99 Homes (2015)

Please don't spend money on this.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

So this was literally the most cringeworthy movie I have seen in a long time (rated 7.1 at the time). I have no idea how this rating is so high.The movie is about this scruffy fuccboi that's like 20 years old and somehow he has a 13 year old son and lives with this son and his 40 year old milf mom. It's 2008 and everyone is getting foreclosed on in this Florida neighborhood and one day this big bad man comes and forecloses on this ugly family. Ure supposed to feel bad apparently. I'm not gonna roast the rest of the plot its ratchet enough as it is.Literally there was not a single realistic part in the movie. From the ridiculous evictions to the family abandoning him for no reason (like how tf is the mom and son gonna be poor as sh*t one minute and then get all arrogant and reject living in a mansion) and then that standoff wtf!!!! The whole time the scruffy guy is having these heartwrenching internal conflicts, I swear to god half the movie his face is like a little crying baby. The director and screenwriter need to both kill themselves smfh

So guy gets evicted. I'm ALREADY against the guy because a) he couldn't pay off his mortgage, meaning myself has to pay for this guy via my tax dollars and b) he has a kid, which in his financial means he has ZERO business doing.So he lives with his Mom and kid. Whatever. They get evicted, Andrew Garfield's character ends up working for the guy, who is not so straight as he seems. I personally love this. America was founded on a cut throat mentality. Sure this is illegal and not as straight as 'The Founder' but whatever.So the whole thing ends with him selling his old house (that they got evicted from) and buying a new one with a pool, BBall court, and a giant huge area. His Mom starts freaking out about how she wants the original house and the KID SIDES WITH THE F'ING MOM!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? Look I and many friends got moved out of our house when we were 8. If I got a stupid pool, BBALL court, and GIANT house overlooking a lake I'd tell my grandmother to F off, and my grandmothers (both of them) weren't stupid enough to whine and B about some stupid trivial house that some dead guy built.Whole film started out interesting, but I literally closed the movie the last 10 minutes and felt I'd been raped. What a pathetic film. 6/10 for the start... -2 out of 10 for the ending, giving this a 2. Save your time.

I really wanted to like "99 Homes." I didn't hate it, but it is far from perfect. The skinny: Andrew Garfield is a construction worker who loses his home to foreclosure, unable to find work. He has to move with his young son (Noah Lomax) and mother (Laura Dern) into a hotel on skid row, but through a twist of fate find himself working for the man who evicted him (Michael Shannon). As he gets involved deeper in various real estate scams, his sense of morals has to be balanced against his need to provide for his family.Some of the action and the plot is very contrived -- there's no reason for this big time con man (Shannon) to bring in a protégé and give him so much access and place so much trust in him. At one point, he's given a crucial assignment, to deliver a forged document, that Shannon obviously could have just as easily done himself. You can always identify dodgy writing when the story has to be manipulated in order to put the characters in dramatic situations. Another problem in the film is that while Shannon's bad guy is quite nuanced, Laura Dern is forced to play the same wise grandmother role she plays in lots of Disney movies. After being kicked out of her home, you'd think she might not be quite so high and mighty about the chance to get ahead in life. The writers of the film can see more than one shade of evil, but only one shade of good. And that kinda gets at the heart of what's wrong with the film -- it's a film made in 2014, about events that took place in 2010, and yet the film's vision of America matches what Capra put on celluloid in 1946's holiday film "It's a Wonderful Life." According to the film, America is made up of mostly hard working and honest folk who might steal a little water or power from a bank-owned home next door but who would never -- ever -- EVER -- do anything to hurt anybody else in order to get ahead. Whenever the film tries to play at moral ambiguity, it easily betrays it for sentiment. How did we get here, and how do we get out? The film should either present no answers or it should present a better answer than it does. The ending feels like a definite letdown. It's not really earned. Andrew Garfield continues to show himself as one of the best young actors working, and this really should be sort of a star-making role for Michael Shannon as well. The film is well-directed, but the script is too manufactured.

The Global Financial Crisis inspired several chaos of capitalism movies each with a different spin on the same story. For example, Money Monster (2016) is a hostage thriller, The Big Short (2016) a comedy drama, and Inside Job (2010) a documentary. All try to make sense of financial fiasco but a standout amongst them is 99 Homes (2015). It is a tense hyper-realistic drama that literally barges inside the safe space of people's homes, tosses them into streets, and points the finger at the moguls of real estate.The opening scene graphically portrays the brutality of poverty when a mortgage defaulters' blood-splattered body is quickly removed and the family thrown out so that a soul-less real estate agent can claim the property. The agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) is accompanied by local police for evictions and repossessions and they call him "Boss". Unemployed builder Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is next to go and when he seeks a stay of eviction the local court sides with Carver. Nash shows guts and Carver offers him work in his thriving repossessions business that buys defaulted homes at rock-bottom prices. It turns out that Nash is good at it and there are several dramatic evictions in which angry mortgage defaulters are given a few minutes to grab their personal belongings before Carver's men legally empty the homes and force traumatised families onto what was their own footpath. Nash starts making real money from doing Carver's dirty work which includes fraud, theft, and the forging of documents to secure eviction orders. This is the ugly side of capitalism and Nash sinks deeper and deeper into a world of human misery. The stakes are raised when Carver is offered a multimillion dollar real estate deal that forces Nash to choose between the devil's wealth or moral redemption.This is a modern take on the Faustian dilemma of an ordinary man selling his soul, not for greed or greatness but to support his mother and kid. The acting performances are strong and the filming powerful, especially the close up hand-held camera scenes of evictions full of screaming palpable anger against real estate vultures. At almost two hours, it could have benefited from more time in the editing suite but overall the pace and tension are tight. It is an unsettling film but one that stays on message about the greed that preys on homes.