Movie credits – how much longer before they outlast the movie?

Film credits have gone truly insane by the time you see a mention for ‘standby plasterer’. Do these people actually refuse to work unless they get a mention?

For crying out loud, Hollywood, put your foot down: actors, director, scriptwriter, locations and score composer. Everyone else – WE DON’T GIVE A TOSS. Get over yourselves.

No guns or gore, yet Inside Job one of the all-time great horror movies

Image via Wikipedia

In a way, I’m delighted that Inside Job is now available free of charge, for all to see.

And in another way, I’m not.

Because I defy even the most benign among you to reach the end of this documentary feature film analysis of the crash of 2008 without wishing you had a gun.

On the face of it, 108 minutes of talking heads shouldn’t make for an Oscar winner. The drama, however, emanates not from the characters but from their damning words, as the causes and causers of Wall Street’s latest meltdown are nailed emphatically to the wall, in an expose of greed and hubris that will take you beyond anger.

That not one executive nor company  has yet been brought to justice for their part in this fiasco raises serious questions about just how much daylight exists between law enforcement and Government in America and leaves we plebs having to savour the film’s minor triumphs of retribution:

1. Mouse-like Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard’s  laughable attempt to go all John Wayne on the interviewer (“Give it your best shot!!!” – at 1:31:55) as he begins to perceive the corner into which he’s being painted. Some men can carry off the all-guns-blazing approach: this isn’t one of them.

2. John Campbell, Chairman of Harvard’s Economics Dept (1:30:05 and 1:32:30) doing the best hapless Brit routine since Bertie Wooster. If I thought this was the sum total of my 15 minutes of fame, I might never leave the house again.

And at the end of what I thought might be a film that merely confirmed what we already suspected, there is a certain sting-in-the-tail. If America’s business and economics academics are as hand-in-hand with these Wall Street geniuses as Inside Job suggests, what’s to say we won’t be back here again in 10 years’ time, when the next batch of college graduates hit the Street?

It’s a sign of just how relentlessly infuriating this film is that its only note of optimism comes if you’re a woman of a certain age, as French finance minister Christine Lagarde ably demonstrates that grey hair need be no bar whatsoever to arousing a certain je ne sais quoi in the opposite sex. If Combe Inc is the next American corporate casualty, it may be the first in a while for which bankers can’t be held responsible.

Autumn time for Hitler

Cover of Downfall

The real reason Constantin Films called halt on all the wonderful parodies of the Hitler rant scene from Downfall?

It suddenly dawned on someone that long after Constantin Films has been forgotten, people will still remember the folks who took the idea and ran with it to create one of the best viral YouTube clips ever.

And they couldn’t bear the thought of it.

That’s my theory anyway.

I call ego.

Enjoy this one while you can.