#Brian moneymoney money movie#

But dollars are not backed by gold, or anything else.

People use them because they trust that others will value them, and because the government says it stands behind them. Today, the Federal Reserve controls the supply of dollars. Shelton is under consideration to be President Trump's next Federal Reserve pick. 'All kinds of constitutional freedoms, and this moral commitment to maintain the value of the money, were swept out,' says Judy Shelton, director of the Sound Money Project at the Atlas Network. during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt even confiscated private holdings of gold in order to devalue the dollar. 'And after losing the war, Germany suffered the infamous Weimar hyperinflation.' went off gold,' the documentary's narrator notes. 'To print money to pay for the conflict, Europe and the U.S. World War I was the first big event that shook up the consensus around gold. Governments throughout history have often resorted to inflation when they couldn't raise enough taxes. The re-issued coins, critically, also contained less gold than the old ones. 'They would call in all the coins, melt them down, reissue them-of course, with his picture on them,' according to Jack Weatherford, author of The History of Money. The Roman Emperor Nero was one of the early creators of inflation. The stability it brought to markets helped enable massive economic growth.īut a gold standard didn't always ensure stability. They tried all sorts of things, including backing money with crops, silver, and salt. 'Salt' is where our word 'SALary' comes from.Įventually, most people settled on gold, which was used up through the mid-1900s to back currency. Stossel presents an abbreviated version of the documentary, which notes that throughout history, people needed a way to assign a fixed value to money. Imagine if that floated each day that would make life chaotic.' We have 'sixty minutes in an hour sixty seconds in a minute. Lelouch seems to be out of breath sometimes he’s a diligent comic director but not a gifted one, and he can’t really handle a plot this complicated.'It has to be fixed in value,' says Steve Forbes in his new documentary, In Money We Trust?įorbes notes that money has to be reliable, like a clock. But Tati’s movies are like Swiss watches, labored over with infinite care for the smallest piece. Lelouch also admires Tati’s gift for introducing a prop or character and then getting an unexpected laugh with it 10 minutes later. Lelouch, like Tati, stays in long shot a lot of the time, proving along the way that when Chaplin said: “Comedy is in long-shot, tragedy is in close-up,” he should have added: Provided there’s something funny going on in the long shot. I can’t prove it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Lelouch had Jacques Tati on his mind when he made “Money, Money, Money.” He steals the Tati style but leaves Mr.

#Brian moneymoney money movie#

Sometimes there’s a funny one-liner, sometimes a nice sight gag, but for the most part the movie just lies there. And he holds some of his shots so long that any possible humor simply dissipates. Yet for some reason Lelouch has his characters pad around and mumble at each other. It’s good for a laugh or it’s not good for anything at all. This material needs timing like Allen’s in “Bananas,” or Brooks’ in the classic “The Producers.” It’s slapstick stuff.

As the picture closes, they’ve got their hands on the Pope. Then they kidnap a revolutionary leader, and sell him back to three different bidders at the same time. First they arrange the self-kidnapping of a pop singer ( Johnny Halladay), who pays them for the publicity he gets. You’ve got to work in the key fields: Show business, revolution, and religion. But then their self-appointed leader sets them up with a crash course in the way big money is to be made. When the picture opens, they’re aiming too low: One gas station attendant is pumping gas into his private hose instead of into the customer’s car, for example, and a guy who works at Michelin is stealing tires. Lelouch gives us a band of 5 two-bit thieves and puts them through an education in the really big ways to make money. That’s too bad, because the movie’s premise is basically a good one. But the movie should have been directed at the breathless pace of a Mel Brooks or Woody Allen: Lelouch, who has apparently come down with a case of terminal whimsy, throws away laughs with his lazy timing. Claude Lelouch’s “Money, Money, Money” suffers from an almost fatal malady, for a comedy: It maintains the wrong tone from beginning to end.