Dumb Money

the everyday affairs of the financial world were made aware of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. A film about a bunch of meme-creating Redditors driving up a penny stock that forced Wall Street analysts to a reality check is expected to be funny. But little did I expect that Craig Gillespie’s film, based on ‘The Antisocial Network’ by Ben Mezrich, would turn out to be such an uncompromising laugh riot that glues you to the screen throughout its 100-minute runtime. Dumb Money feels like an infectious dark joke that tells of something severe and stark, one that ridicules what’s considered no laughing matter. In Brockton, Massachusetts, marketing professional and YouTuber Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is laughed at by his pals for investing almost $50 grand in call options in a penny stock of a long-struggling video game retailer called GameStop. “It’s the next Blockbuster,” says Gill’s friend and finance bro Briggsy (Deniz Akdeniz). But Gill believes in the stock, and with some encouragement from his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley), he continues to share his analyses to a small but loyal audience on a subreddit called WallStreetBets under the username DeepF***ingValue and on YouTube as Roaring Kitty. Rapidly, the stock price begins to surge and a ‘revolution’ begins, and though it seems to be led by Gill, we get the sense that a few have been sharing his sentiments. Behind those numbers on those balance sheets and charts are real people investing their hard-earned money on the say of a YouTuber wearing a cat-tee and a bandana. For frontline worker Jennifer Campbell (America Ferrera), having suffered through a disaster of a year due to the pandemic, this is the only hope to pay back her debt and take better care of her child. College student Harmony (Talia Ryder) wants to stick it up to the hedge fund firms who have long been accused of gatekeeping Wall Street, but her supportive girlfriend Riri (Myha’la Herrold) wants her to look at it as a means to pay back her student loan. There’s also the unhappy GameStop store employee and immigrant Marcos (Anthony Ramos), who needs the “tendies” — Gill’s term for the capital gains. The growing desire to scale up the capital heights, post the Wall Street crash in 2008, and the need to democratise the system all reached a crescendo at GameStop, which was when the Wall Street pundits and short-sellers who like to put down meagre retail investors as ‘Dumb Money’ were forced to realise that the internet was not some ‘fantasy land for nerds and weirdos’. And here we have Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), the founder of Melvin Capital Management that took a liking to short GameStop stocks; Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) and Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), hedge fund managers who help out Melvin Capital; and Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), founders of stock trading website Robinhood that infamously halted purchasing of GameStop stocks. What impresses from the word go is... Full review here: