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As Good As It Gets

A Masterpiece!

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Former friends Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) and Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner) reunite for a power women panel. Naomi is a top investment banker with a hot IPO of internet privacy firm Cachet. She faces a glass ceiling especially after a problematic previous client. She's sleeping with corrupt trader Michael Connor (James Purefoy) who is desperate for inside information and is being investigated by US prosecutor Ryan. A programmer reveals a hack vulnerability to Naomi which Cachet CEO Ed vehemently denies. Naomi gets ambitious underling Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas) for Ed to sign an indemnity clause.There are moments of greatness especially with Anna Gunn holding the center of the stage. This is almost good except little false notes keep popping up. I'm guessing Blackberry paid for the mention but it's shockingly unreal how every character is playing up their Blackberry phones. I'm fine with people going darker in the end but Naomi needs to be fired as a scapegoat. The movie fails to increase the intensity in many scenes with the exception of the climatic trading day. I love that Erin is secretly pregnant but Ed's pass at her needs to be bigger and more dangerously private. One of the reason I love Naomi being chewed out by her boss is that there is no buildup. He just barges in and starts barking at her. It's very effective. The connection between Naomi and Samantha needs to be tighter so that Samantha's part doesn't drift off so easily. It's obvious when Naomi gets the info that even a rumor could sink the IPO. The way to heighten the drama is for Naomi to lay out the ending of the movie directly to Ed and for the ending to happen nevertheless. She should tell Ed not to fire Marin and he fires her anyways. It's already bad that she's sleeping with Michael and gets blindsided by him. She can come off as a bit naive despite her brilliant smarts. While I get the female position in the professional sphere, the movie is not pushing the drama hard enough.

I didn't know that Anna Gunn was the woman who also starred in Breaking Bad series, the one who became Walter White's wife. She looks so different in this movie. I think she doesn't look as feminine as she does in Breaking Bad. The movie started very slow for my taste. I didn't know what kind of business and troubles she gets herself into. But it got clearer in the half time of the movie (I guess). I imagined the guy with a tad messy look as Mark Zuckerberg who's offering his product to the market and Naomi's there to be his agent/mediator. Something like that: stock/share. While trying her ass off to be successful with her project, some people close to her try to sabotage her. Stabbers all around. What I hate from this movie is the voice of Anna Gunn. It's like she's whispering while her face has a strong look. It's just not okay. Her expression's mostly hard to understand. Is it just her trying to never let her emotion out? Is it what the script wanted her to do? I don't know. This made the conflict fall flat. Although it's not quite satisfying, I got some knowledge from this movie: the world of stock market.

I cannot understand how a movie like this gets a 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The characters are under-developed, the movie is slow paced even though it's meant to be a thriller. To top all of this the director while trying to create strong female characters has included all the society stereotypes women face (just for the sake of it) ex.The lesbian relationship between the two characters. This movie is feminist to the core. If the director really wanted to show strong female leads then she should've learned it from Katherine Bigelow. The only good things about this movie is a powerful performance by Anna Gunn and an above average performance by Alysia Reiner. A star for this. 2nd star for the story (not the execution) And 3rd for the effort it took to make this movie.

If this movie was a stock about to get its debut, it would flop worse than the mock company that appears in it.With 1,5 "good, correct" male characters (the VP's husband disapproved of her dedication to work, so he gets only half...), we have women in all the lead roles.The hero is a white lesbian, in a relationship with a black, very supportive woman and having to small kids, all perfectly adjusted.All the women are presented as being inherently good - even if some, driven by the machinations of the evil men above and around them, do bad things to advance their careers....All the men (except the aforementioned 1,5) are manipulative or outright bad, with all the stereotypes related to Wall Street.An uni-dimensional movie with a poor, underdeveloped story. A thorough waste of time.