Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Rules of the Game

Written, produced, and directed by Mr. Charles Ferguson.

What has Mr. Ferguson done with all this control? Well, we get about 2,000 helicopter shots of Manhattan island. Another couple thousand low angle/high angle views of New York's postmodern monstrosities. And a bunch of hooker/cocaine/Bentley montages straight out of a 1986 Miami Vice episode. (And like those montages, how can we feel anything but envy?) The whole movie is clean and well-scrubbed.

So we are left with the faces and voices of the gangster class. This is the tribe that intentionally crushed the world's economy, stole $20,000,000,000,000 (and counting) from U.S. taxpayers, thereby crippling (also intentional) all public functions of the United States government? These are the Masters of the Universe, so brilliant and driven and complex their work is beyond mere human ken? These pinched, cheeseball faces? These stunted, third-rate minds? My, how the game has been fixed. To quote Mr. Ferguson's kinsman Michael Collins on the Brits: "How did these people ever get to run an empire?"

A very poor documentary on the subject of our time, yet a large helping of proof that the last thing 21st Century U.S.A. resembles is a "meritocratic" society. (Unless merit has been reduced to nothing beyond being a weasel fixer. I guess it has.)

And speaking of weasels . . . Barack Obama, the planet's currently most famous weasel, is not mentioned in this movie about Wall Street power until minute 98 of 102 (sans end credits). The word capitalism not at all.

2010's Inside Job.



On the same subject (actually I'm not sure what Ferguson's subject is), only much much better.