|
Directed by: Alex Gibney Starring: Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow It was inevitable that there would, at some point, be a documentary about the collapse of the Enron corporation. This one is a lot better than it could have been. The crimes of those who conspired to essentially steal billions of dollars from both the company's investors and its own employees are detailed and explained very well. Alex Gibney does a very nice job directing, especially with some inspired visual sequences. But some of the film does, I think, get a little too lost in the numbers part and loses the effect of the human impact. Early in the movie, someone says that the scandal wasn't about simply accounting and shifting around numbers on paper; it was about real people with real motivations, albeit heinous ones. And the movie goes to a lot of trouble to try to explain the background of Lay, Skilling and Fastow that led them to make the decisions they did. But still, I found myself not quite engaged for most of the first half of the movie, as the various tactics Enron used for hiding their debt and artificially inflating their profit were explained. It picks up a lot, though, in what I considered the best portion of the film: the California energy crisis, which was basically engineered by energy executives. There's a lot of audio footage of phone conversations between Enron employees from that period, applauding themselves for their brilliance while they call power plant managers to ask them to shut down for a few hours so demand will rise. There's one call that jokingly refers to "Grandma Millie" out in CA, who can't afford electricity. It almost gives you the impression that these employees actively hate the public; it's even more chilling to realize that these people aren't even acting out of malice, but are just following their mandate to squeeze money out of customers whenever and however possible. There's a great comparison to the research experiments from several decades ago that found that 50% of people were willing to administer fatal electric shocks to a test subject if someone else was in authority. Definitely worth seeing. RATING: 4 PROS: Amazing story, great talking heads CONS: A little too much about the numbers and less about the human impact ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413845/
|
#
?
May 13, 2005 01:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 15:30 |
|
|
Extremely interesting documentary, although a little too flashy for my tastes: many events are re-enacted with actors, often backed by songs with quite specific messages (anti-capitalism, anti-greed, etc -- Marilyn Manson's Sweet Dreams is used in one montage). I doubt there's many people defending any part of the Enron scandal, but if they do exist, it's clear the filmmakers have no interest in them. The editing seems a bit aggressive at times -- for example, footage of an executive (Pi) leaving a building is shown, but the narration covers up the audio. Pi responds to a question with "I feel nothing" (which punctuates the narrator's description of his personality), but we never hear the question or discover the context of the footage. Like Propaniac, I was also disappointed with the almost exclusive focus on the accounting aspects of the collapse. I've heard some of the stories about the personal downfalls of the people involved in a radio program, and it was honestly quite a bit more interesting than the dry accounting details. The basic personalities of the main players are laid out, but the documentary doesn't go any further. The topic is so rich with outrageous stories that it would be hard to mess up a documentary, especially when much of the research has already been done by others. The Smartest Guys in the Room succeeds at turning all this into an interesting 2-hr documentary with only a few flaws. 4.0
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2005 21:16
|
|
|
I have to admit I was reluctant to shell out $7 to see a two-hour long equivelant of a Frontline special, but I was pleasantly surprised. The documentary was coherent, cohesive, and featured all kinds of exclusive interviews with former employee higher-ups, including the whistleblower. I'm not an accountant or a businesswoman, but the documentary made the technical stuff not only very interesting but also very understandable. I had no idea that the rolling blackouts of California (and, to some extent, Shwartzenegger's run for governer) were a giant Enron conspiracy to raise energy prices and lower market restrictions. Haha, joke's on us! Things to watch for: The interview with the Fortune 500 journalist who first realized something was wrong, and the two interviewed employees who happened to have lazy eyes. My only complaint was that the film really lacked a message, other than that these guys were really greedy. While some vague attempts were made to discuss how it reflects on society, it was really more in passing. 4/5 dj_clawson fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jul 1, 2005 |
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2005 16:57
|
|
|
Just watched this over the weekend, figured it would be a good time for another review/bump since the trial is rapidly approaching. This movie really is all about the hard facts of the Enron downfall, and as mentioned before, perhaps doesn't delve into more of the personal issues surrounding the incident. However, I think that this overall works in the film's favor, as it lays out the cold and calculating things that Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow, and Jeffrey Skilling did, without every falling into the trap of Michael Moore-esque personal attacks. This film isn't Alex Gibney's personal crusade against the evil fuckers that were in the top eschelons of the Enron corporation, but instead more of an accompaniment and visualization of the book on which the film is based. In this way, I found the film to be very successful, and in many parts downright horrifying and fairly upsetting, particularly the sequence where there are taped phone conversations between the traders while they are literally just choking money of California and the people there, and laughing about the elderly dying from heat exhaustion and other problems intensified by the energy crisis. I felt that the very matter-of-fact, mostly uncalculating way in which Gibney laid out the events of the Enron disaster made me feel much more than if he had tried to insert any message of his own. The movie is long enough as it is at two hours, and I think any attempts to reflect on America or society as a whole may have just dragged this well past the watchable point, but who's to say for sure. Depending on how many documentaries you watch, you may find this to be absolutely astounding or terribly wretched in parts, as Gibney attempts a variety of techniques throughout the film, some of which work and some of which fall flat on their faces (particularly irritating is the director's tendency to show a clip with an image pertaining to whatever the speaker is saying at the moment - i.e. if they say "it was a game of cat and mouse" he will have some stupid stock footage of a cat chasing a mouse or something else equally unnecessary). There are some very nice touches in here however, such as the rising and falling stock prices juxtaposed against Skilling and Lay's ridiculous speeches to the Enron employees and stockholders (towards the end of the film this is particularly effective). My one other complaint was that even though the film focused so much on the accounting and "technical" aspects of the Enron collapse, there were some key economic terms and issues that could have been explained more clearly for viewers like myself who know very little about high-level economics. You may find yourself pausing the movie and Wiki-ing terms like "mark to market" a couple times during the film (the film explains what these things are and how Enron used them to their advantage, but they do not explain why such easily abused powers exist in the first place). With the Enron trial coming up, watching this film or reading the book of the same title certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, as a lot of us aren't nearly as aquainted with this attrocity of corporate America as we should be. 3.5/5
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2005 18:28
|
|
|
I don't get economics, I really don't, and I was able to follow this film. This is a very straightforward documentary, it doesn't sensationalise and it doesn't go over the top. I appreciated that. What could have been very boring source material is transformed into a compelling film. Thoroughly enjoyable and definitely worth seeing. 4/5 TCC: Dude, you gotta play miniature golf.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2006 17:42
|
|
