In the breezy, amoral heist comedy Mad Money, Fun With Dick and Jane meets 9 to 5 on the way to recession. If this uncomfortably timely movie lacks the political bite of the first and the cozy star chemistry of the second, it sputters to fitful life in the crooked grin of Diane Keaton, whose character, Bridget Cardigan, an upper-middle-class homemaker in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, develops an insatiable lust for larceny.
As in Fun With Dick and Jane, financial crisis inspires serious theft. No sooner has Don (Ted Danson), Bridget's husband, sprung the alarming news that he has been downsized from his cushy corporate job and is US$286,000 in debt, than she springs into action.
Is there a place in the workforce for an upper-middle-class woman of a certain age with a degree in comparative literature and no job experience? Yes, if she accepts humiliating work as a janitor in the local Federal Reserve Bank. Surrounded by money in a high-security environment of surveillance cameras, checkpoints and employees subject to random searches, Bridget, while pushing a mop, becomes obsessed with getting her hands on some of the dough.
The lucre she craves is literally filthy. Every day carts of old bills are transported under lock and key to shredding machines. Since the money is going out of circulation, diverting some wouldn't really be theft, would it? That's how Bridget rationalizes her scheme, in which she enlists two handpicked co-conspirators to change the locks on the carts so they can grab some moola during its transit to the shredders. She airily calls it recycling.
Bridget initially decides to steal just enough to allow her family to get out of debt and not have to sell its fancy house. But just enough soon becomes more than enough, as she amasses a basement's worth of dirty money.
Bridget and her partners - Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah), a single mother raising two children, and Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes), a flibbertigibbet who lives in a trailer with her husband, Bob (Adam Rothenberg) - are a demographically oddball threesome calculated to appeal equally to the Woody Allen, Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer crowds.
Having grabbed some loot without being caught, the women go wild and deliriously toss it into the air. As the movie invites you to share their delight, you may feel a tad unclean. Is wealth, ill-gotten or not, the answer to everything? Yes, yes, yes! proclaims the movie, directed by Callie Khouri from a screenplay adapted by Glenn Gers from the British television film Hot Money.
The attachment to the project of Khouri, whose screenwriting debut, Thelma and Louise, made her Hollywood's go-to gal for stories of empowered sisterhood, lends it a feminist credential. And because two of the film's women become their family's breadwinners, Mad Money is another fable of sisters doing it for themselves. Danson's stay-at-home husband becomes a reluctant collaborator who agrees to run a sham consulting business from the house as a cover story for their affluence.
The movie's weakest link is Holmes' underwritten Jackie, a one-note character who dances around the bank wearing headphones. While Bridget and Nina bond amiably (Nina is one of Latifah's meatier recent screen roles, which isn't saying much), Jackie registers as a ditsy afterthought. Nina is given a love interest in Barry (Roger Cross), a soft-hearted security guard who, spotting the signs of money stuffed under her shirt, remarks, "Unless you have very hard, rectangular breasts, we need to talk."
The film's other feminist predecessor is 9 to 5, another movie in which three smart women defy the system. But in Mad Money, Glover (Stephen Root), the stubbornly doltish bank manager who thwarts investigators by insisting his security is unbreachable, isn't half as pungent a villain as the evil sexist boss in 9 to 5.
This movie is awkwardly structured. Beginning with a scene of the thieves frantically disposing of their stolen cash by fire and flushed toilet as the feds close in, it jumps back three years, then periodically leaps ahead to show snippets of the women under police interrogation. The confusion is a sign that Mad Money doesn't trust its audience to stay seated until the caper is underway.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located