Friday, May 25, 2007

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

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.

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Gummo

by Jay Kerr on May 25, 2007

in Directors,DVD

Gummo

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.

Julien Donkey-Boy

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.

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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?

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