Movies watched in October 2011

Glengarry Glen Ross -  an all-male casting movie (except for the coat-check girl at the Chinese restaurant), about real estate agents that need to sell better or they will get axed. Al Pacino is the salesman that manages most sales per month, while Jack Lemmon is the one that is almost being fired. Alec Baldwin plays the major asshole that has the best lines of the movie. It is an excellent movie, but rather depressing (throughout, and more so towards the end).

The Town, by Ben Affleck and with Ben Affleck. He is a young man from Charlestown, a neighborhood of Boston well known for breeding bank robbers (dunno whether that is true or not). He is the brain of the operations, while his other Irish-American friends are the hands etc. He starts dating the girl that was the manager in one of the banks they robbed and that was taken hostage by them, and wants himself out of the bank robbing business, but is forced to make another robbery. It's a pretty cool movie.

Margin Call - about the Wall Street crash, or the 24 hours before it. I don't remember *which* Wall Street crash, but I think it was the 2008 one. Some investment bank analyst realizes that investments have been sold outside of their risk margin (or something like that, as I have no clue what it is all about), and basically everything was overvalued and things were going to collapse soon, and some people need to be sacrificed and fired. It has some really famous people (Demi Moore, Jeremy Iron, Stanley Tucci - I like Stanley Tucci - , Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, etc), nothing really happens during the movie yet it doesn't feel that long. It's just mood, mood, oh something bad is going to happen soon what do we do, and then the movie is over.

Atonement, based on Ian McEwan's homonymous book. I have mixed feelings about this movie. At some point in the middle of watching it I thought it was pretty crappy, then near the end I started liking it again. I haven't read the book yet so I can't tell whether I like it better than the book or not. A friend said there was good acting in it (which I disagree) but the movie wasn't good and another friend loved the movie, so I decided to keep the movie for a while and maybe watch it again some other time.