Rememberings

Inside Job is a powerful, comprehensive documentary examining the financial clusterfuk/circle jerk/meltdown of 2008 from Charles Ferguson who also directed the excellent No End in Sight. Most people, I hope, are depressingly familiar with the narrative of deregulation, greed and idiocy that has led to our current piteous economic conditions but if you're not this film covers all the lowlights in a considered fashion and still has time to throw in some fresh titbits to stoke your outrage, for instance I was unaware quite how many well regarded academic economists had been selling themselves to the Mammonites as mouthpieces in their endless quest for More but then I've always been a bit naive. Anyways with a tonne of unrepentant interviews with bankers, regulators and morally bankrupt cnuts and an interviewer with a handful of balls this got me thinking about Roasting Pits, Judas Chairs and Spanish Ticklers and it's a film that should be broadcast nightly.

Fair Game is a desperately earnest slice of Hollywood liberalism about that time when Scooter Libby outed one of Dubya's covert CIA agents in a petulant feud about Iraqi Mayhem 2 and then pardoned him of all the charges. Sean Penn and Naomi Watss star as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, the victims of a spin/war frenzied government on the defensive and though it's well made and has a healthy cast of familiar and talented faces it's dull and utterly toothless, wavering unsatisfactorily between limp thriller and family drama. It was an interesting sideshow to the terrible events but I think the story would have more impact told by the characters themselves, maybe in conjunction with other tales of Whitehouse pwnings, documentary style, rather than this hammy interpretation from a bunch of rich thesps.