Yesterday was my Birthday and I decided to go see this movie as I had been hearing good things about it. First, small critique on the filming style, really would have loved less shaky camera and extreme type close ups. It’s okay to show everyone in a room talking, we can keep up with who says what. That much movement in a smaller theater gets a bit motion sickness-y
Now to the movie itself. I remember Brad Pitt stating some years back that he wanted to produce movies so he could make the movies he wanted to get out there, George Clooney said the same thing. They wanted to make smaller, human interest type movies and this is something that needs to be seen.
One thing I loved about this was how they both mocked and used the “short attention span syndrome” to explain complex financial ideas. The narrator voice would get to a complex idea and go “Here’s “insert famous/hot celebrity name here” to explain this idea, then they would cut away to Anthony Bourdain or Selena Gomez or Margot Robbie (in a tub, with bubbles and drinking champagne) to break down the concepts into simple explanations, it was educational and hysterical.
This movie has no heroes, a faceless villain and no feel good ending. Why? Because nothing has changed. The banks were bailed out, we spent trillions doing it and they are doing the same things they did before. The people that take us through this are all people who profited of being able to see the horrible house of cards that the financial system was built on and although Geller and his partner, Shipley showed regret at the end, they were not heroes either. Ben Rickert, Brad Pitt’s character, who makes it clear throughout the whole movie that he hates banking, helps Geller and Shipley make their money. Then when they are celebrating he finally explains that they are celebrating the fact that they are betting that millions of people lose everything to make their money. That’s when it hits them but they still go forward because they have all this money invested.
When the collapse happens they ask Rickert why he helped them, he simply says, “Because you wanted to be rich, now you are,” and hangs up, as if saying, “Now you understand why I quit.”
Why everyone needs to see this is simple, people need to understand how fucked up our economy is, how the SEC, the Banks and the Rating agencies are all incestuously interlinked and why, just why, we need to start paying attention to what our leaders do.
And yes, I will go here and say that Bernie is the only person who I know of who has addressed the fact that Banks PAY the Rating agencies. It is made perfectly clear that they had to inflate the bond ratings or the banks would go elsewhere. That is beyond screwed up.
Mike Baum is perhaps the only one that seemed truly sickened throughout the whole time with what was going on, and he held out to the bitter end but he had to sell his swaps because he had investors who had given him money.
The most DISTURBING part of this was that the ones that went to the government or lawyers or press to try to get this out were all either laughed out of the room or harassed with audits afterwards. No one WANTED to tell this story, no one, NOT EVEN LAWYERS, were willing to touch the inherent corruption of the system.
Legal is NOT the same as Ethical and while all these companies “technically” did not break laws, they all should go be put out of business for screwing the American people over because they were more than aware of the fact that this was a shady scheme and they didn’t give a shit about it.
(WOW! Thanks for the rec list!)