Film review: Inside Job

I just watched the above documentary that was released in October 2010 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Narrated by Matt Damon, it lays bare the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It shows clearly the way the financial oligarchy has taken control of the government irrespective of which party is in office and is using its power to greatly enrich itself.

Here’s the film’s trailer:

Most of the film focuses on the way that the crash went down, the whole sordid story in which big investment banks (which have done more to harm to the US and the world than any terrorist organization and of whom Goldman Sachs is the worst) used government deregulation, predatory mortgage lending, lax ratings agencies, practically nonexistent government oversight, and complex new financial instruments to create a Ponzi scheme in which a very few got rich and then when trouble hit were bailed out by the government.

(Almost all of this was covered in my 2008 multi-part series titled Brave New World of Finance, but the film provides a lot more details and tells the story with much greater power and clarity and impact.)

Towards the end, the film highlights something I did not dwell on and that is the cozy relationship between academic economists in elite universities (such as Glenn Hubbard, Laura Tyson, Martin Feldstein, Lawrence Summers, Frederic Mishkin, and others) and the government and giant Wall Street firms, with the former providing the high-toned rationales that influenced government policies that enabled the latter to fleece the country. While we rightly deplore those people in the medical profession who act as flacks for the health industry without disclosing their conflicts of interest, it is a scandal that strict ethical guidelines seem to not exist among university academics who can take huge fees from the financial giants to produce ‘studies’ and ‘reports’ that benefitted those who paid them, justified the measures that led to the disaster, and then walked away unscathed. Watch the chair of the Harvard economics department struggle and fail to explain why they do not have similar guidelines.

Some of those academic economists agreed to appear in the film, no doubt expecting to be given the usual softball treatment they receive from financial journalists and they become visibly uncomfortable and hostile as they get questioned on their own ethics. Glenn Hubbard, now dean of the Columbia Business School, is a case in point. As Charles Ferguson, the film’s writer, director, and producer says in an NPR interview, “Well, the entire interview was fairly contentious, as you can imagine. It surprised me somewhat to realize that these people were not used to being challenged, that they’d never been questioned about this issue before. They clearly expected to be deferred to by me and I think by everybody.” Watch the clip:

In an article, Ferguson writes:

Indeed, one of the most disturbing things I learned in making Inside Job, an issue discussed in the film, is that US universities do not require disclosure of financial conflicts of interest by faculty members, place no limits on the sources and size of professors’ outside income, and do not collect information on the size of this income.
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Over the past 30 years, the economics discipline has been systematically subverted, in much the same way as American politics – by money, especially from the financial services industry. Many of the most prominent economists in America are now paid to testify in Congress, to serve on boards of directors, testify in antitrust cases and regulatory proceedings, and to give speeches to the companies and industries they study and write about with supposed objectivity. This is not a marginal activity; it is now an industry, run by a half dozen large companies.

Some prominent academics have close ties to financial services yet neither their university employers nor the journals in which they publish require them to disclose their conflicts of interest, their financial positions, or the relationship between their financial interests and the policy positions they take.

You can listen to an NPR interview with Ferguson about the making of the film, where he elaborates on how the system is corrupted.

What you find is that very prominent professors of economics, often people who have also held high government posts, are paid to testify in Congress. They are paid to be expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. They’re often paid to write papers that praise the financial services industry and argue on behalf of deregulation of the industry. They make millions, in some cases tens of millions, of dollars doing this. And this is usually not disclosed. And in fact, university regulations do not require disclosure of these payments.

The film is well worth seeing. But be warned that it made me very angry and may make you too. And what will make you most angry is that none of these people in academia, government, and Wall Street are even being investigated for their actions, let alone in jail where they deserve to be. And if what they did was not technically illegal under current law, the law should be changed to make it illegal.

Phone calls in films

To enjoy a film, you have to suspend disbelief and get absorbed in the story. One sure way to destroy that feeling and take you completely out of the film is having a character dial a phone number that starts with 555, which are never given out to customers. They do this because apparently viewers often will note the numbers and call them (I have no idea what drives people to do this) so that if a real number is used, the owner of that number gets tons of annoying calls.

In the 2003 Jim Carrey comedy “Bruce Almighty,” God’s phone number (776-2323, no area code) appears on the Carrey character’s pager, so of course moviegoers called it and asked to speak to God. That’s kind of funny, unless you happened to own that number in your area code.

The Associated Press reported that a Florida woman threatened to sue Universal Pictures because she was receiving 20 calls an hour on her cellphone. The phone number also connected divine-seeking callers to a church in Sanford, N.C., where the minister, who happened to be named Bruce, was not amused. The BBC reported that even a man in the Manchester, England, area was receiving up to 70 calls a day from folks seeking help and forgiveness.

At the time, Universal explained that the number it chose was not in use in the Buffalo area, where the movie was set. The studio subsequently replaced it in TV and home video versions with, yes, a 555 number.

I have wondered why, with their multi-million dollar budgets, film companies don’t simply purchase a few dozens of real numbers that are sufficiently varied and nondescript so that no viewer would likely remember that they have seen them before in other films.

So I was glad to see in the above article that some films are purchasing real numbers where, if you should call it, you receive a recorded message, maybe promoting the film.

Title song from Singham

Apparently a new film has been released in India with the title character sharing my last name. The way my last name is spelled in Tamil leads to a slight ambiguity in transliterating to English, with those favoring a hard g sound writing it as Singam and pronouncing it ‘Sing gum’ with heavy stress on both syllables while those favoring a soft g (as my family does) writing it as Singham, to rhyme with Bingham.

The Singham/Singam in the film seems to a tough but honest cop in the Dirty Harry mold, as you can see from this music video created around the title song.

Marjoe

Some time ago I wrote a review of the documentary Marjoe of a Pentecostal child evangelist/faith healer in which Marjoe Gortner (an unbeliever and now an adult) gives an insider’s account of how the racket works.

You can now see the entire film online. It is quite fascinating

The lessons of V for Vendetta

After reading the book The Count of Monte Cristo and seeing the 1934 film adaptation, I watched the film V for Vendetta again and enjoyed it even more, as it is one of those films whose message grows on you with repeated viewings (though the plot holes also become more apparent) and I cannot recommend it enough. The trailer focuses a lot more on Natalie Portman, the box office draw, than the film does.

I could see why the character of V would be drawn to the story of The Count of Monte Cristo. Both he and Edmond Dantes seek vengeance for injustices and terrible harm done to them personally, as well as see themselves as agents for bringing evil people to justice. Here is a key scene in which a speech that V gives explains what is going on and why things have to be changed.

I predicted that the film V for Vendetta would become a cult classic and that seems to be coming true. Its basic message, that of people waking up to their oppression and taking on a cruel and ruthless power structure that uses the media and religion as tools of control, has caught on and I have been observing people in various demonstrations wearing the iconic V mask and using the V symbol, mimicking the climactic scene in the film where the people rise up against their oppressive rulers.

V for Vendetta.jpeg v-for-vendetta-logo-wallpaper.jpg

The group Anonymous that consists largely of computer hackers sees itself in the tradition of V, fighting against oppressive structures behind a shield of anonymity. It even uses the V mask on its website where it describes its vision of expanding access to information and breaking down the barriers of secrecy that prevent people from realizing what is actually going on. This group is acting behind the scenes to support the current uprisings in the Middle East.

A recent communiqué further explains its mission.

Under most circumstances, ordinary people have little chance against the massive firepower that rulers will unleash through their security forces against protestors. The prime purpose of the armed security forces in any country is less to defend the country from outside forces and more to be used against their own people if they should challenge the power structure. Soldiers are deliberately hardened during their training so that they will be willing to kill even their own people. We see this happening in Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya, and it is likely to happen in Saudi Arabia and Syria and Jordan. And, yes, it will also happen in the US if the people should really rise up in mass protest against the oligarchic rule that is going on here.

What stops security forces from killing civilians is if they are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers arrayed against them, so that except for the psychopaths, even the most hardened troops on the front line begin to suspect that rather than saving the nation from those who would harm it, they are on the wrong side and are being used as tools to perpetuate a power structure that is actually against the best interests of the nation.

For all the ballyhoo about the use of social networks in the Middle East revolts, that is only a tiny part of the story, since only a small, though influential, minority has access to these new technologies. Besides, technology alone cannot overthrow oppressive governments. The basic message of V for Vendetta is that it is when large numbers of people are willing to get out of their homes and go out into the streets and rise up against their tyrannical rulers that regimes get toppled. As the tagline of the film says, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

The people in the Middle East are doing precisely what V recommends, whether they have seen the film or not. These protests are spreading. I don’t know where they will go.

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

Elizabeth-Taylor.jpgElizabeth Taylor was stunningly beautiful, a wonderful actor, and seemed to be (to the extent that one can infer about public personalities by their public actions) a nice person who supported many worthy causes (especially AIDS prevention and treatment in its early days when many did not want to be associated with it) but who unfortunately could not seem to find happiness in her private life and battled many illnesses and personal demons.

She is the only famous actor that I have seen in person. It happened sometime between mid 1962 and 1963 when I was living in England for a year. My parents were friendly with an executive at Pinewood Studios and he invited my mother and me to spend the day visiting the studios and wandering around the various sets. At lunchtime he took us to the cafeteria and there was Elizabeth Taylor at an adjoining table. They were shooting some final scenes from her epic Cleopatra and she was in costume, famous hairstyle and all.

Of course my mother, a big fan, was far more excited by seeing Elizabeth Taylor than a boy like me who would have preferred to see the action heroes of that time. But even at that age I could tell that she was really pretty and this is the image that I will remember her by.

Review: The Nature of Existence

I watched this documentary yesterday. The filmmaker and narrator Roger Nygard is looking for the meaning of existence and his method of finding out is to travel the globe and pose questions on god, the soul, happiness, sex, the afterlife, etc. to people from various religious groups and from scientists and just record their responses. There is no attempt to challenge the stated views or to analyze or to create some kind of synthesis. What we get are snippets of people’s views from all across the spectrum.

The documentary is fairly entertaining but not deep. The filmmaker seemed to spend a lot of time on two particular groups. One group consisted of serious scientists whom, as far as I could tell, were all atheists, and the other group consisted of people from more exotic religious groupings, people whom we would not normally encounter, such as druids, new-age spiritualists, Indian mystics, and the like. There was one supposedly very popular Indian guru named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who got a lot of screen time who had a twinkle in his eye as he delivered his banal fortune-cookie aphorisms that suggested that he knew he was perpetrating a con and was delighted that all these saps around him were buying it.

Mainstream Catholics and Protestants were represented by sober clergy and intellectuals while the evangelical Christians got the short shrift and were largely represented by a preacher who rails at people on university campus grounds, a wrestling ministry that uses wrestling bouts as a means to evangelize, and drag racers. A lot of time was given to an Orthodox Judaic rabbi in Israel who spouted deep-sounding but meaningless words about the finite and the infinite.

The best segments were of a 12-year old girl, the neighbor of the filmmaker, who in a few pithy words dismissed the idea of both god and the afterlife.

Although Nygard did not have any overt point of view and ended with a somewhat trite statement of the ‘why can’t we all get along’ sort, I thought the film had a definitely anti-religion subtext by contrasting sensible atheist views with the mumbo-jumbo of religions.

You can see clips at the film’s website.

Film review: Good Hair (2009)

Hair is an important issue in the black community, getting way beyond the level of attention that people of other ethnicities give it. I first became aware of this fact a long time ago back in Sri Lanka as a student when I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964). As a young man of the streets, he adopted the then common practice of ‘conking’ (straightening his hair) and he vividly describes his first experience. As he became radicalized he decided that this attempt to adopt the hair styling of white people was a symbol of how much black people had internalized their sense of inferiority and subservience and he went back to his natural look. The 1960’s was probably the high point of black acceptance of their natural hair. Nowadays it seems like the black community, especially women, has gone back to accepting straight hair and to even see it as desirable. One wonders what Malcolm X would have thought about this development.
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