Movie #39 Inside Job

Back to back documentary reviews.  Inside Job is a new doc by director Charles Ferguson.  Its focus is the 2008 financial collapse of Wall Street.  It is a probing looking into the people, politics and institutions that not only foresaw and allowed this economic meltdown, they caused it.

I credit the film for not dumbing down its content or the issue or even the explanations.  The economic crisis can not be explained with simple metaphors.  The "it's like a fish bowl filled with bologna" type of reasoning or simplifications don't fit this problem.  I won't hesitate to say that a good deal of this film was over my head.  The downside of that is I did loose interest a little.  It was like sitting in a meeting listening to Japanese for two hours.  There I go with the witless metaphors. 

What struck me the hardest about the doc was that when you do boil things down there are about 50 people that can be directly held responsible for this catastrophe.  The CEO's and Board of Directors for the top 4-7 finical institutions all knew what was going on and continued to rake in BILLIONS of dollars personally until the bottom fell out.  Then what really struck me was that none of them have been held accountable.  Not only have they gotten off scott free, they were given millions of dollars in bonuses for they left the company.

I have a saying.  "The answer to your question, and every other question, is money".  When you boil things down every question or action made by mankind is a direct result of the longing for money or sex.  And as we all know (and the movie points this out as well) if you have enough money, you can get the sex.  I couldn't believe the balls on the men involved in this problem.  The director would nail them to the wall with facts and data.  He had all his sources (many of which are public record) in line and he would have these men over a barrel.  Then they would just basically tell him to F-off!  It is a "what are you going to do about it" type of mentality.  It was disgusting display of greed, power, and arrogance.



I give the movie props for staying completely A-political.  It rips every administration from Regan to Obama.  It claims that all of these teams have either knowingly participated in deregulating Wall Street to fatten their own pockets, or at least been stymied by the machine of collective campaign contributions by the lobbyists.     The movie is narrated by Matt Damon for extra credibility I guess?  Over all I enjoyed the film even though occasionally I felt like a freshman in a senior economics course.  I would give the film a 3/5 stars.  Check out the link below for the trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2DRm5ES-uA