MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

On DVD and Blu-ray Disc

Inside Job Rated PG-13

Photo © 2011 Sony Pictures Classics
Movie Review by Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

After the financial woes of the past few years in which millions of people lost billions of dollars and thousands of families lost jobs and homes – all due to elaborate and often confusing investment strategies – I would think that a film like Inside Job would be welcomed into the conversation. 

Filmmaker Charles Ferguson has an agenda: He would like to see the people responsible for these monetary shell games prosecuted and imprisoned. 

Before you dismiss Ferguson as just another liberal fanatic like Michael Moore, you need to see Inside Job.  It will make you nostalgic for the good old days when you could count on a documentary to champion your side against a perceived enemy.  But, as Pogo Possum once said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” 

Our economic meltdown has been in process for at least three decades and it includes Democrats, Republicans, bankers, lawyers, politicians, realtors, and investment advisors.  And, since it also includes anyone who expected to become wealthy over time by simply trusting the folks in charge of our money, I know that it includes me, too! 

What it is, is sin.  In this film we listen to dozens of people trying to make sense out of a deregulated financial system that rewarded the people who promised investors returns that the system would be unable to provide.  And then, after that was accomplished, the system was tweaked once again to reward people who bet against those promises.

In other words, if you fail, I still win.  (Michael Lewis writes about this in his entertaining and heartbreaking book The Big Short.) 

While it can be argued that the stock market has always been a type of upscale gambling system, it has also been a way for businesses to raise capital and for healthy competition to reward creative growth. 

The big tragedies depicted in Inside Job are the failure of the banking system to handle the funds of depositors with integrity and the profligate granting of subprime loans that were bound to fail to the people least able to recover from foreclosure. 

Most people don’t watch documentaries these days, and even fewer people watch documentaries like Inside Job that make the viewer feel uncomfortable. 

Consider this movie as a Lenten act of penance that might help you experience the dark side of greed as well as identify with the plight of America’s poor.  If things continue unabated, you and I will be closer to the poor than ever before.

Pitchfork/Halo Ratings:
Three halos
A film of moral outrage that demands a day of reckoning for those responsible persons and institutions.

Four pitchforks
For duplicity, corruption, mismanagement of funds, gambling, sexual sins, and greed.

COMMENTS!

Do you have comments about this movie or movie review? Email comments. (Your comments will be posted to our web site.)