Horror movies are always popular–torrents of blood, talons tearing flesh, nubile young women menaced by creatures leaping from graves. Given that, here's what I consider the most frightening horror film of 2010, "Inside Job," opening today, and audiences will be slim to non-existent. People will stay away on droves.
Why?
Well, "Inside Job" is a true story, with horror even greater because it is true and because it is affecting most of us right now. A true story about how and why a cabal of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people, including bankers, insurance executives, Wall Street tycoons, politicians and others in the top 1 percent of earners created the current recession and financial scandal with their greed and criminality. Not only did they force millions of people into bankruptcy and out of their homes, but they also increased their own worth immeasurably at the same time.
And too many people don't really believe it can happen here, or to them, and who have been inculcated to–somehow–vote against their own best interests.
Producer-director Charles Ferguson has done remarkable work, with Matt Damon as the narrator (Ferguson's own voice comes to the fore a few times), and a script from Chad Beck and Adam Bolt. And it is not a partisan screed. This financial revolution and war by the rich against everyone else dates from the days of Ronald Reagan, when "morning for America" became "all day and night for financial manipulators." Democratic administrations are as guilty as Republican ones.
Back in the 1930s, during the First Great Depression (if the wealthy have their way, they'll soon be adorned with Roman numerals, just like the Super Bowl), President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who invented the type of Socialism that has President Barack Obama as a believer, convinced Congress to pass the Glass-Steagall Act. That law kept banks out of the investment business, and was one of the first restrictions that Reagan Republicans wanted abolished.
Greed hit a bump in the adventures of the Keating Five and scandals in the savings and loan business, but Glass-Steagall took hit after hit, Copngressional session after Congressional session, until it met death by a thousand cuts. And then the bankers and brokers took off their masks and started robbing people in broad daylight. Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Henry M. Paulson Jr., Robert E. Rubin and a large gaggle of government advisers who reaped millions for themselves and their friends all share in the blame, but peculiarly, none was willing to be interviewed for the movie. We see them testifying before Congress and making well-paid speeches, but none talked to the movie-maker. It reminded me of the generals testifying before Congress over the death of Pat Tillman in "The Tillman Story." They wouldn't talk to the movie-maker either.
The details of the derivatives scandal come to light, pointing out the rapacious greed of bankers and Wall Street geniuses who cooked the books until they smoked, who figured out methods to entice people to pawn their houses and their livelihoods while they took their giant corporate bank accounts and bet that the little people would go bust while the bankers got rich enough to make one retch.
There's more, of course, but my own awakening came when Ferguson got around to the academic world and revealed how much money was being paid to the academics listed above. Their books, their lectures, their lies all were being sponsored and promoted-and paid for-by the same people who were getting rich by ignoring the advice of the so-called experts..
This is not Ferguson's first attempt at muck-raking journalism. He also produced and directed "No End in Sight," a documentary about how the U.S. got into the morass known as Iraq. It was an Oscar nominee for best documentary. "Inside Job" also benefits from some superb cinematography and editing. Svetlana Cvetko, born in what was then Yugoslavia, and Kalyanee Mam, born in Cambodia, shared that title. Mam, a human-rights lawyer as well as a filmmaker, also has credits as an associate producer, a researcher and a "special thanks" credit from Ferguson.
Whether it was another power play, or a conspiracy, or whatever, "Inside Job" should be opening a week before an election, not a week after.
"Inside Job" opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
—Joe