NYFF 2010: Inside Job and Certified Copy
Inside Job
The financial meltdown of 2008 is still fresh in my mind as I was surprised at how quickly everything could just collapse. In September alone Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the federal government, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and AIG was bailed out with $85 billion. In the first week of October the U.S Senate approved a $700 billion bailout of banks with toxic investments and the stock market had it's worst week since the Great Depression. I'll never forget this period because it got me interested in investing and led me to create a personal retirement account filled with various mutual funds which I bought then and are doing fairly well now. However after watching Inside Job I am forced to realize our problems are far from over.
The financial crisis has led to a number of films with the first notable production being Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story which I found to be one of the director's weakest efforts to date. Inside Job is a more insightful and surprisingly more amusing take on the crisis. Where as I can see Michael Moore trying to be funny and obnoxious in his interviews, here Charles Ferguson let's the guests provide their own dark comedy as he knows their answers are going to be absurd. Case in point when Ferguson asks an interviewee to grade how the boards of various companies have been doing in terms of handing out bonuses and hiring CEO's he gives them a B. Ferguson accurately reponds, "not an F?".
Matt Damon provides the narration and does a fair job explaining to us in layman's terms what happened. The problem as we know by now was the housing bubble and the selling of subprime loans to people who could not afford the homes they were being given. A subprime loan is basically a loan to someone that is a high risk of not paying off the mortgage and defaulting on the loan and thus having to give up the home. The film explains that banks were able to do this because of the innovation of a financial tool called a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) which allowed them to essentially combine all this bad debt and sell it off to investors. These practices were also accessible due to the lack of regulation by the federal government.
The rest is history as we all know that once investors started realizing the toxicity of what they owned everything came crashing down. This also is the most simple explanation of what happened just to indicate how truly complicated these matters are. I am right now in the process of applying for business school and hopefully will eventually have a better grasp on finance and the economy. Knowing as little as I do now I'll say Inside Job was an efficient learning tool and an interesting film. More importantly it is trying to get people to go out and spark change as the ending will have many wondering if the worst is yet to come.
3.5/5
Certified Copy
I'm not the cinephile I thought I was because Certified Copy is the first film I have seen from respected Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami but after witnessing the involving dialog and natural performances here I will have to add some of his older films to my netflix queue. French art dealer Elle (Juliette Binoche) and writer James (opera singer William Shimmel) supposedly meet for the first time in her art shop and then proceed to travel around Tuscany discussing art, marriage, love and responsibility. As they continue to spend more time together we realize that perhaps they might have known in each other in the past and then eventually that they have been married for fifteen years. Or have they?
The film plays out like Linklater's Before Sunrise or Before Sunset but as directed by Charlie Kaufman. At first I was frustrated, as I usually am with ambiguity, that I was dealing with something poetic, philosophical and existential rather than narrative but a day later I realize that the films that have me thinking about them afterward are always the best pieces of work. The book by James, called Certified Copy, explains that a copy of art is just as meaningful as the original and that all art is valued by our perception of it. This ties in with the relationship he has with Elle. Is it original or is it a copy of their previous relationships and marriages and does it even matter? Perhaps what matters is only their perception of what they have together.
Juliette Binoche gives one of her career best performances here as she reveals layer after layer of her sad, intelligent and passionate character while speaking in three different languages. William Shimmel acting for the first time is surprisingly commendable in his role, specifically his performance during a scene set in a restaurant. The true star of Certified Copy is Kiarostami's screenplay which along with The Social Network contains some of the most fascinating conversations I have heard in film this year. Certified Copy is in the top tier of films whenever and wherever it gets released.
4.5/5
