2023, Nicole Paone (Friendsgiving) -- download
Patrice (Uma Thurman, Batman & Robin) runs a not-currently successful gallery in NYC. She's part of the art world, deeply embedded in the nonsense lingo you see written on those cards next to the art. She also does a lot of drugs and since sales are down, she owes him money. She gives him an unsellable piece of art instead, and that gives his boss Gordon (Samuel L Jackson, The Hateful Eight), or The Black Dreidel, an idea. Gordon, who runs a bialy bakery (polish "bagels", generally lacking a hole), cleans money for mobster Andrei, but their front shops have been getting caught and shut down. But galleries sell nonsense for vast amounts of money all the time, and since Patrice has a money problem, they could work together. His enforcer Reggie (Joe Manganiello, Magic Mike) will make the art, Patrice will log it on the books, Andrei will "buy it" and Patrice can cut them a check. Clean money. Exceeeeept, Reggie's art gets noticed, and Reggie actually gets into it.
This is a middling, enjoyable, crime caper movie. It starts off rather weak, the characters are all rather paper thin, but once it gets up and running, once Patrice embraces the art work of The Bagman (Reggie kills people by suffocating them with bodega bags) and genuinely sells it to her clientele, it becomes kind of engaging. Kind of. This is not high quality by any means, which of sort of sounds like I am justifying enjoying it, but sometimes just seeing fun things play themselves out, where the actors are not phoning it home, makes a story rewarding. For me, the weakest part remained the satire of the art world. Sure, most people think art is all bullshit, that anything can be art, and considering we live in the world of NFTs, who can blame them, but it would have been nice to see at least one artsy fartsy say, "Wait, this is a joke right? We are actually considering it art?"
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