Really enjoyed Alex Gibney's Scientology:Going Clear doc recently but this is not as engrossing or as dynamically told. Its very nuts n bolts.
In 2001, the massive Enron company goes bankrupt leading to a criminal scandal. Kenneth Lay founded the company in 1985 amidst Texas deregulation implemented by the Bushes.
I guess the Enron collapse, and the other corporations that collapsed around the same time (such as Worldcom) were sort of a harbinger of the crisis that was to arise in 2008, however just as with the events that surrounded Enron, it seems that the response to the global financial crisis was simply to sweep the problem under the table, make sure the stock market starts rising again, and go on as if nothing had happened. However, the case of Enron is similar to this whole farcical system that is the modern market, and that is that the health of a company is determined by the growth in profits, and in turn the growth in the share price.
The collapse of the Enron Corporation is fascinating to anyone with even rudimentary understanding of the economic practices of American corporations. It isn't surprising that several books describing the collapse are available.
Overall I found this to be a decent recap of the Enron saga, or at least the pre-trial portion thereof. However the film is necessarily simplistic, and there's a high dose of cable-documentary cheese (re- enacted funerals, gratuitous topless dancers, inappropriate Oingo Boingo songs, etc.
...because I can't see what's different from what happened here and what the banks did that caused the global collapse of 2008.
From the start the documentary makes it clear that it's a hit-piece. It has a clear agenda it's pushing and the film makers don't hold back on telling the public that, yes, Enron was evil.
William Muir, an animal breeder at Purdue University, once conducted an experiment in which hens were selected for egg productivity using two different selection methods. The first method involved selecting the most productive hens from different cages to breed the next generation of hens, whilst the second method involved selecting the most productive cages and using all the hens within those cages for breeding.
Shock. That is the primary feeling this film will elicit in you.
