I ended up checking out the documentary and giving it a watch. I thought it was very cool that Matt Damon was the narrator! A celebrity taking things into consideration for the middle and lower class, and on their side, that is pretty rare to begin with. I'm sure it'll hurt his career by 'investors with a grudge', but maybe he is a man that believes in better business morals than caring about money.
I wonder if he was the same guy asking the questions in the interviews with the high profile people. That could've been why all those guys were willing to talk even though they ended up arguing and such over the interviews.
It's been less than 2 weeks since I've seen the movie, but I've already started to forget some of it. I also watched the movie a second time with the commentary on. I don't remember if that was subtitled also or if I got by by watching it with headsets. I don't recall being that frustrated while watching that special feature, so I'm going to guess that it was captioned also. The director mentions in his comments that many people refused to be interviewed, but he was surprised that a lot of people did agree to be interviewed. His guess was that they were not use to be challenged during interviews so they weren't expecting the type of questions they were given.
He did point out a few cases in the movie where the interviewees shut the interview down or tell him he just has a few more minutes. The movie is so dense with information it can be easy to miss it.
I think Damon did the narration but the movie director did the interviews. I'm not sure though.
I also won't pretend that I understood everything in the doc.
Same here!
I'm intending to give it another watch through when I have more free time to devote to the subject,
As I mentioned, I watched it a second time with the comments on. Some of the comments only dealt with discussing the movie from an "artistic viewpoint", but other comments went into explaining why he chose to open with Iceland, and why he chose to interview some people, and some comments on what those people had to say. I also took the time to watch the deleted scenes and got some additional insight from some scenes also.
a lot of it felt like I was being brought into Econ 455 when I've only took Econ 101, it was all rushed in and sorta felt like cramming for an exam. Loads of information...
Yes. The movie was very dense with info -- but I still felt it was very watchable. The director's comments explained why he included some information in the film, so that was interesting also.
A lot of the aspects of the documentary seemed to focus on identifying the problem and later who were the one to blame. I found also interesting to research and portray a negative light towards business schools and their associates, ie, Glenn Hubbard @ Columbia, Harvard dudes like John Hubbard, Martin Feldstein.. etc. Led me to re-think about the purpose of education, not for morals, but for the future prospective investments of current investors and people involved with the crisis, sort of like these future students at Harvard business and MBA's turn out into future prospective bailouts of some kind to save the greedified key investors.
Yes, he did talk about the revolving door between business, goverment and the schools and what the negative side effects of that can be.
In one of the deleted scenes a politician in Singapore explains how the politicians and bueracrats in Singapore get paid extremely high salaries so they won't be tempted by lobbyists to make policies that aren't in the interest of the nation. IIRC, Singapore and most of Asia was not as heavily effected by 2008 Economic Crisis as the US and Europe was.
It did a good job to bring me up to speed and recap, these problems and what they did, and what happened, but now it's over it left a big question mark.
I'm more interested towards what do we do?
What can we do?
It left me with those questions as well.
There was very little given in the aspect of the doc on that..
I found the movie was depressing because it basically substantiated that in many ways the USA is an ogliarchy and not a true republic.
going to lead me to look into researching a way to figure this out on my own for my own life or if I intend to have bigger ambitions and become a politician..
I wish more people felt as you did. I believe that a lot of political problems are a result of the political will and the culture (for lack of a better word) of the majority of the voters. Basically, what are we willing to put up with? What is difficult about this situation is that not that many laws are probably broken -- what we have is a result of widespreasd corruption. It seems to be fashionable to affect a weary air and say nothing can be done about it. Well, yeah, sure -- if enough people have that attitude that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead of affecting an air that all politicians are crooks and leaving it at that, I think we would be better off if we encouraged people we respected among our friends, family and neighbors to enter politics on the local level. Or, at least, to become active in grass roots affairs on a local level.
So I just love the fact that you posted that you are considering becoming a politician. The more people in the game, the more choices we have and the better the odds that we may become more of a republic and less of an ogliarchy again.
..And it brought me to understand why there is criticism given of the Obama admin.. obviously putting the wrong people in charge of an armageddon of a situation.
Maybe Obama was trying to give them a second chance? I sort of doubted it after realizing how many of his advisors are actually all the wrong people who should be with his reform.
Obama has been really disappointing in this area. It's appears to be a blow against any hopes to solve this problem peacefully using democratic tools.
