Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Informant

It has been a long long time since I did a movie review. I am not that busy, but I just haven't had time to get to one. Yesterday, after I finished work, I headed out to the movies. My bike has a flat tire that I haven't gotten around to fixing, so I didn't have much else to do up here in Eden. I went up to Fond du Lac to see "The Informant". This is a movie based on the life of Mark Whitacre who became an informant for the FBI about a price fixing scheme that the company he worked for, ADM, was involved in.
It is a dark comedy that turns out to be not as good as all of the promos indicate. But it could be that the plot is a little too smart for me. It is hard to know if Mark Whitacre (played by Matt Damon) is really an idiot, or just acting as an idiot. What makes it more difficult to understand if he is acting dumb or playing dumb is the fact that he has a PhD in BioChemistry from Cornell. It is a hard plot to follow, at least I thought so. The most interesting / comical parts of the movie are when you hear Mark Whitacre's inner monologue. They reminded me a lot of Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts on Saturday Night Live. Matt Damon character reminds me of the skit on Saturday Night Live when Eddie Murphy dressed up as a white man. But again, I wasn't impressed by this movie. I will give it only a 4 out of 10.

1 comment:

Bubs said...

Clerk: What are you doing?

White Murphy: I'm buying this newspaper

Clerk: That's alright, there's nobody around. Go ahead, take it. Take it.

Murphy: Slowly, I began to realize that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free.