It’s called 99 HOMES…
You probably haven’t heard much about this movie. And I would speculate that it will probably have a pretty short shelf life in theaters. However it may find a larger audience when it hits On Demand and DVD.
If there’s a main theme to the movie it’s, Good versus capitalistic (bad) greed during the financially strapped housing market a few years back ago.
Forced evictions. Families being tossed out on the street by greedy real estate sharks doing the dirty deeds on behalf of banks holding the mortgages on the properties—and with the law on their side.
Here Andrew Garfield plays a construction laborer in the Orlando area during those volatile days when the economy totally tanked
He lives in a small home with his young son and mother, Laura Dern.
When he loses his job and misses several house payments, real estate shark Michael Shannon swoops in and immediately evicts them.
Shannon’s crew now moving their possessions onto the front lawn.
“America doesn’t bail out losers.”
Their only option is moving into a cheap motel which seems to be home to others in similar circumstances.
Think UP IN THE AIR of the repo biz with shades of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE thrown in for sad measure.
But Garfield is ambitious. So much so that he ultimately goes to work for the vary scumbag real estate mogul who evicted him in the first place.
Evictions and repos are mounting up and a really BIG deal looms on the horizon. Flipping houses during the real estate crisis. Yeah, that’s the ticket……
But to what extreme can Garfield continue to take it?
After all what he now sees and does on a daily basis is downright heartbreaking.
Will his selling out to the devil ultimately make a better human being out of him?
And will the one percent holding all the cards forever rule over of the other 99 percent?
An engrossing and ambitious melodrama.
As for its ending—well, that’s another story.
Our screening audience sure didn’t seem satisfied with it.
But so be it.
99 HOMES opens ‘wide’ this weekend to an ambitious score of: B.
(Reviewed at Cinemark, Merriam)
JACK GOES TO THE MOVIES Friday mornings during Kansas City’s Morning News with E.J. & Ellen on 98.1 FM, KMBZ.
Where did this movie come from? Why kept a secret?