Better Late Then Never

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.The film was released in 2005 and I watched it in 2015. Is it dated? Perhaps a bit. But it is also just as important as ever, really recapping some great history of finance, energy, and California politics. The names of "Ken Lay" and "Jeff Skilling" have not been forgotten.What would perhaps be interesting is a follow-up film about some of the key players. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big winner. Ken Lay is, I believe, dead. I forget what happened to Skilling. And Gray Davis? Still tainted, and for something he had no control over.

I guess the Enron collapse, and the other corporations that collapsed around the same time (such as Worldcom) were sort of a harbinger of the crisis that was to arise in 2008, however just as with the events that surrounded Enron, it seems that the response to the global financial crisis was simply to sweep the problem under the table, make sure the stock market starts rising again, and go on as if nothing had happened. However, the case of Enron is similar to this whole farcical system that is the modern market, and that is that the health of a company is determined by the growth in profits, and in turn the growth in the share price.The funny thing is that we were look at the growth in the share price of a company, or their reported earnings, there is one thing we don't actually see, and that is inflation. There are other ways of increase profits without actually increasing the earnings or the customer base, and that is to cuts costs. One can actually grow profits (and even earnings) without actually increasing the customer base, and that is one of the massive cons of the market. There is much that I could say about this issue, however I think I will simply focus of the Enron fraud in this instance.Enron, like many modern corporations, is effectively a farce. It only exists to make money and its only reported goals are profit growth and its success if measured by the value of the company. However a company's value is a vary dubious quantifier as there is a lot that cannot be measured. A company's value can be measured by the value of its assets and by its actual earnings (which is quantifiable because that can be measured), however one can also add an intangible factor called 'goodwill', which is the reputed reputation of the company, and then there is future earnings. Future earnings, as the name implies, are earnings that may come in in the future, but because they are in the future they are merely speculative. However what Enron did was to base its current value on these future earnings though a method called mark to market accounting. The problem is that if these earnings don't arise then the value of the company comes into question.However, what Enron did was that they kept on creating these wonderful ideas and deals (such as bandwidth trading, which never eventuated, or video on demand, which also did not eventuate as the technology was not sufficient to allow at at that time), and when they began to dry up, they began to manipulate the market itself. This is thus the cause of the California rolling blackouts. It was not that deregulation did not work, it is that deregulation was being exploited to drive up the price of electricity. Power plants were being shut down, and blackouts and brownouts created to create the appearance that there was not enough power, and in response the price of electricity was being forced up. I remember that at the time we were simply watching it as the failure of deregulation, however as it turned out it was a lot more sinister than that.What is interesting though is that this documentary reminded me a lot of the Wolf of Wall Street, however this had a much stronger focus on the human cost and the actions of the people at the top of the tree, were as the other film was more glamorising what was in effect a crocked and greedy individual.

Shock. That is the primary feeling this film will elicit in you. Shock at such blatant unethical misconduct on such a powerful corporate level. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a documentary that chronicles the rise and fall of Enron, an energy company that practically ruled the world at one point due to fraud and faulty business practices that led to its eventual demise. The film is told through interviews with people who were at one point involved with Enron or have studied Enron to find out what made it fail. The evidence compiled so coherently in this film is sickening as it paints a perfect portrait of the lengths that corporate greed goes to. The film details a tragedy that not only deals with the economics of this corporation, but the psychological aspects that went into the process of such unethical practices.This film is structured very well and I commend it for its use of a purely chronological telling of the story of Enron. It starts from Enron's beginnings and its first steps up the ladder of success. It then continues to detail the company's growing success and how it all affected the stock market, all the while throwing in hints that misconduct was occurring amidst this seemingly perfect achievement. The finally the film starts to detail just where everything was going wrong and the moral code of the players in this film begin to crumble. We see every last bit of fraud and it is honestly quite frightening to see just how terrible some of the people working at Enron were. This of course all leads to Enron's downfall and the film strongly emphasizes just how hard this hit the economic world.Over the course of this film there is a lot of political and economic jargon thrown our way, and it can be a little difficult to keep up with. But overall it isn't difficult to get the gist of everything that is going on here, and by the end of the film it is easy to see just how bad these people are. There's nothing to make you question the validity of this film because, quite frankly, the facts are all laid out on the table before us and the director just connects the dots for us. And once the whole picture is put together it is absolutely stunning. Fraud on all different levels becomes evident, which is why the Enron scandal is considered to be the biggest corporate scandal in history, and rightfully so.If I had one tiff with this film it would be the interviewees. Gibney, the director of the film, interviews some very important and legitimate people, yet they are all on his side. I would have liked to see more people interviewed that were on Enron's side in order to get the situation from their point of view. Of course it is easy to decline an interview for a film that is going to chronicle the role you played in the biggest corporate scandal ever, so I can't blame the film itself for this issue. Plus, a lot of the people who could have been against Gibney in his argument are in jail or were in jail at the time this film was made. I would say that Gibney makes the most out of what he had, but where the real engaging content of this film comes from is really the archival footage from the news, trials, and even secret videotapes with incriminating evidence and just how well Gibney puts it all together.This is a fascinating documentary that frustrates as much as it intrigues. The Enron scandal is a complicated tale, but Gibney tells it in a very coherent and straightforward way that is as fascinating as it is shocking. Documentary filmmaking is an art, and Alex Gibney proves this by making true engaging art out of a story full of business and economics. This is a great film that tells a sickening story.

Were it not for the fact that its collapse led to over twenty thousand employees being pink-slipped, the situation involving Enron might very well be considered a black comedy. Unfortunately, the corporate shenanigans of its morally bankrupt potentates, to wit Andy Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, and, last but not least, the late (but not lamented) Ken Lay, led to what was, in its time (late 2001/early 2002) the single biggest corporate failure in the history of the United States, and a sign of what was to come in the next seven years. This saga is told here in writer/director Alex Gibney's compelling, and at times infuriating, documentary ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM.Taken from the book of the same name by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean, this film details the rise of the Houston-based energy giant and how it manipulated its finances to hide the fact that it was a house of cards ready to collapse for several years before it did. Even more than that, however, the film shows us just how Lay and his boys, with the always-reliable help of his deregulator-in-chief George W. Bush, manipulated energy prices and the energy grid in California to produce the rolling blackouts that caused electrical costs to skyrocket, thus putting the world's seventh biggest economy in a $38 billion hole from which it has yet to re-emerge.Gibney, with able assistance from narrator Peter Coyote (remembered as the mysterious "Keys" in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL), wisely interviews those Enron employees who knew what was going on inside the bowels of their company but were powerless to do anything, and thus makes them sympathetic. But he also gives us those phone calls in which Enron traders chuckled profanely about the pain and suffering their shutting off of power plants caused Californians during one of the hottest summers on record, something that'll definitely cause one's blood to boil.If we need any reminder of how important ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM is, it comes from one of those unemployed Enron employees who warns us that what happened to them and their company would happen again. Need I say more?