Double Dream Hands? Or Party Jerk?

[Bizarro]

Hells yeah.

[Doctor Rock]

A salomonic decision. 

[Doctor Rock]

The Earth is warming

[Doctor Rock]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/eHKhB3-EmZM" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/eHKhB3-EmZM</a>

[Moetown]

The Earth is warming

Huh-uh! No it's not!

[Doctor Rock]

I stopped using the word "denier".  These days, I prefer to use a more descriptive and accurate term.  I call them smacktards instead.  

[Bizarro]

I Love You, Phillip Morris is worth seeing. It's meandering, in a way that's kind of inevitable given how odd the true story is, but it's a fascinating character piece and Jim Carrey really is fantastic in it.

[matthew]

Finally got around to seeing "Inside Job" and my feeling is more or less "enh".

While it would certainly be a devastating revelation to anyone not following the story in the news media, I felt that, besides tapping down a decent chronology of events the film did little in the way of fleshing out the story. There was little in the way making clear the corporate structure and reasons for the pillaging beyond the standard issue Michael Moore freeze frame stamping of CEOs with their salaries and severance pay, encouraging the viewer to (wrongly) conclude that the actions were taken for the personal enrichment of those CEOs.

It also dropped the ball when it came to the present day Obama administration, despite the damning line (from a participant in the film) that "[the Obama Administration] is a Wall Street administration" leading into the horrifying list of Wall Street insiders (mostly Clinton Democrats) who rigged the system to collapse, the film just sort fizzled out at the end with Matt Damon muttering some vague platitude about fighting for a change (or something) over a shot of the Statue of Liberty.  

At the same time the film doesn't deliver anything new, I am unsure how much it could serve as a primer for the uninitiated. A newbie would definitely require multiple viewings, as the film is unnecessarily punchy and bombastic in sections dealing with the specifics of Wall Street trading and investment banks (ex. there is no explanation for what a derivative is, but it refers to them constantly throughout the film).

The film also implies that the financiers and bankers of yesteryear were good family folk running mom & pop operations for the decent white Americans everywhere, and that things only got ugly in the 1980s when Reagan began deregulation (which he didn't: Carter began deregulation) I was also hoping that it would talk about "the Fed", but it only mentioned it in passing. The devastation of the working poor and working class was all but ignored instead focusing on how this hurt the "middle class", a position that regularly illustrated with cuts to rotting McMansions and grass pushing through the cracks in their massive driveways. Aside from a very brief section where a denizen of "Tent City" in Florida gets in a line about being laid off, the only footage of those hardest hit are voiceless and shot from afar, suggesting that "oh, and the little people get hurt too, but we were afraid to interview them".

It is a lot like the first film I saw of Charles Ferguson's, "No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq" - it's critical ...but not as critical as it should be, not nearly as critical as you want it to be. In "No End In Sight" Ferguson sided with the "doves" of the Bush Administration who felt that Bush blew what should have been a perfectly righteous invasion and facile occupation (Richard Armitage, Colin Powell, Barbara Bodine, Samantha Power, Paul Hughes, etc.). In this way it was not unlike the soft imperialism and aggressive liberalism that PBS and NPR regularly promote on shows like Frontline. The We Were Right To Do, We Only Did It Wrong (which would become the central plank of John "Reporting For Duty" Kerry's election platform) "liberal" perspective focused on troop numbers and post-invasion planning and security instead of taking issue with the criminality of the invasion itself.

The criticism (in truth it is more disagreement than criticism) is so empty and impotent and apparently aimless and abstract that it feels less like a film intended for the general public than an in-house Council on Foreign Relations position paper in the form of a film. While the film is critical of Ferguson's fellow (yes, these people are almost all colleagues of his) CFR members such as Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, the film offers up only a return to regulation as a solution, ignoring the fact that the recent crisis was nothing more than a more severe form of the economic devastation that has been with us for more than a century.

[matthew]

Oh yeah: $13.50 for a fucking movie? What the fuck is that about?

Which reminds me: I wasn't around for a while because my comp. crapped out (almost a year to the day that it last crapped out - at least we don't have bedbugs this time - knock on wood).

Faced with either a new computer $1,600 or $380 (CAN) for a new hard drive, I opted for the latter. Merry Christmas.

[Bizarro]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/eHKhB3-EmZM" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/eHKhB3-EmZM</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/A3ZG1-o9KWc" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/A3ZG1-o9KWc</a>

[matthew]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/eHKhB3-EmZM" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/eHKhB3-EmZM</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/A3ZG1-o9KWc" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/A3ZG1-o9KWc</a>

That's funny. That's the first thing I thought of, too.

[Doctor Rock]

Matt, I think you're too harsh.  I mean, it's a film!  And an american film at that. They have to tell us about a very complex subject in less than 2 hours.  And they have to tell a story.  Plus... Do you really think you're going to get smash-the-system rhetoric out of a documentary starring Matt Damon destined to the general public?   I mean, being radical is cool and shit, but it usually implies that you only preach to the converted.  

When you think about that, you realise that anything under the form of film inevitably has limitations.  

I thought it was good introduction to the subject.  And it gave me enough to know what to read, to go deeper into the subject.  

And they did explain what a derivative is, I remember it clearly.  A derivative is a financial instrument that has a value, based on the expected future price movements of the asset to which it is linked.  But they also repeatedly mentioned that derivatives, as used by Wall Street, quickly became incredibly complex affairs that are incomprehensible to most people, simply because typical derivatives are usually linked to the values of multiple assets.  You can't track their values without complex math and complicated computer programs.  Modern derivatives cannot exist without computers.  That's one of the problems with the system: it has become incomprehensible.  

I do agree that the film offers little besides a critique of the system, without any solutions besides government regulation.  But you can pretty much say that of most of the left anyway, this lefty included.    

Nevertheless, considering that you rarely see stuff like this on a screen anywhere, I thought it was quite good.  And I urge those who haven't seen it tp go see it.  

[matthew]

Matt, I think you're too harsh.  I mean, it's a film!  And an american film at that. They have to tell us about a very complex subject in less than 2 hours.  And they have to tell a story.  Plus... Do you really think you're going to get smash-the-system rhetoric out of a documentary starring Matt Damon destined to the movie going public?

No, but I wish I had looked into the film before I went to see it...had I known it was the same director of the atrocious "No End In Sight" I certainly wouldn't have spent $27 to sit and watch the same Council on Foreign Relations member tiptoe around his fellow members to focus exclusively on the CEOs of the corporations and offer them up as fall-guys, and then retreat to argue that Merrill Lynch et al. need to be restrained a little so that can be a little more like the "mom and pop" financial institutions of the oh-so-rosy Cold War era.

When you think about that, you realise that anything under the form of film inevitably has limitations.  

I thought it was good introduction to the subject.  And it gave me enough to know what to read, to go deeper into the subject.

I did open by saying, "While it would certainly be a devastating revelation to anyone not following the story in the news media, I felt that, besides tapping down a decent chronology of events the film did little in the way of fleshing out the story."


Can I recommend Pam Martens as a source that I trust?

And they did explain what a derivative is, I remember it clearly.  A derivative is a financial instrument that has a value, based on the expected future price movements of the asset to which it is linked.

That's a definition, not an explanation. The definition for engine "a machine for converting energy into mechanical force and motion" does nothing to deliver a working knowledge of engines. It is a start, but nothing more.

I do agree that the film offers little besides a critique of the system, without any solutions besides government regulation.  But you can pretty much say that of most of the left anyway.  

Nevertheless, considering that you rarely see stuff like this on a screen anywhere, I thought it was quite good.

Yeah, I don't think that the film had anything at all to do with "the left". I certainly did not expect a Hollywood film to be so radical as to call for capitalism to be dismantled, or Wallstreet to be reduced to ash, but in the end it really said nothing at all in the way of a conclusion.

The particulars of the recent upheaval are there, but Ferguson would never think to criticize the system or even the political leadership. The way he mentions the nominations of Reagan, H.W. Bush (CFR), Clinton (CFR), W. Bush you would think that those nominations were unintentional and that the leadership not complicit.

[Doctor Rock]

Matt, nobody can deliver a working knowledge of derivatives in a few minutes!  That's one of the problems with derivatives.  But they did try to explain how derivatives contributed to this collapse.

And these days, because of the sycophantic approach of most media to anything involving the rich, I tend to view anything that doesn't present CEOs as unfailing heroes of capitalism as being "of the left"...

They emphasised the links with the Obama administration.  They talked about it repeatedly.  in fact, that's one of the things I thought was the most shocking.  I mean, I knew about it, but I didn't realise to what extent the Obama administration is filled with these guys.   I don't think they painted a rosy picture of the past.  Besides mentioning that financial institutions were much smaller (which is, as far as I know, true), they didn't spend a lot of time talking about the past.  Which is too bad, I would have liked to have seen more about the 1929 crash, so that viewers could learn that economic recession is ingrained into the system (the whole boom-bust cycle), which is something that is known since the XIX century.   

But it was a doc on the 2008 collapse! 

Anyway, I liked simply because it was kind of refreshing to see a critique of the system, even a fairly mild one, on a screen. 

[Tripp]

So I just went out and got a 12 pack and was on my way home when some redneck cunt almost plowed into my car as she sped thru the intersection causing me to slam on my brakes which sent the 12 pack sailing thru my car, shattering every single bottle and releasing 12 bottles worth of beer and broken glass all into my car. I should've just plowed into her and put her whole goddamn redneck moron family out of their collective misery..