http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/movies/08inside.html?pagewanted=all
DealBook: The Filmmaker Who Does a 'Job' on Wall Street (October 1, 2010)Oliver Stone took the better part of an hour in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps to make you indignant about the schemers who dreamed up credit default swaps, but pretty much any 30 seconds of interview footage in Inside Job will make you want to throttle the nearest banker, broker or economic analyst.
Ferguson begins the film with a cautionary tale that foretold things to come in America: Plucky little Iceland, land of volcanoes, hot springs and a blissfully stable economy, foolishly deregulated its banking system, allowing massive borrowing by their banks, which led to their own national meltdown. "No checks/no balances" . . led to "no paychecks/no bank balances." From there, Ferguson's film launches into an exploration of how something remarkably similar was then allowed to happen, in a somewhat more complicated way, in the United States.
Those who followed media coverage of the crisis as it was unfolding, or who remember Reagan-era savings-and-loan scandals, Clinton-era rule-shredding, and the derivatives-bingeing and subprime-bundling that was popular during the Bush administration will experience some of Inside Job as a refresher course-cum-history lesson. Still, the filmmaker keeps finding comparatively unexplored niches in the story -- asking tenured Ivy League pundits, for instance, why their corporate-lecture-circuit fees haven't raised conflict-of-interest issues with their universities or with the government bureaus and media outlets that turn to them.
A number of the film's talking heads, evidently unused to being challenged, prove to be their own worst enemies, one of them even asking Ferguson to turn off his camera when he founders under Ferguson's withering questions.
The film lays out the missteps of regulators, the greed of arbitragers, the hubris of hedge-fund managers, and the ineffectual showboating of politicians. Ferguson hasn't much confidence in the notion that the perpetrators can somehow be got rid of. At least not through politics, given that the Obama administration recruited its economic advisers from the very crowd that helped create the disaster. Sheer embarrassment might have an effect, if enough people were to see this film. But they probably won't.
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130435557)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
