Greed (2019)
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
A retail billionaire's 60th birthday party is celebrated in an exclusive hotel on the Greek island of Mykonos.
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23 films that influenced Greed
What critics say influenced Greed
So far, so good, but Greed borrows all the bad ideas from McKay’s sadly influential The Big Short .
Although Erich von Stroheim’s mauled 1924 masterpiece “Greed” is nearly 100 years old, it is sufficiently monumental that adopting its title can still seem like an attempted flex.
It was the character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in Oliver Stone's Wall Street who argued: "Greed is good."
In Greed, Winterbottom goes after the rich and the decadent with satire, employing his usual muse Steve Coogan — once again at his obnoxious finest.
So far, so good, but Greed borrows all the bad ideas from McKay’s sadly influential The Big Short .
In detailing how the system works, “Greed” borrows a few pages (and a comic/furious tone) from “The Big Short.”
On the one hand, the film yearns to be a British version of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Vice , which use formal experimentation and humour to explain the financial crisis and the career of Dick Cheney.
In the production notes of “Greed,” Winterbottom says that when he was seeking financing for the movie, he told potential investors that the tone of “Greed” would be similar to “The Big Short,” writer/director Adam McKay’s 2015 Oscar-winning satire of Wall Street’s manipulation of the U.S. housing market.
Recent films such as The Big Short and The Laundromat have explored the division between the rich and the poor.
This is where Greed closely resembles The Big Short, a better film that also stopped its plot to teach its audience.
But, in what could be intended as an homage to Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” the movie is overstuffed with supporting characters, subplots and non-chronological timelines within timelines.
Winterbottom’s screenplay has pretty obviously been inspired by Orson Welles’ great “Citizen Kane.”
Borrowing from French literary history (see roman à clef), the term applies to a film that is a thinly veiled portrait, often satirical, of a real-life figure; think of John Travolta’s version of Bill Clinton in Primary Colors, Orson Welles doing an loose approximation of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, or even Meryl Streep’s glacial take on Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada.
Structured a bit like Citizen Kane hot-glued to the front of an Altman ensemble shamble, it's a wobbly but amusing pic that only really raises eyebrows at the end, when it briefly behaves like a cry for global economic justice.
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It was the character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in Oliver Stone's Wall Street who argued: "Greed is good."
Likewise, if one says, "Greed is good," it's not difficult to picture Michael Douglas playing the slick corporate raider Gordon Gekko in 1987's "Wall Street."
Not since John Belushi went to a frat party in Animal House have so many people on screen been making merry in togas.
He throws himself a decadent, "Gladiator"-themed 60th birthday bash on Mykonos (inspired by the Ridley Scott movie), complete with a pre-fab Colosseum and a massive lion waiting in the wings for his close-up — or maybe his dinner.
Some parts of it reminded me of Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and the way that movie portrayed its protagonist.
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Charlie Chaplin did a much better job at satirizing capitalism in the brilliant, funny and charming Modern Times.
Borrowing from French literary history (see roman à clef), the term applies to a film that is a thinly veiled portrait, often satirical, of a real-life figure; think of John Travolta’s version of Bill Clinton in Primary Colors, Orson Welles doing an loose approximation of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, or even Meryl Streep’s glacial take on Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada.