and reveal your intended methodology and means of repayment while under the influence of NZT48 if you've already quadrupled your money 4 days straight?
Adds unnecessary physical risk and he would have had 100K+ in 2 more days anyway.
"If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me..." -Professor Rohl
outstanding point
shareThis never made sense to me either. He was basically tripling his money every day. In a month his little bit of money would have been worth millions it was pointless to borrow from a gangster. You would think a drug that made you so smart would make you smart enough to not deal with someone like that. Just silly. It would have been better if just the Deniro character were the villain.
shareIt would have been better to the plot if Morra had borrowed the money from the gansta pre-NZT usage as it would tie in nicely with his lazy, struggling character.
shareAbsolutely!
I think the plot could have basically been where he needed to clear some stale debt from his now dead ex-brother-in-law, with the thug. The thug could be hot on Eddie for the cash, thinking they were full brothers. This would drop into the story nicely for the rest of the film with the thug interactions thereafter.
Excellent point. I think everyone knows that old trick about doubling your money daily, even if just starting with a penny. Before a month's past you're talking millions.
shareQuoting from the movie:
"Armed with Vern's last 800 dollars, I made 4000 in a day."
"It was too slow."
Whether you like it or not, there is your explanation.
He was hyper-focused and highly motivated to make bigger moves on a faster time scale.
Whoa, wait. That explains why he took the loan, I agree. But when he was making in the stock market and getting famous wouldn't he have 100k to pay the shark back? This seems like a terrible plot hole. In 10 days he made 2.3 million, as said in the meeting with DeNiro at 40min runtime.
shareAnd where did he get that start-up investment capital?
Even though many dislike how he came about it, the plan he had seemed to have worked. To be honest, I also didn't like it but knowing that risks have to be taken for faster results, I can see his course as being one possible way of obtaining his goal.
Yes, that was the explanation...it's just a stupid explanation.
800...100k if he's really doubling every couple days the difference is negligible and i cant see how someone so smart would find the risk reward ratio acceptable.
yes, obviously the plan seemed to have worked - because the same people who wrote this part of the plot also wrote the rest of it and made it so the "good guy" couldn't fail.
but this made the entire movie hard for me to enjoy. in an otherwise well acted and interesting movie (even if it did follow the exact same general plot of every drug movie ever made save the ending) this was the weakest part of the plot and the only reason the loan-shark was in there at all was because they couldn't think of a better way to finish up the story. i think that entire part of the story could have been taken out. maybe get rid of the murdered socialite and have him kill the loanshark in the same fashion (well, minus the sex scene)
there are better ways for a smart guy to get fast cash -probably even faster ones that don't involve a thigh-skinning mobster.
hell, as impressed as his editor was maybe he could have gotten an advance on his next book? he seemed like a loser to me and he'd gotten 1 already for the one that ultimately blew her away.
this was a weak plot point that distracted me the entire time i was watching. pity
so he more than quadrupled his money in a day. At that pace he would he would have more than 16 million the first week. LOL at it was to slow.
shareThat's not an explanation.
Day 1: 4000
Day 2: 16000
Day 3: 64000
Day 4: 256000
It would have taken him a few days to make that. No need for a loan shark. Probably took 1-2 days just to get the money. It was a very annoying and obvious plot hole and it bothered me the entire movie.
"I think everyone knows that old trick about doubling your money daily, even if just starting with a penny. Before a month's past you're talking millions."
It's not a trick, it's called "binary system". Meaning powers of two. Bits.
16 bits = 65536
18 bits = 262144
20 bits = 1 048 576
24 bits = 16 777 216
This means of course that it could be translated to days and pennies. However, millions of pennies are not the same thing as millions of dollars, of course. So, even with 24 days, you would have only less then 167 thousand dollars, if you start with a penny.
30 days = 1 073 741 824 pennies, which would mean
10 737 418 or more than 10 million dollars.
So, you are correct in that estimation - by the 28th day, you already have a couple of million dollars, if I calculated it correctly.
Btw, you made an 'american typo' or two. "Past" means a time in the past, and makes no sense in the context you use the word. You probably mean to say "passed". Although "has" can probably be translated to "'s", I think it's quite clumsy english in any case - it'd be way more clear, if you had said "before a month has passed".
http://americantypo.site11.com/typos
I think your point about it being an 'old trick' comes from the story of the creator of Chess. He only wanted the King to give him rice for the game, and he could have it. A chessboard has 64 squares, and the clever Chessmaster demanded to have 64 bits of rice grains. Meaning, that you put one grain of rice on the first square, and then always double the previous amount for the next square.
(Though it's probably 63 bits, because you can express two states with one bit, so it basically is a value of two (2), but it's late and I am tired, and I don't know if I thought this correctly)
So, the first square will have one grain, the next will have two, the third has four, the fourth has eight, and so on.
1 (this would not exist in computer binary system)
2 (one bit can express two values)
4 (two bits can express four values, and so on)
8
16
32
64
128
256 (eight bits can express 256 values - hence "8-bit computers")
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16384
32768
65536 (16-bit computers had this wide registers - I remember this far)
131072
262144 (18-bit colors were used in AGA-Amigas' HAM8-mode)
524288
1048576
2097152
4194304
8388608
16777216 (24-bit color amount - this is easy to remember, palette of AGA-Amigas)
33554432
67108864
134217728
268435456
536870912
1073741824 (30 bits is already over a billion!)
..
..
9223372036854775808 (63 bits)
18446744073709551616 (64 bits - don't even ask me to put this amount to words)
Quite a lot of grain.. after thinking that the Chessmaster would be satisfied with a couple of sacks of rice, the King and his men were shocked, when they realized they had consented to paying this man more rice than existed on the planet!
Talk about cold sweat..
I kept wondering myself why it took him so long to pay it off. Since the drug made him so smart he should have known priority one was paying back someone dangerous.
shareby imdstuf » Thu Jun 12 2014 22:01:22
IMDb member since March 2010
I kept wondering myself why it took him so long to pay it off. Since the drug made him so smart he should have known priority one was paying back someone dangerous.
Pretty sure it was taken out of context from the book.
In the book if i remember right he borrowed 75k and was going to start pay back two weeks later 22.5k every friday, first payment day russian guy stole 5 pills from Eddies apartment and after Eddie notice the missing pills he wanted to pay back everything next friday but wasn't allowed to pay back all at once.
...and reveal your intended methodology and means of repayment while under the influence of NZT48...The biggest weakness of the film for me! Here's one of the world's smartest guys scamming for money from some Russian hood, when he's just received advances for his book, won at poker and is giving finance counselling. Gimme a break! share
yep ... the only thing that mad this movie fishy to me ... still a very entertaining movie ... but your point is 100% valid
shareEven if you work this plot point in, in a more logical way, I never understood how he got to be work 2 million and could not just stop off and drop 100k in the guys lap and give him a tip of the hat. Its finny in the scene where he says the guy is not going away. well no duh.
shareAs a daytrader by ummm trade it bothered me too. But maybe he needed that money to be able to trade at one of those daytrading centres? We don't have those where I live so I don't know what you need to trade there. Also, maybe his trading account had a max limit and in my case withdrawing funds take 3-5 business days (and deposits immediate) so if he wanted to move up a level he would have had to change brokers.
shareYeah, borrowing 100k made no sense. He says something like he wasn't making money quick enough, the thing is - you want to make it slowly to avoid attention.
shareWhile having a large bag of NZT, the supply is still limited. He wanted the 100k to move faster, and that's exactly what he did. The plothole really is that he completely forgot to pay back the thug as he had enough time for it (and the thug taking drugs he has never seen nor heard of from a guy who - at that point - isn't really looking healthy).
shareThe plothole really is that he completely forgot to pay back the thug as he had enough time for it
(and the thug taking drugs he has never seen nor heard of from a guy who - at that point - isn't really looking healthy).