Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Inside Job

Charles Ferguson, 104m, 2010

An outstanding documentary. Panoramic cinematography and razor sharp editing give us a visually and mentally exhilarating presentation on a subject that is too abstruse for most of us to understand. Most of us have been victims of the global inflation and impaired employment following the recession starting in 2008, when some leading financial institutions and banks in the US went bankrupt. Life has certainly become harder, even as the symbols of homogenized development, different kinds of concrete structures, mushroom all around. The film examines this phenomenon in calm but merciless objectivity. What becomes clear is that the cause lies in the greed and selfishness prevailing among the rich, mighty and learned, people in positions of the highest social respectability, like professors and deans in the best known universities and the captains of the finance. It is a puzzle how a self respecting individual can guzzle packages running into hundreds of millions, even as ordinary folk are rendered homeless or jobless. The clear answer is that these are hi-tech crooks. These are the creatures who run the world, or are at least key players, engineering wars if their need be. One needs to make the mental effort to glean the corruption and decay that underlies the glitter of apparent progress and growth of knowledge. Indeed, to borrow Michael Moore's word, we are living in a fictional bubble. It ought to be scary. This is a low decibel more clinical version of Moore's Capitalism: a Love Story.

2 comments:

Seongyong Cho said...

And, as Ferguson said when he accepted an Oscar, these bastards have not been arrested yet for what they did.

S M Rana said...

I'll have to check on that speech too but I certainly hope there are more films to come from Ferguson.