better than anybody. But to give the impression that you are better, you do something incredibly stupid because only a truly better person could afford to get away with it. And people do fall for it. Take for example, the death of the two Popular Guys. If they had actually survived their idiocy (which action movie stars do all the time), would you think they were stupid or badass? Why are some women attracted to bad boys? I mean that’s just retarded.

This line of logic leads to the sort of hilarious idiocy that is on full display in Ferrell/McKay comedies and especially in “The Other Guys.” The NYPD is full of officers that take macho pride in cracking down on petty crime while their very livelihoods are being put into risk through complicated financial schemes they find to boring and faggy to understand. A $32 billion theft is huge, but nobody besides the Will Ferrell character cares about the case. The Other Guys are ordered to turn over all the evidence to SEC, only to find out that the SEC agent is also the lawyer of the Wall Street scumbag he is supposed to be investigating. I assume that the makers of this movie we’re angered by the Wall Street fiasco of the past years. They wanted to make a movie about it but, at the same time, wanted to stay true to their chops of action/comedy. So in effect, what we have here is a subterfuge movie like Blood Diamond or Quantum of Solace. The audience walking into the theater has been promised silly action and comedy. The movie delivers on this promise but has an ulterior purpose. In this case: veiled ridicule for society’s idealization of ignorance. Of course the funny thing about making fun of overconfident people is that they won’t ever admit they’ve been insulted. They take the insult and brag about it. You can trick them, insult them, and laugh at them all you want but you will never win the argument. Take that Wall Street. 

Oh and by the way, Ferrell and McKay are huge pussies by having the safe, competent accountant married to an incredibly hot doctor. I mean she actually likes him and there is even a comic riff about them having great sex which apparently they enjoy equally. What fags.