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.

Juno

Tonight four-time Oscar nominated Juno. Nominated for best film, best original screenplay, best actress (Ellen Page who plays Juno) and best director (Jason Reitman, his second film, following ‘Thank You For Smoking’).

Juno MacGuff tells us ‘it all started with a chair’. This the chair that the sixteen year-old manoeuvred her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) on to. The chair where she had sex with him and ended up pregnant. To her credit she then refuses to become a victim of her circumstances and explores her options, although without seeking anyone else's advice. In the end, she bottles out of an abortion and instead finds adoptive parents in the local freebie ‘Penny Saver’ newspaper, which is a bit like ‘Loot’ I suppose.



I'm afraid this really isn’t my sort of film at all and I don't really want to criticise it but it's been 'nominated' so I feel I ought to. I find the first half a real drag and what makes it worse is that everyone talks in a pretentious American teenage slang which is extremely annoying and that’s just the adults. The jokes aren't very funny and the ticking off of an ultrasound engineer is just embarrassing.

Juno herself is portrayed as a cocky, clued up individual. A pretty smart one at that, which makes it a bit unbelievable that she was stupid enough to get herself knocked up in the first place, particularly as it was her who planned the seduction. A broken condom excuse would have been more believable and a better message to send out.

From this point onwards everything actually goes swimmingly for Juno. Her parents are supportive, she doesn't get kicked out of school, it's hinted that her classmates shun her but they don't really seem to, and her boyfriend doesn't disappear over the horizon. That's despite the fact that she treats him like dirt, which he doesn’t deserve because he clearly adores her. She's a selfish girl who really needs a good hard slap to knock some sense into her.

Luckily the film does settle down and the second half is better. The film even manages to deliver some more natural humour and emotion. This is mainly due to the focus switching to the couple who decide to adopt her baby. The wife, Vanessa is the desperate for a baby type. The husband, Mark is clearly not, he's a typical bloke, and he'd rather be a rock star. Juno and Mark find common ground in music and splatter movies. Although for no explained reason she's into 70's punk while his era is more the 80's. All the same they have more in common that Mark and his wife do. It seems at one point that they were destined to get it on together, despite the twenty odd years between them, but the film ducked that potential issue, which was a shame. He does eventually leave his wife and I almost stand up and cheer, because Vanessa is awful.



L says it was a nice romance but there wasn’t really any romance in it until the last ten minutes. Juno’s Dad, who is excellently played throughout, gives a good description of whom you should love and Juno decides that she does love her poor on-off boyfriend, who she's pretty much ignored throughout, after all. Her father should have told her this earlier, preferably right after he'd administered the previously mentioned 'good hard slap'. Had he done both early enough it might have saved her a lot of bother.



Now I think oh God she’s going to ruin it all and keep the blessed baby but thankfully she doesn’t. Juno and Paulie get all romantic while Vanessa goes it alone as a mother. So in the end, we end up more or less where we started with another single parent on the block.

It's an ok movie but nothing special and pretty lightweight. It's an ideal Sunday night sort of film. You just know everyone is going to live happily ever after and they do. Which for a film which raises a lot of ‘issues’ is odd but it just can't seem to be bothered to deal with them.

It's certainly not worthy of any awards. Please. Ellen Page is good in the role without being totally convincingly. The script is ok but is full of holes. Hardly in the same league as the Coen Brothers.