Inside Job
"The bee I've just eaten has advised me not to comment."
Sarah 33, Death Race 23; 15 of 24 categories completed
I got impatient with it at first. It misspells two key names in chyrons right off the bat — former Fed chairman Paul “Vocker” and IMF managing director “Dominque” “Straus”-Kahn. Come on, guys; get an intern to Google that shit. And tell Matt Damon not to sound quite so much like he’s about to giggle while he’s narrating. The subject matter is pretty well-worn territory by now, and filmmaking techniques aside, I didn’t know if I had the energy to get pissed off at Wall Street’s venality all over again.
In Inside Job‘s defense, though, it’s at the point in the Oscars Death Race where any movie is going to make me impatient simply by virtue of being a movie, and about half an hour in, it started to win me over. It’s a little obvious with the music cues and a little willfully naïve in some of its questioning of key figures, but whichever one of the filmmakers conducted the interviews IS AWESOME. You can’t say the documentary pretends it doesn’t have an axe to grind, and the interviewer responds to various disingenuous answers or outright lies with wearily stroppy comments like “Excuse me, but you can’t be serious” and “Forgive me, but that’s…clearly not true.” Love it! At one point, confronted with a hair he’s just meaninglessly split, Glenn Hubbard snaps that he nicely agreed to participate in the movie, which he clearly shouldn’t have, and the interviewer now has three minutes to complete the interview and get out. Amazing. Definitely a good watch once you get past the failure to copy-edit and the use of Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time.” And if missing Eliot Spitzer is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
I’ve now seen the entire category, and I still enjoyed Exit Through The Gift Shop the most: it was the most consistently entertaining, interesting, and just fun. But Academy voters don’t reward fun in this race. (Or at the ceremony.) Fiber-packed topicality with a pasty fondant of liberal guilt — now that’s the stuff that would give this one and/or Restrepo the edge. With all of that said, I called this category completely wrong last year, so I think it’s not Gift Shop or Waste Land, but we’ll see.
Tags: Dominique Strauss-Kahn Eliot Spitzer Inside Job Matt Damon movies Oscars 2011 Death Race Paul Volcker Peter Gabriel shut up Glenn Hubbard
My one problem with the movie was when it gets a little rah-rah at the end in trying to rouse people to action. Ferguson spends the whole movie trusting us to be able to process all of the information he’s giving to us in a clear, lucid manner, only at the last minute, he thinks he has to gild the lily? Having said that, I hope the movie does rouse people to action. It certainly made me angry watching it.
I have long been wanting somebody at the federal level to give Spitzer a special prosecutor’s gig. I know it won’t happen, but it would be so satisfying.
I keep seeing ads for this book and thinking of you:
It would help if I coded correctly, wouldn’t it?
The Bee Eater
Damon did not have that problem when narrating the more recent of the two Red Sox World Series MLB films. He sounded to be taking it SERIOUSLY. VERY! SERIOUSLY! Like, “I’m gonna get a whuppin’ if I giggle in church” seriously. (Although, thank God, he was not as grim as Denis Leary on the earlier one, which was ponderous and overblown on all levels. Imagine a sports version of the “Manchild In Beantown” documentary that Diane Chambers made for Woody’s father.)
Speaking of impatience: This seems an uncommonly concise batch of Oscar contenders. Usually you can count on one if not several major nominees of Avatar/The Thin Red Line/Schindler’s List/Dances With Wolves/Reds/Godfather/etc. proportions. This year, has anything even come close to three hours? You are hitting more of the “minor” categories than I will — have you seen anything yet that even exceeds Inception’s briskish 148?