Customer Reviews

Inside Job

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4 star:		(1)
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Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job" is like a documentarial "Usual Suspects". While the film by Bryan Singer highlighted the exploits of a team of professional criminals and a job gone horrifically wrong under the watchful eye of the mastermind Keyser Soze - Ferguson pulls the cover off the wrongdoings of a cabal of professional bankers and how their string pulling misdeeds and pursuit of personal riches resulted in a meltdown of the world financial system - echoes of which will be felt for years... maybe decades.

Winner of the Academy Award for best feature documentary of 2010, "Inside Job" opens with a brief expose of how Iceland was an early victim of the hype and and misunderstood potential of derivatives trading. It was a neat little teaser of a story (which has the potential of being a feature length documentary on it's own), that leads into the main target in Ferguson's scope: Wall Street bankers and their lust for profit.

Interviews with former employees of some of the institutional culprits are very enlightening. After particularly bombastic revelations in the film are made concerning some big players in the industry, a black screen with white type is displayed saying "Goldman Sachs" or "Alan Greenspan" or "The SEC" was "unavailable for comment for this film". The list of players who turned a blind eye in the interest of exorbitant personal gain is a known fact, but to hear their colleagues and the likes of George Soros interviewed giving the gritty details is a nice reinforcement.

A lot of great journalism has been produced surrounding the events addressed during the encapsulating footage of "Inside Job". Much as the documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" served the masses in explaining the Enron collapse, "Inside Job" with it's easy to understand charts and simplified language is the perfect film to embrace this subject. If you've kept a finger on the pulse of the mortgage crisis and the floundering of Lehman Brothers, AIG and Bear Stearns, you will find that this documentary presents a clear concise retelling of how it all went down. Ferguson's accusatory bit of film-making is a welcome addition to the canon. For those wanting to dive a bit deeper into the economic mechanisms behind this event, highly recommended reading would be "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The recent global financial meltdown will go down in history as one of those singularly defining events that characterizes what is wrong with society. If we always suspected that greed and corruption were at the heart of the human condition but could never prove it, 2008 changed all that. Charles Ferguson's award-winning film, "Inside Job" takes us inside the various American financial institutions where this monstrous scheme of corporate deregulation was hatched in the years leading up to the ultimate crisis. Instead of reviewing the chain of events which are already well-known, Ferguson visits a number of the big players after the fact to get their view on why global financial markets virtually seized up in September 2008. Most of the big-name operators who capitalized on derivatives, subprime mortgages, and credit swaps were from the Wall Street fraternity. Prominent investment bankers like Blankfein, Paulson, Fudal and other lesser knowns openly encouraged the multi-billion dollar sales of questionable securities which they then proceeded to go short on. In this era, government regulators from the Fed and Treasury turned a blind eye to these seriously unethical practices that threatened the very integrity of the American financial system. Not only were American banks and insurance companies in the thick of this concerted drive to unload bad debt on unsuspecting clients, European banks were caught up in it too. Icelandic banks were privatized and became involved in arranging over a hundred billion dollars in dodgy loans that eventually destroyed the country's economy when they were called in. What I found particularly useful and instructive about this documentary is its ability to get behind the scenes to ask the tough questions of the supporting cast of economists such as Tyson, Feldstein, Summers, and Geithner who promoted the concept of deregulation and grew very wealthy from it. Fast forward to the supposed age of Obama and financial reform, and we find that many of the Wall Street architects of the last debacle still hold positions of influence in government, forcing the new administration to go soft on rooting out the culture of greed and corruption. The film leaves us with the troubling thought that only in America can a financial engineer make vastly more than a civil engineer, even when what they produce is manufactured out of thin air. Nowhere in this production will you find an outright admission of guilt from those who created this crisis. It is almost as if silence or denial is part of the reward of fleecing one's fellow being.

SnowPharaoh, you said this documentary was sensationalist? Well perhaps a little to jazz it up a bit, but not as much as Michael Moore telling Americans that Canadians don't lock their doors, based on his experience in Sarnia, Ontario. Everything about this documentary was well researched and supported, including all the warnings, articles and books about the coming global financial crisis.

Matt Damon does an excellent job. The complexity of the derivatives market, particularly the CDO's, is spelled out nicely in layman's terms for the average viewer. Although, as with any documentary, you need to pay close attention. I've watched it a few times now, I highly recommended this as one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

very good movie. good to see the inside job of what takes place and how we are royally "scre*ed" by those behind the scenes.

Along with "Let's make money" and "Capitalism, a love story", "Inside job" offers a great inside view of today's financial system, in other words the heart of capitalism.

If steam isn't coming out of your ears at the end of this well executed expose, then I'll cook you dinner! Real powerhouse of a documentary, and I take my hat off to this talented director. I read that his next project is a documentary on Wikileaks, so fasten your seatbelts! When you think that Madoff got nailed, these other crooks should be thrown in the slammer for nearly destroying the economy along side the former Federal Reserve Chairman for deregulation!. A must see. Outstanding work.

Every citizen of every country should see this DVD.!
Beautifully done. Very depressing and action needs to be taken.
I understand Oprah is opening a bank. How brilliant is that!
Seems to be the only answer.

Inside Job exposes many of those who have committed crimes against humanity that we are now all feeling the ramifications. A film that points the finger at those responsible but have no accountability. Greed, corruption and sociopathic actions have led to the financial state we are in today - near collapse. This is a must watch. See how economic warfare is just as dangerous as military warfare in today's world.

I am always skeptical of documentaries. They are a bit too sensational, a bit too journalistic, not scientific enough, they rarely ponder the different factors involved in a given event or phenomena appropriately and usually require the audience to be able to bring their own critical thought to the process. And often, the audience's critical thought is simply not informed enough.

This is the case with INSIDE JOB as well. It is difficult to parse out the information from the opinions of the people who made the documentary. So I am a bit irritated by this documentary.

But I must say that, if only 10% of what is reported here is accurate (and I tend to think that more than 10% is accurate) then our western economies are in incredibly dire straights and this documentary does an incredibly important service in ringing this bell. To be honest, with the little information I have on economics in the US and elsewhere, after watching this documentary, I was first angry at being taken for a ride by the insatiably greedy, but also very fearful that our economies are in their hands. There is definitely a frightening perspective in this documentary if 10% of what is said is accurate.

On the down side, we are left with a sense of powerlessness at the end. What can be done? Even Obama seems to have succumbed to the evil ones... one is left with the impression that there will be a great need to live courageously and face even greater economic setbacks and poverty... so that a few can play.

This was not what I thought it was..not a story like The Bourne films.
In fact it's not even a story, more like a documentary of facts and figures, rather dry to me
but interesting to those who are into conspiracies , economics, and politics.
I was looking for an exciting suspenseful story based on truth on government secrets and conspiracies.
For me it didn't fill my addiction to Matt Damon movies.