Rollover (1981)

Very well executed

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This is the only movie I've ever walked out on; I even held out through Caligula! Boring, made no sense to me at the time and I could see no hope of redemption, so I left and waited in the lobby with a magazine for my date to finish watching the film. He understood it and enjoyed, but I was lost from the opening credits. Perhaps the fact that he's in business & understands computers and accounting principles helped his level of enjoyment. I felt akin to a foreign-language speaking person thrown into the middle of some major conference where I was not only expected, but required, to understand and follow what was being said.As previously stated, I'm an eternal optimist when it comes to movies; I fervently believe that they HAVE to get better. I knew this one was a lost cause early on. "Rollover" rolled over and played dead for this viewer. I wish I could have whacked it with a rolled up newspaper.

This was a 1981 movie Jane Fonda "got made" after her exploration of the dangers of nuclear power in the "China Syndrome" back in 1979. She was driving to tell the story of real money - gold and how OTHER parts of the world value gold as real money while the Americans don't understand it. (Note: And it's not about Jane. I don't even like Jane Fonda...her politics aren't supposed to be in the acting on the screen. At some point a movie - or any art - is not about the artist's personality, it's about what's on the page or the score or on the screen.)The plot line is about "outsiders" not rolling over their CDs in American banks and buying gold...and what the loss of those foreign investments means to the financial establishment in New York. I'll admit the acting and the romance are not top notch. So what? This movie was a "financial thriller" and there just ain't many of these movies made. Movies need bank financing, and banks usually won't finance anything that makes them look bad or stupid. (They show "I'ts a Wonderful Life" with Jimmy Stewart on TV only once a year now because it shows "run on the bank" at the Bailey Savings and Loan - not something the financial establishment wants Americans to even think about.) I'm a Certified Financial Planner and I recommend this movie in my classes along with Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" and "Boiler Room" as movies that shed light on the financial world in which we live today. In 2005, it's even more important for people to understand the relationships between gold and paper money as the cycle from the 1970's reasserts itself.And get over the Arab slights in the movie. They weren't the point back in 1981 and they aren't the point now. A lack of political correctness is not a reason to avoid this movie.

An over valued dollar, the system on the brink, the big bankers and their government stooges have gone too far. Sound familiar? The previous poster attributes the financial melt down in the movie to capitalism. Actually, the movie doesn't touched at all on the causes of the system breakdown. But it is not capitalism, but government interference in the market which would cause such a melt down. But it is fun to see central banking get its just reward, and to see gold emerge a winner.

The short side of the story is that this has to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Rythme-wise, the movie is dead. It makes you feel like you are attending a lecture on economy at the university. And to think that I watched the movie because it was described as a "thriller!"The story portrays an Arab plot to shake the foundations of global economy using the simple concept that there is alot more "printed" paper money than there is actual value out there in the world.First of all, the movie is offensive to Arabs. If this movie was made now, civil rights groups and Muslim/Arab groups would be all over it, in one scene, Jane Fonda says (about taking a loan from those Arabs): "I feel like a beggar asking them for money, and I HATE it!" and Kristofferson comforts her by saying: "You and the rest of the world!" This is an out right racist statement that wouldn't slip so casually as it did in 1981. Aside from that, the movie protrays Arab customs rather poorly, on one side, the director of the movie is keen on showing Arab rich people sitting on the ground and eating with their hands from one big plate (to somehoe portray primitivity) and forcing Fonda and Kristofferson to do the same (which doesn't happen in real life, they give guests plates and spoons if they need them), but the director makes a bigger slip of showing them shaking hands with Fonda and sitting right next to her in the dinner. That would not take place in the same societies that eat with their hands from the plates.Other omissions are plenty as well, portraying Arab countries and cities as vast areas of desert lands and tents doesn't portray what the Arab world looked like in 1981.From an acting stand point, Fonda is not too bad, but Kristofferson is awful. His "cowboy" acting style really misses the target in this one. The image of a banker who talks like a cowboy, behaves like a cowboy and tells his boss in the bank that if he doesn't hang up the phone he would smash his head.. This image is just not real. The way every night fall in the movie almost always ends with Fonda and Kristofferson making love is also not real for two people well over fourty as the movie portrays. So, you feel like the roles were written in a naive way. Not much attention was put into seeing how the characters fit into their perspective roles.Overall, this movie is not worth renting on video even, I would suggest waiting till its out there on TNT or TBS or something, in fact, it's not worth such a long review. (:-)))