Hollywood occupied with financial crisis
October 21, 2011 9:21 AM Subscribe
It's in the "Additional Films" list, but I'd highly recommend The Flaw as a companion to Inside Job.
The Flaw's abrupt ending might even let it tie seamlessly into Inside Job if you wanted to make a double feature out of them.
Saw it at a film festival recently and the crowd got a bit rowdy. At the suggestion that mortgages were not given for residences in minority-dominant areas, someone spontaneously yelled: "THAT'S SICK!" It's also the only time that I've heard the phrase "shut up" repetitively pointed at the people on screen and not in the row ahead.
posted by pokermonk at 9:44 AM on October 21, 2011
The Flaw's abrupt ending might even let it tie seamlessly into Inside Job if you wanted to make a double feature out of them.
Saw it at a film festival recently and the crowd got a bit rowdy. At the suggestion that mortgages were not given for residences in minority-dominant areas, someone spontaneously yelled: "THAT'S SICK!" It's also the only time that I've heard the phrase "shut up" repetitively pointed at the people on screen and not in the row ahead.
posted by pokermonk at 9:44 AM on October 21, 2011
For me, it depends what you're looking for. I thought Too Big To Fail (biased as it was toward making us actually like some of these assholes) was great because it gave me a solid timeline and, in dramatizing events, helped me follow the complexities of the "story" better than most of the documentaries.
The big two missing to my mind are Manufacturing Consent and The Corporation, both co-directed by the same guy, Mark Achbar. Of course, they predate the crisis a fair bit but what they do is give it context. In the case of the Corporation, that's fairly obvious: you get see how such monstrous entities have come to be.
In the case of Manufacturing Consent (a deep study of some of Noam Chomsky's ideas about Big Media etc), it's more subtle: you get to see how the very people who should have been warning us about all of this deception and recklessness had become consumed by it, were active participants in the crime, even if they were completely blind to their complicity.
If you haven't seen it, take three hours of your life and commit. Youtube has it all.
Official description:
Funny, provocative and surprisingly accessible, "Manufacturing Consent" explores the political life and ideas of world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky. Through a dynamic collage of biography, archival gems, imaginative graphics and outrageous illustrations, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's award-winning documentary highlights Chomsky's probing analysis of mass media and his critique of the forces at work behind the daily news.
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
The big two missing to my mind are Manufacturing Consent and The Corporation, both co-directed by the same guy, Mark Achbar. Of course, they predate the crisis a fair bit but what they do is give it context. In the case of the Corporation, that's fairly obvious: you get see how such monstrous entities have come to be.
In the case of Manufacturing Consent (a deep study of some of Noam Chomsky's ideas about Big Media etc), it's more subtle: you get to see how the very people who should have been warning us about all of this deception and recklessness had become consumed by it, were active participants in the crime, even if they were completely blind to their complicity.
If you haven't seen it, take three hours of your life and commit. Youtube has it all.
Official description:
Funny, provocative and surprisingly accessible, "Manufacturing Consent" explores the political life and ideas of world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky. Through a dynamic collage of biography, archival gems, imaginative graphics and outrageous illustrations, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's award-winning documentary highlights Chomsky's probing analysis of mass media and his critique of the forces at work behind the daily news.
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
Casino Jack and the United States of Money (not the Kevin Spacey drama of a similar name) also pairs nicely with Inside Job, particularly because of the sections which focus on the failures of deregulated nations.
Hell, you might as well throw in Alex Gibney's other financial expose Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room and make a day out of it.
posted by pokermonk at 9:49 AM on October 21, 2011
Hell, you might as well throw in Alex Gibney's other financial expose Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room and make a day out of it.
posted by pokermonk at 9:49 AM on October 21, 2011
> Hell, you might as well throw in Alex Gibney's other financial expose Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room and make a day out of it
My doctor doesn't recommend I drink that much scotch in anger in a day.
posted by mrzarquon at 10:07 AM on October 21, 2011 [3 favorites]
My doctor doesn't recommend I drink that much scotch in anger in a day.
posted by mrzarquon at 10:07 AM on October 21, 2011 [3 favorites]
What, The Corporation doesn't count because it came out in 2003, is eight billion hours long, and makes you feel like maybe the business-as-psychopath metaphor is stretched a little too far?
posted by psoas at 10:10 AM on October 21, 2011
posted by psoas at 10:10 AM on October 21, 2011
Collapse is perhaps the most terrifying movie I've decided to check out on-Netflix-at-one-AM-because-I-couldn't-sleep-and-now-I-never-will.
posted by Maaik at 10:23 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by Maaik at 10:23 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
The best thing about "Too big to fail" both the book and the movie is the parlor game "guess which director level wall street person co-opted Andrew Ross Sorkin and leaked this info to him"
posted by JPD at 10:32 AM on October 21, 2011
posted by JPD at 10:32 AM on October 21, 2011
It is clear, judging from the subject matter depicted in so many films and TV shows of the past five years, that the world is currently gripped by some sort of zombie or vampire infestation. Oh, and an ongoing recession.
I now have a strong desire to write some sort of Marxist literary critique about how zombies and vampires in movies are a manifestation of economic anxiety and resentment of the 1%. And also make a low-budget zombie-vampire financial thriller.
posted by immlass at 10:54 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
I now have a strong desire to write some sort of Marxist literary critique about how zombies and vampires in movies are a manifestation of economic anxiety and resentment of the 1%. And also make a low-budget zombie-vampire financial thriller.
posted by immlass at 10:54 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
I now have a strong desire to write some sort of Marxist literary critique about how zombies and vampires in movies are a manifestation of economic anxiety and resentment of the 1%. And also make a low-budget zombie-vampire financial thriller.
I could have sworn I'd actually seen a couple articles, possibly even on MeFi, that covered this.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:15 PM on October 21, 2011
I could have sworn I'd actually seen a couple articles, possibly even on MeFi, that covered this.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:15 PM on October 21, 2011
Old (Romero-era) zombies are often taken to be metaphors of The Spectre of Communism.
Vampires have some pretty obvious parallels to corporations— undying, wealthy, survive only by preying on humans and incorporating humans' lives into themselves— but I haven't seen a detailed essay on the subject.
New Fast Zombies are probably metaphors of foreign-ideology terrorism, I dunno.
posted by hattifattener at 1:39 PM on October 21, 2011
Vampires have some pretty obvious parallels to corporations— undying, wealthy, survive only by preying on humans and incorporating humans' lives into themselves— but I haven't seen a detailed essay on the subject.
New Fast Zombies are probably metaphors of foreign-ideology terrorism, I dunno.
posted by hattifattener at 1:39 PM on October 21, 2011
Gotta call the movie Zombie Bank, of course.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:41 PM on October 21, 2011
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:41 PM on October 21, 2011
Well, not about the current crisis of course, but Network is still very prescient.
posted by triggerfinger at 5:31 PM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by triggerfinger at 5:31 PM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
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