Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Director: Alex Gibney, USA, 2005): It took a little while for me to get around to seeing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) but it was worth it. Everyone knows something about the collapse of Enron but how much do you know about “the smartest guys in the room” — Jeffery Skilling, Kenneth Lay, Andrew Fastow and Lou Pai.
Alex Gibney’s film provides a great overview of the Enron scandal by giving us a glimpse into the lives of some first class weasels. Lou Pai is by far the luckiest and the smartest of the weasels. He left the company with $280 million, became the second-largest land owner in Colorado and married the stripper girlfriend who had his love-child.
Without being too ‘preachy’, Gibney’s documentary shows how these guys thought they could outsmart the system. Their incredible greed and their willingness to rip off their stockholders and customers is legendary. There is a lot of information to absorb in this film but it does a fabulous job of explaining the whole scandal.
Tagged as:
corporations,
Documentaries,
DVD
Gummo (Director: Harmony Korine, USA, 1997): Writer/director Harmony Korine is one strange dude. Gummo (1997) is one strange film. It follows two bored kids as they wander around a small town in Ohio looking for things to do. They sniff glue, listen to black metal music, ride dirt bikes, kill cats and run into some of the strangest residents in the US. Harmony Korine claims that he cast the bizarre secondary characters in his film by hanging out at a Burger King for 45 minutes. I believe him.
Some of the more memorable moments in the film:
- trailer trash hanging out in the kitchen, drinking beer and wrestling chairs ( I actually laughed out loud during this scene because it was so absurd and probably real)
- a deaf couple screeching while having an argument in a bowling alley
- kids sniffing glue and getting high
- a mentally challenged woman shaving off her eyebrows
- an albino woman without any toes talking to the camera
I tried watching Korine’s other film Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and didn’t enjoy it either. Somebody in Hollywood thinks that Korine is a genius because of his bizarre films — random scenes, no narrative, weird characters.
His films could be described as experimental but I prefer to call them crap. This guy doesn’t come close to the creative genius of say, David Lynch.
Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely is due to be released this year. I’ll take a pass and I doubt that I’ll watch another film by Korine. In my opinion, there are much better films out there that I could watch.
Tagged as:
Directors,
DVD
An interesting article by Variety columnist (and blogger) Anne Thompson claims that film bloggers are here to stay, and that they’re changing the way studios and their publicity departments deal with the media in general. Bloggers have the ability to release information immediately, which is an advantage over print and television. But only if the information they’re releasing is true. And for the studios, only if the timing is right. A number of recent high-profile leaks regarding casting choices have annoyed the studios, and the speed with which some blogs are posting has led to a similar frenzy among the old media which in the long run doesn’t benefit the studios.
Although Thompson seems to argue the opposite, I wonder if at some point we’ll see a general reduction in access for the less-established “new” media?
Tagged as:
Critics,
publicity
