Movie Blog Post: GOLD

by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor

 ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD

Tinsel & Tine’s Look at the Movie GOLD

When I think of mining for gold what immediately comes to mind is a dirty old bearded prospector during the California Gold Rush, trying to either stake a claim or jump a claim. I don’t picture someone as confident, beautiful and sexy as Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez) or a loser kinda guy like Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey) and I certainly don’t think Bromance, but that’s what you get in director Stephen Gaghan (Writers: Patrick Massett, John Zinman) GOLD.

Let’s define a few basics: “Bedrock” is the solid hard rock of the earth’s crust–like a cliff or like the solid rock you see in highway road-cuts through the mountains. “Streambed” consists of all of the rocks, sand, silt, gold, and other sediments that end up in the bottom of a creek or river. Streambed always lies on top of bedrock. A “lode” gold deposit is gold that is still locked up in solid rock, often contained in quartz veins. “Placer” gold deposits are created after erosion has broken the gold away from the lode and deposited it elsewhere. There are different kinds of placer deposits. The difference primarily has to do with how far away from the original lode the gold has traveled… READ MORE The New 49’s True Life Gold Prospecting Adventures

Kenny is a guy riding high, working for his father’s (Greg T. Nelson) mining business and trying to impress a slightly cheap looking barmaid, Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard). Cut to 8 years later, Kenny’s father has died, he’s 30 pounds overweight, balding, (same bad teeth) in debt and struggling to keep his father’s legacy alive.  When things look the darkest, he has a dream about finding gold in Indonesia. This triggers a memory of a guy he met briefly years ago, Michael Acosta, a geologist who had made a success in Copper some years back. Kenny then sets out, selling the gold watch he gave Kay during their courtship, to find Acosta and convince him to partner up with him. That turns out to be the easy part, surviving malaria, Wall Street (where once again Corey Stoll plays a corporate baddie) and eventual “Bre-X” scandal, turns out to be a pickax up the butt.

And so, for my very first conversation with him [McConaughey] when he actually portrayed the character, we were getting together to talk about the script months and months and months before we started shooting. He turned away and he turned back and he had been fully inhabited by this guy, so, he hadn’t gained one pound at that point. His hair was his normal hair and suddenly he turned into this person. Just like you are sitting across from me. 100%. Body language, posture, weight, tiredness, voice. Everything. And I just looked at it and I started writing it down. He was improvising and I was writing it down, and all the stuff he said in that first meeting that just popped out of him like in an inhabitation of the script. I actually snuck away and went to the bathroom and I texted my wife. I said, “This is so much better than you could imagine. This is like watching a real artist be an artist.”

It didn’t feel like it served my interest to dig in to Bre-X, and that’s the opposite of the way I worked on say Traffic or Syriana. I do a lot of research, and it’s all based on true things and every story in them are true. They are all based on real things and real people. Real voices. And this felt like I just wanted the lens to be a little further back…I wanted it to be a fable of capitalism, a fairy tale. I didn’t want it to be a literal interpretation of something. LRM Interview with GOLD Director Stephen Gaghan READ MORE

Bottom Line: I feel Gold is Wolf of Wall Street (click for T&T post) meets American Hustle (click for T&T post) with a little bit of McConaughery’s own 2008 movie Fool’s Gold mixed in.  Unfortunately, the movie isn’t getting very good reviews, and I agree it’s not brilliant, but it’s engaging, especially in telling the story from the vantage point of a character like Kenny Wells.  I’m also a sucker for movies about friendship, betrayal and loyalty.

T & T’s LAMB (movie bloggers association) Score: 3 outta 5

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