Molly's Game

Molly’s Game is a true story based on the autobiography of Molly Bloom who ran high stakes poker games in Los Angeles and New York before finding herself subject to an FBI investigation, standing accused of illegal gambling and colluding with organised crime gangs.

The film opens with Bloom (Jessica Chastain) trying to convince a lawyer, Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba), to take on her case. We then see the rest of the story through flashbacks.

Bloom was a decent freestyle mogul skier, albeit pushed by her overbearing father (Kevin Costner), who didn’t quite make the Olympic team for Salt Lake City in 2002. She ends up severely injured which terminates her skiing career. However her competitive instinct serves her well in later life.

She skips law school to becomes a waitress at a club in Los Angeles where she meets Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong), a real estate developer and she becomes his personal assistant. He has a side-job running underground poker games and he soon involves her in that.

Molly quickly learns how to appeal to the players, whom include many famous and wealthy individuals including film stars, to gain tips. This include the terribly un-PC approach of the ever lowering of the necklines and lifting of the hemlines of her dresses, until you think they’re going to meet in middle. As a career move it works and she runs rings around all of the men but she is smart too.

Her boss feels threatened by her popularity with the players and fires her but Bloom is

now well known enough to strike out on her own, which she does and steal Dean Keith’s players from him.

It all goes well until a few of her players start to run up unmanageable debts and then when she falls out with her number one player, known as Player X (Michael Cera), she is sidelined. However, instead of giving up she moves to New York to set up a new game.

Despite more success, she is again unable to cope with the players who cannot pay and she starts illegally taking a percentage of the pot to cover her losses. The mafia kindly offer to ‘help out’ with the bad payers and after she declines she is beaten up in her home. Then when one of her players is charged with running a Ponzi scheme everything begins to collapses and Molly herself becomes under investigation. 

I do love a real story and this is a good one, entertaining and well told. It cracks along at a speedy pace and boasts a marvellous performance from Chastain. She is phenomenal and she owns this film as much as Bloom herself owned the poker game. Highly recommended.

A Most Violent Year

A Most Violent Year follows Abel Morales (Oscar Issac), the owner of a successful, private oil company in New York City during 1981, which is statistically the city's worst year for violent crime.

Abel and his wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), started their business from scratch and built it up into the successful enterprise it is now. When hijackings of their vehicles start to happen and then start to turn violent, they struggle to keep their heads above water. Let alone expand, which they wants to do, by purchasing an important new property.

His workers are beaten, his oil trucks are stolen and he has 30 days to pay off a loan, so he wants answers from the police but none are forthcoming. 

Instead, led by DA (David Oyelwo), the police begin to investigate his company and eventually file charges. Certainty aspects of their company are a bit dubious... Why else would you hide all the company paperwork under the house?

Yet whilst everyone around him seems to be corrupt, even his wife, who is the daughter of a gangster, he refuses to stoop to their level. Morales by name, Morales by nature (perhaps a deliberate play on words here). He sees himself as an honest hard-working business man and he attempts to stay within the boundaries of the law despite all that is going on against him. It is fair to say his slightly eccentric wife favours a more direct approach. The question is, is he actually as bad as her and as bad as everyone else?

It’s a slow burning crime thriller, which could well be the best thing so far this year and Oscar Isaac is quickly becoming a man to look out for.

Zero Dark Thirty

‘Zero Dark Thirty’, half past midnight, is the codename for the US Navy SEAL raid that took out Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written/produced by Mark Boal, concerns itself with the CIA’s decade long search for him and more specifically the obsession of one woman to get her man.

It is a fictionalized account that is apparently as 'accurate' as they could be and is partly based on what was in the book ‘No Easy Day’ by Mark Owen, who participated in the operation. It is told very much from the US perspective and that has left the film open to accusation of propaganda. I have no idea how realistic it all is but I’m open to anyone’s account. It is also not your typically polished Hollywood production, thankfully, and is more of a documentary drama.

The woman with the obsession is Maya (Jessica Chastain). We never find out much about Maya other than that she was recruited right out of high school, so clearly she wasn’t your typical teenager. She maintains her focus on bin Laden throughout despite the numerous attempts by her, usually male, superiors to dismiss her theories.

The film opens in audio only from the 11^th September 2001 with recordings of the emergency telephone calls from people trapped in the Twin Towers. It is occasionally difficult to watch. There are a few torture scenes at the beginning, which although they aren’t too graphic are still quite disturbing. If it is disturbing to the viewer, it is also disturbing to Maya, at least at first. When we first meet her in 2003 at a 'black site' (e.g. secret site) she is observing another CIA officer called Dan (Jason Clarke) interrogate a detainee using waterboarding and other forms of torture. Maya looks distinctively uncomfortable throughout but she soon gets the hang of things.

Then via other terrorist atrocities such as the London bombings we gradually home in on bin Laden, zigzag style and perhaps more by chance than anything. As for anyone who is levelling claims of propaganda, I’m not sure if they mean this in a positive or a negative way because although they eventually kill bin Laden, at times it’s more of a film about their failure to find him. What were they messing around at?

Even then, some of their successes seem improbable, like when a terrorist finally spills the beans over lunch. Almost as improbable are their failures, the relaxation of security so that they won’t spook an informer ends in the entirely predictable explosion of a military base and several deaths. Not very bright.

Much of the film takes place in meetings full of middle management and at times it can be confusing as to the approach they’re taking or not taking. In the end the entire operation hinges on catching a courier who they seem to find only because somebody discovers something they overlooked years earlier. It doesn’t actually make the CIA look very good at all but they got there in the end.

Still, I was riveted by it all and I’m a total sceptic. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if ten years down the line they say well actually guys it wasn't actually bin Laden we killed... So if this is just sort of the truth, sort of as it is now, then that's fine. Good film.