No Capital in the Bay Area

I got an email this morning with the subject "CAPITAL Has Been CANCELLED."

"Wow!" I thought. Maybe Obama really is a socialist.

Of course, it was about Costa-Gavras’ latest film, Capital. Apparently the film’s American distributor decided against releasing it in the Bay Area. That seems pretty weird to me. I can’t imagine a better location in the country for a corporation to make a profit with an anti-corporation movie.

Anyway, now I don’t feel so bad about never having written a full review.

For what it’s worth, I gave the film an A+.  Here’s what I had to say about Capital:

Gad Elmaleh stars as Marc Tourneuil, a young bank officer who by a stroke of luck becomes CEO of one of the largest banks in Europe. Soon, an American hedge fund wants to do business with him. Or maybe the hedge fund wants to take over his business and destroy him. Early on, Marc shows some signs of scruples,but he’s soon playing the Americans’ games, laying off thousands of people in order to improve the company’s stock price. He’s definitely Capital’s protagonist, but I’d be hard put to call him the hero, since he spends so much time acting like a villain. Much of the film’s financial talk went over my head, but the human factors driving and being driven by the high-stakes poker game were all I needed to enjoy Capital.

I saw the film at its Bay Area premiere at this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival. You can read my report on the whole evening, including an interview with the director, here.