I was reminded this morning by the occasionally irritating “Bruce Taking A Nap” that I’d never posted a review of Michael Winterbottom‘s Greed (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.28).

Reply: Good heavens! I saw Winterbottom’s reasonably well-made, generally respectable one-percent satire around 2.20. I didn’t just “forget” to review it. I wasn’t that deeply stirred, you see, and somehow it slid to the side. I’m nonetheless sorry for dropping the ball. Not cool, profound apologies to Michael and Tom, won’t happen again.

Steve Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a super-rich, Philip Green-resembling garment industry titan who ruthlessly exploits the Indian labor market by insisting on paying less than $4 or even $3 per day for sewing-machine sweatshop workers (location unspecified but think Myanmar or Bangladesh).

I found it hard to get it up because I had determined that Greed was a decent but somewhat minor effort — emphasis on the “somewhat” as it hits what it’s aiming at. The Rotten Tomato rating was nonetheless 48%.; Metacritic was 52%.

I was partly influenced by the fact that Greed had screened at the Toronto and Santa Barbara Film Festivals without generating what I would call significant heat. The promotional lead-up to the U.S. opening was accompanied by a certain lack of hoopla, and I somehow allowed my attention to wander and wither.

I wasn’t shocked to learn once again that certain garment industry titans (like Zara’s Amancio Ortega and H&M’s Stefan Persson) have become multi-billionaires off the backs of hand-to-mouth Indian workers. I was a wee bit underwhelmed, I suppose, when I realized early on that the basic thrust of Greed was to say this over and over again — i.e., that McCreadle (who has huge, show-white teeth) is an insanely greedy prick. Yes, agreed, he is that…and that’s it? Yes, the basic idea.

Greed isn’t a drama or a comedy as much as an instructional one-note satire.

I suppose I didn’t feel that repeatedly making this point was enough. But within this parameter, Greed is a reasonably good film in a Michael Winterbottom sort of way. Seriously. I know what this review sounds like, but I’m not putting it down. Not really, I mean.

Posted on 6.29.15: The other day a friend mentioned a pending high-school reunion. Okay, fine, I wanted to say, but if you were fundamentally unhappy and occasionally miserable in high school (as many of us were, and as I definitely was), you’ll need to stash that history in your locker and keep it there until the reunion is over.

Reunions tend to remind a lot of us what a regimented environment and cultural concentration camp high school was. Most of us only realize this after we’ve found our footing as adults. I was lost but now I’m free, or certainly a lot freer.

My high-school years didn’t feel “miserable” in an unmistakable, lemme-outta-here sense; the unhappiness I lived with seeped into my system in a hundred subtle ways. I was so down it looked like up to me. All of it. I didn’t expect any semblance of “happiness,” but I was hoping all the time that life might eventually become less grueling.

I wasn’t anti-social but I didn’t party and run around all that much until my senior year, and once that phase kicked in I became a madman. The truth is that on a certain level I was a kind of functioning alcoholic (no serious behavioral problems but a few serpents under the surface) from my late teens until I quit the hard stuff in the mid ’90s. The real healing didn’t begin until I went sober in March 2012, or so I tell myself.

Before I socially flowered I watched a shitload of TV and listened to a lot of music and basically lived in my head. I was a secret genius who could potentially be persuaded to join the crowd, but no one ever asked. I know that my father’s alcoholism felt and smelled like mustard gas in our home, especially during dinner hour, and that my self-esteem was in the basement. I mostly felt apart, diminished and unworthy when it came to women. In school I didn’t do sports or join clubs or do anything extra-curricular except for detention.

My life didn’t really kick into gear until my mid 20s when the journalism started, and even that was agony until I became a half-decent writer and had learned the ropes and had gotten to know people, etc. Things didn’t actually kick into a good place (confidence, comfort, fair reward) until the online column era started, in late ’98.

Back to reunions: Everyone has a look of excitement and anticipation in their eye after they’ve graduated high school and are about to start college. The great adventure! When I attended my 25th celebration most of my ex-classmates had either surrendered that gleam or put it into a bureau drawer somewhere. To me they looked sedate, staid, settled. All except for a small fraternity, which I estimated to be maybe 5% of the crowd. X-factor types with a semblance of life in their veins. Looking for action, adventure, the next discovery.

Sinclair Lewis said the following to his high-school class at a reunion in the ’20s: “When we were young most of you didn’t give a shit about me, and now that we’re older I don’t give a shit about you.”

That’s obviously an ungracious thing to say in any social circumstance, and especially to ex-classmates. I would never go there, but I have to admit that I understand the urge.