$.98 Movie (Non-)Review: Coming to America 2

The process of creating art is hard.  Creating art by way of an assembly line is terribly difficult.  And creating art that finds widespread acceptance among consumers is exceedingly rare.  Eddie Murphy is one of the few people who have managed to pull off the elusive trifecta of creating a body of work over decades which is of consistently high quality and is commercially successful.  He has even pushed the envelope on his considerable talent with noteworthy dramatic performances as in Dreamgirls. The point here being Murphy has earned the benefit of presenting us with occasional flops. 

But Coming to America 2 sucks.  I mean... it's really awful.  It's Best Defense bad; Meet Dave bad.  It's not as if I held expectations the sequel would recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the first movie.  I don't believe I was influenced too much by the advance hype.  I was hoping for a mildly entertaining update on the lives of Akeem, Semmi, and other characters from the original; something I'd watch just to pass time.  However, CTA2 failed to meet even this minimal standard.  I actually passed out after about 35-40 minutes out of sheer boredom.  And to think I turned away from my normal routine of Sunday morning public affairs TV for this.

I'm kinda, sorta okay now with having watched this bomb though, because as I stated earlier Murphy's body of work earns him the occasional pass.  I did get an extra hour of sleep.  I dreamed I was a studio executive about to reject a proposal for a sequel to a classic movie or TV series... or worse, a remake.

Fast Times in the Slow Lane on Wall Street

The constant pace of technological evolution has again stirred the waters At The Bottom of the Well as it seems every third person on social media fancies themselves a business coach or financial advisor.  I understand there's a growing cross-section of folks motivated to inspire everyone toward financial security and have no problem with it.  I want to believe most of them mean well.  But, it's these... motivational speakers' (?) pushback against putting any real effort toward understanding business basics, finance in depth, or the very product/service/activity they're hyping that's unnerving.  Even hacks tend to know a great deal about their subject matter; it's just that they disregard transparency and disclosures for turning a buck.

My earliest encounters with this phenomenon online were with acquaintances who were pushing one of several direct sales/MLM/network marketing opportunities -- some of whom were sometimes hawking more than one at a time (!) -- as the road to personal economic salvation.  There are two giant flaws with this approach: one, few people are cut out to be entrepreneurs; two, the hard sell (including the use of funnels) is better suited for selling high-ticket items such as real estate or automobiles. But cellular phone service? Or energy? Forex trading software?  I'm not suggesting MLM is illicit or inherently ineffective.  It's just that direct sales... Hell... sales in general ... isn't for most people, especially when the company offers practically no support and the 'independent representative' has to rely upon their social capital to recruit new reps and moving volume in order for the 'business' to earn decent money.  Once, a female acquaintance and her brother took to bickering with me over the cryptocurrency scam BitConnect.  The brother trolled me with selfies from BitConnect conferences and screen shots flexing his supposedly exploding account balance until just days later the con was exposed and the whole racket fell apart.  Naturally, dude ghosted everyone.  Another acquaintance held classes on teaching people how to buy Bitcoin notwithstanding the fact advising investments without a license or promoting securities without making certain disclosures is illegal. 

Many of these mountebanks and hustlers will state they're not economists, CPAs, CFPs, brokers, dealers, or even business owners of any type as if the announcement magically excuses them from any responsibility for trafficking in nonsense and disinformation.  'I'm just sharing information', they'll say. However, when we ask them to explain what's behind the performance of whatever investment they're promoting at the moment, the response is, 'the price is going up', as if they're real-life characters from the movie Idiocracy ("It's got electrolytes").  It is this attitude that was at the root of the recent WallStreetBets/Robinhood/GameStop pump-and-dump scheme that's still costing retail investors millions and destroying public confidence. 

The nature of how we use social media indicates we're going to see more of this stunting in the future, and so the best defense is to ask questions and otherwise do your own homework.  Keep in mind many of the people appearing to volunteer business or investment advice often have no skin in the game whatsoever by way of professional experience or training to qualify as reliable sources.  We owe it to ourselves to always measure twice, cut once.