The Smartest Guys In The Room Netflix Movie Based On
Barbarians At The Gate is an excellent movie based on true events regarding the Nabisco takeover. The documentary The Cove (because the story runs deep) 2. The movies Boiler Room and Margin Call.
Sadly, though, there is no mention of one British participant in this sorry story: Tory peer John Wakeham, who in the 1990s pulled down a juicy £80,000 per year serving as non-executive director for Enron and brushed aside warnings that his employer was dodgy. Her story is brilliantly told in this cracking documentary directed by Alex Gibney, based on the subsequent book that McLean co-wrote about the Enron scandal. Thanks to McLean, the public discovered that Enron was a fraud, inflated by mendacious accounting, the manipulation of public utilities and Maxwell-style raiding of pension funds. Best Netflix Shows and Series To Binge The 100 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now The Best TV Shows of 2020.
She read the accounts, and doggedly ignored the spin.We sorted Netflixs extensive catalog to find the 20 best documentaries on the streaming service, sorted by their IMDB reviews. She assessed Enron not on the basis of its ongoing success, not on the basis of the conspicuous wealth and prestige of its executive officers, not on the basis of its glossy brochures and glitzy premises - but purely and simply on the numbers. Director Gibney deftly compiles vast amounts of in-house video and audio footage along with after-the-fact interviews and Congressional hearings chronicling the devastating downfall in 2001 of corporate behemoth Enron.McLean's triumph lay in her forensic rigour.
They marketed derivative financial products based on everything from internet bandwidth to, unbelievably, the weather. Enron brokered the buying and selling of energy futures whose values they were allowed to include as part of their own assets, like the owner of an armoured car who believes he owns the gold bullion while it is being carried inside, and, incredibly, were permitted to consider the hypothetical future value of anything they owned as a current reality. Enron's chairman and chief executive officer were Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, two supremely arrogant and belligerent men who believed they were the "smartest guys in the room": that through sheer cleverness and creativity - an unfortunate concept in connection with accounting - they had brought into being the most innovative corporation in the US. For the 2003 book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, see The Smartest Guys in the Room (book).The Enron catastrophe emerges from this film as a fascinating story of crookedness that grew out of business practices, which, though audacious, were just about on the right side of the law.
My only quarrel with the movie is its apparent sympathy with David - who should have been taking tougher action, or making a louder complaint, against the Enron swindlers.Gibney's movie shows how the top brass at Enron realised what was happening, but like a mad and dysfunctional cult, everyone carried on. So Enron is even guilty of creating the Governator. California suffered power cuts like a developing world country or 1970s Britain, and this was blamed on its hapless governor, Gray Davis, who was to be booted out of office in favour of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This modern-day South Sea Bubble grew and grew and grew.When California deregulated its energy markets, Enron was allowed to shut down production here and there to pump up the price of electricity.
Eventually, the smartest guys in the room, sycophantically praised by the political and business elites - including Bush Sr and Jr - wound up being taken to the police station in handcuffs. In reality, asking why would get you fired. "Ask why" was the company's supremely conceited, brainiac motto.
Maybe John Wakeham would care to make a donation. Meanwhile in the US, the company's pauperised pensioners are still looking for ways to make ends meet. Middle-class Brits are borrowing more, spending more and unconcerned about the future because ever-increasing property prices will buy us out of trouble. The movie has disquieting resonances about our own Enronised prosperity.
0 kommentar(er)
