For Your Consideration: '$upercapitalist'

A film with a symbol replacing a letter in its title is most likely awful, a lesson we should have learned after Se7en and I ♥ Huckabees. Just how awful such a "symbol" movie could be, however, remained unknown until $upercapitalist, the first feature from director Simon Yin, a movie so terrible it should have gone directly to DVD or cable television. Hopefully, blame is falling on the correct head for whoever green-lighted the distribution of this miserable project, a travesty that should have been recognizable from its hackneyed screenplay. Credit for that happens to go the leading man, Derek Ting, who is just as bad an actor as he is a screenwriter. According to this oddly worshipful article in Forbes, the film was made on a shoestring budget of about $500,000, and it shows.

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The mistake to distribute a mediocrity must have come from the fact that the story, such as it is, is somewhat timely, in the aftermath of the worldwide financial meltdown. Derek Ting plays an arrogant New York trader who goes in search of big money in Hong Kong, where he goes inside a company looking for information for his scheming boss back home (a sadly wasted Linus Roache). He manages to break free of his American counterparts (who are so shallow, bro) and learns the important lesson that one can make merely an obscene amount of money and have a family, without having to resort to unethical schemes that will destroy companies. Along the way, he connects his own pointless back story to that of the locals in Hong Kong. If I could have left after 20 minutes of this drivel, I would have.

This film opens today at Landmark's E Street Cinema.