Michael winterbottom

Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to any living person is purely intentional. (Hello, Sir Philip Green.) Plenty to work with, you would think. Low-hanging fruit and all that. But as the characters are so feebly sketched and the ‘jokes’ — ‘jokes’ in quotation marks; always a bad sign — are so heavy-handed it drags (and drags) rather than flies. Greed is good, greed works, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street. But in this instance it isn’t. And doesn’t. Greed is good, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street.

It’s always best to eat before you go to a dinner party, just to be on the safe. The same goes for weddings, but more so, because they go on so long. As a unprofessional musician who’ll play it if you’ll hum it, I’ve attended more weddings than Elizabeth Taylor multiplied by Zsa Zsa Gabor to the power of Mickey Rooney. Usually, the father of the bride spoils the fun. Weddings should be marathon festivities with endless food and rivers of free booze, but they usually tend towards reheated salmon, dysenteric chicken, emetic fake fizz, and two of the saddest words in the history of human socializing, ‘pay bar’. Jay, an Englishman of Pakistani extraction, is an enterprising fellow.