MOLLY’S GAME is the directivational debut of playwright/The West Wing creator/screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (MONEYBALL, STEVE JOBS), and man is it ever Sorkiny. It revolves around the legal defense of a woman who ran an illegal poker ring, so there is law, legal strategy, business procedure and poker all out there needing to be explained and waxed poetic about by fast-talking geniuses constantly on the verge of dropping an anecdote about the 1942 Olympics or the Warren G. Harding administration or some shit that at first sounds like they got sidetracked with trivia but turns out to be a deft analogy to drive home the point they’re trying to make. And the protagonist Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain, MAMA) narrates the shit out of it and skips around in time, talks about her childhood and her Olympic skiing accident and what not. It looks good and the performances are excellent but yeah, dude, a writer’s writerly writer definitely wrote this writing here.
Sorkin seems like a guy who obsesses over some story he read about in a magazine a while back and he won’t fucking shut up about how fascinating it is and you’re like “Okay Aaron, young Hollywood intern stumbles into running high stakes poker game, sounds great Aaron anyway I gotta get going,” but then when he makes the movie you realize he was right, it really was a compelling story when presented exactly as he knew how to present it. (read the rest of this shit…)
I’ve been writing Expendables-related reviews for weeks because to me that was the movie event of 2010. That’s just the way I was raised. But according to The Internet the most important and historic release last weekend, possibly this year, possibly in our lifetime, most likely within this epoch, and almost for sure within whatever is a hundred times bigger than six epochs, or at least since KICK ASS… is this movie for the youths called SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD. It’s based on a comic strip of some kind, which explains why it’s so historically inaccurate. They don’t even mention the Mayflower once, and it’s a total whitewash of what we did to the Native Americans. To be fair it does take place in Toronto. Maybe their pilgrims were different, I don’t know that much about it. 
Merrick here…
