By TeeJay Small
| Published 1 minute ago

Do you recall the 2021 GameStop stock trading story that took over the media and made a bunch of broke college kids thousand-aires overnight? It’s an incredible underdog story, about how the little guys can band together to take on financial behemoths, using the very tools that the billionaire elite employ to keep us down.

If you told that story with a stacked cast including Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan, Vincent D’Onofrio, and more, you might have a certifiable hit on your hands. Unfortunately, the film Dumb Money fails to deliver on any big laughs and reminds me of why movies about internet trends so often miss the mark.

The True Story Behind Dumb Money

In case you missed it, Dumb Money follows the true story of Keith Gill. Gill is a broke financial analyst living in Brockton, Massachusetts, who maintains a middling social media presence discussing low-value stocks with a small group of would-be day traders.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gill’s channels began to pick up major steam, especially as he bought up cheap shares of GameStop. As Gill reads into the financial reports, he arrives at the conclusion that the big firms are betting on Game Stop to fail, and shorting the stock with the intention of raking in billions from the business’s impending bankruptcy.

Thanks to an army of loyal Reddit users, Gill and his pals manage to fight back against Wall Street and raise the stock price of GameStop significantly. Doing so makes millions for people with pennies and takes billions from companies with hundreds of billions. If you’re not a complete sociopath, you should see it as a win-win for every party. Sure, the billionaires lose a fraction of a percent of their wealth, but they can dry their tears with lobsters on the decks of their massive yachts.

Reddit Forums Are Not Interesting

I wasn’t actively part of the GameStop stock push in 2021, but I did follow it as it took place. I was super excited to see Dumb Money when it released just a few years later, but I ultimately left the film extremely disappointed. As it turns out, it’s really hard to make a movie engaging or visually interesting when 90 percent of the action takes place on Reddit forums. The result is roughly 100 minutes of watching Paul Dano shout “holy shit” while sitting in a gamer chair, or watching America Ferrera make shocked expressions at her cell phone.

Dumb Money is also loaded with random, unnecessary, and downright obnoxious needle drops. The narrative hardly progresses for five minutes at a time without some licensed pop song stopping the action so we can watch people dance around pointlessly. Look, I’m not a monster, I enjoy Kendrick Lamar‘s “Humble” as much as anyone. But if I wanted to watch 6 music videos back-to-back, I’d be on YouTube, not Hulu. My estimate is that the team behind Dumb Money realized they didn’t have enough story to make a feature film and relied on these musical portions to pad the runtime.

Has Craig Gillespie Ever Met Another Human Being?

To further that point, it seems like director Craig Gillespie really struggled to juggle the moving parts behind this story. Sure, Keith Gill is the centerpiece of the narrative, but all the side characters feel more like cameo appearances than supporting performances. Nick Offerman’s character is meant to loom over the movie like a video game final boss, but he gets only about 5 minutes of screen time. Seth Rogen was all over the trailer for Dumb Money, but in the narrative, he has practically nothing to do. The two college girls created for the film are portrayed so obnoxiously that it makes me wonder if Craig Gillespie has ever met another human being in his entire life.

Personally, I’d skip this movie, but if you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, Dumb Money is streaming on Hulu. My best advice would be to throw it on while you’re cooking, cleaning, or looking at your phone. That way, you can soak up the interesting parts without committing to an hour and 44 minutes of Pete Davidson lip-syncing.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show filled with amazing characters, and fans love to debate which one is the best. Many prefer Buffy, the natural leader who uses her abilities as a Slayer to put vamps and other supernatural baddies in their place. Others prefer Willow, the geeky girl next door who eventually embraces her own magical mojo. Other fan-favorites include Spike (the bad boy with slick hair and a slicker accent), Anya (the former demon who loves nothing more than sex and money), and Faith (the sexy Slayer who goes from being Buffy’s frenemy to being her worst nightmare).

Few fans name Cordelia, and for good reason: while she grew as a character once she joined the Angel spinoff, she spends the vast majority of Buffy as a mean girl who does nothing more than disparage the other characters we know and love. After a while, it’s easy to start asking yourself a very blunt question: “why is Cordelia even in this show?” However, the answer is deceptively simple. She’s here as a constant reminder of how much Buffy (who was basically Cordelia before becoming a Slayer) has grown as a character. 

The Softer Side Of Sneers

In those first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia is seemingly the opposite of Buffy in every way. Buffy is defined by her duty to protect others, and she often misses out on the best parts of her high school days because she is busy fighting vampires. Cordelia, meanwhile, is a spoiled little rich girl who constantly berates Buffy for being so different than pretty much everyone else in Sunnydale High School.

While she gets some fun, sarcastic lines here and there, Cordelia can often feel like a superfluous character. However, she serves a more basic function in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by being an ongoing foil for Buffy. Like all good foils, Cordelia is everything that Buffy isn’t: she’s weak instead of strong, cruel instead of kind, and cowardly instead of brave. Nonetheless, Buffy is sometimes envious of Cordelia, like when she wishes she could be more like the resident mean girl because she thinks that’s the kind of woman Angel liked when he was still a mortal.

The Yin To Buffy’s Yang

Of course, Cordelia is a foil with a very specific purpose: she’s here to highlight how much Buffy has grown as a character since becoming the Slayer. Before Buffy moved to Sunnydale and fully embraced her destiny of fighting vampires, she was a vapid valley girl in Los Angeles. She just wanted to buy cute clothes and enjoy being popular, and she was so good at this that she was eventually elected Fiesta Queen. All of this is supremely shallow, of course. But to Buffy, this was the normal life she had to sacrifice in order to become the Slayer.

The constant presence of Cordelia highlights the significance of Buffy’s sacrifice. Until her family went broke and she had to move to Los Angeles, Cordelia enjoyed all the privileges of being Sunnydale’s most popular girl. All the women want to be her, and all the men want to be with her. She gets what she wants wherever she goes, and she generally gets to rule the school with the indifference of an imperious queen.

She’s A Killer Queen

In short, she has the life that Buffy desperately wants to have. When we see Cordelia sneeringly enjoying the fruits of her popularity, it’s easier to appreciate how Buffy sets her own needs aside for the sake of others. After a while, Buffy grows into her new life, and aside from occasional relapses (like her desperate bid to get elected homecoming queen), she never seriously tries to become a vapid Valley girl again. When we look at Cordelia, we see everything that Buffy is not, which only helps us to appreciate the Slayer’s growth that much more.

Buffy fans might hate Cordelia for being endlessly cruel to their favorite characters. But she is a constant reminder that Buffy, had she never become the Slayer, would be just as bad, if not worse. Greatness was thrust upon Buffy, and she rose to the occasion so well that she ended up saving the entire world, time and time again. Without Cordelia, the fandom might (like so many Sunnydale residents) very well take Buffy’s sacrifices for granted. Thanks to Cordelia, though, we got to spend three years appreciating how Buffy left her childhood behind to save everyone’s life but her own.

If you still really hate Cordelia, though, you should start rewatching Angel. By the end of that show, you’ll realize that nobody hated Sunnydale’s snarkiest Scooby more than Joss Whedon, who proved himself the meanest girl of them all by ruining her character (and, allegedly, Cordelia actor Charisma Carpenter), one insane plot point at a time. 

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 13 seconds ago

Sabotage, blackmail, extortion, it’s all another day at the office for the political representatives onboard Babylon 5. The intergalactic space station is supposed to be a neutral zone for trade, commerce, politics, negotiations, and all manner of diplomatic activity, but early on during Babylon 5’s run, viewers learned how dirty politics can get in the 23rd century.

“Born to the Purple,” the third episode of Season 1, is the first of many episodes to focus on the Centaurian Ambassador, Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), this time, he’s fallen for the classic spy move: the honeypot. 

Women Were Always Londo’s Greatest Weakness

It’s a classic move in real-world espionage that exploits sexual relationships for the purposes of blackmail and information gathering. In “Born to the Purple” Londo finds himself smitten by a gorgeous Centauri dancer, Adira Tyree (Fabiana Uderno), to the point that he’s abandoned diplomatic duties, including the crafting of a peace treaty with the Narn and his future best friend forever, G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas).

That’s an unintended side effect of her attention. The plan hatched by Adira’s owner Trakis (Clive Revill, the original voice of Star Wars Emperor Palpatine) is to steal the Purple Files and blackmail the Centauri into doing everything he wants. 

The Purple Files contain information on the highest ranks of the Centauri government, including secrets that very powerful, very important individuals don’t want to be made public. Londo is, allegedly, an important Centauran, and also an easy mark.

Adira manages to scan his brain while he’s sleeping off the drugs she slipped him, gets the information, and then has a change of heart and betrays Trakis. Trakis responds by convincing Londo she’s really a Narn agent and uses the lovestruck fool to help track down where she’s hiding. 

While Londo and Sinclair infiltrate the Dark Star club, G’Kar and Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson) meet with Tarkis to verify that he has the Purple Files. Talia uses the old psi-corp trick of saying, “don’t think of what I’m about to tell you,” and gets the location of where he kept Adria. The ability to read minds feels like a cheat code in a world of political espionage. 

Adira is eventually recovered, and her ownership papers are taken from Trakis, allowing her to stay, as a free woman, with Londo onboard Babylon 5. She breaks his heart when she decides to go to a Centauri planet instead. One day, she’ll return for Londo. 

The Honeypot Has Been Used Throughout History

“Born to the Purple” is the first hint at the incredible chemistry between Londo and G’Kar when they give the exact same advice to their subordinates at the negotiating table: “Don’t give away the home world.”

It’s a glimpse into the depths that hide beneath Londo’s foppish appearance and his unique view on the world of love. As a standalone episode, there’s not a lot connecting it to the rest of Babylon 5 outside of the fantastic character moments that would eventually define the series. Not every episode has to push the mythology arc forward, something that creator J. Michael Straczynski was well aware of, and the episode’s writer, Larry Ditillio, helped lay the foundation for the revelations of later seasons. 

Honeypots like Adria were used in actual, real-world espionage and popularized by Russia during the Cold War. Watch The Americans, and you’ll quickly realize most of their spy work involved pretending to be in relationships with the target.

An argument could be made that poor Anne Boleyn from The Tudors is an early historical example. If anyone on board Babylon 5 would fall head over heels for the honeypot, it would be Londo, and if anyone could eventually convince a honeypot to come back to him, it’s also Londo.