Because there was no close captioning on the DVD of
Molly's Game (2017), I don't have much confidence in my opinion of it. I couldn't make out approximately half the dialogue in a film that has perhaps the wordiest voice-over ever. It's the story of Molly Bloom, who went from Olympic skiing hopeful to the brains behind high stakes card games that included actors, athletes, businessmen and, eventually, mobsters. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, it takes the usual Hollywood liberties with the truth. I visited a couple of sites that cited what was false. The one aspect that irks me most is the fact that Molly's competitive skiing career was not derailed by an injury. She stepped away on her own. The second is that her on-screen lawyer, so vital to the narrative and played solidly by Idris Elba, is totally fictional, and seems blatant politically correct casting. A lot of the flick plays more like a documentary. What I enjoyed most was Molly's relationship with her hard-nosed father. I've never been impressed with Kevin Costner's acting, but he was excellent in this role - kudos. The awesome Jessica Chastain largely underplays the lead role. The movie received only one Oscar nomination, for Sorkin's adaptation of the memoir on which it's based, in which she names only the famous already outed by others. Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck were among them. The film was mildly successful at the box office, returning $59 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million. 80,000+ users at IMDb have rated it, forging to a consensus of 7.4 on a scale of ten. It's long, running 2:20. Whatever one may think of Sorkin's liberal views, his work is infinitely more literate than most of tinseltown's, and he has an impressive knack of blending the serious and the flashy. Here's a side-by-side of Chastain and the woman she portrayed:
Betty Goedhart of California, 85, reads about herself in the recent update of the
Guinness Book of Records. She's the world's oldest trapeze artist. Man - to look that good at 85.
Conditions were great but business was terrible today at the floating book shop. My thanks to the woman who bought
Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries by Ramsay MacMullen, and made out a list of pro-Trump sites to visit. I don't know if I will, even though I support the president. The less politics, the better, I say. Lou also stopped to chat. At a flea market recently he bought two baseball figurines, a pitcher and batter, for a buck each. He looked them up on the web and discovered they're from 1940 and worth $999 each. He's looking for the third piece of the set - the "empire," as he called it, a common Brooklyn misnomer back in the day. Well done, sir.
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