I personally cannot stand arrogant, ego-drunk, machismo-frustrated, spoiled rotten white nerds-with-a-'tude like Jeff Skilling. If you peel back the thin coat of academic and financial success, he is precisely the type of guy that creates viruses for computers and banks and e- mail accounts who cum off the feeling of instigating the panic and disturbance of masses by sitting at a keyboard with a scantily dressed call girl over his lap, spanking her with the other hand, snorting coke off her cleavage when he has a few seconds to look away from the screen of complicated numbers and abbreviations.
Alex Gibney's documentary is a crime procedural. It's fashioned in a way in which it primarily entertains, what with very familiar songs over the soundtrack with tongue-in-cheek relevance and the subject of the biggest white collar confidence scheme in history. Regardless of a viewer's politics, this will make you relish the image of what must be happening to these guys in prison. It's about how ENRON grew to be one of the largest corporations with what was fundamentally a scheme to rob Peter to pay Paul, and ultimately ransacked the retirement funds of its employees just to prolong the inevitable.
There's a notion that ENRON was a group of decent businessmen gone bad. The movie make the case that it was a con game almost from the start, much to the tune of a Mamet script. At the time CEOs Ken Lay and Skilling claimed that they were running the best energy company in the entire world, they had to know that it had been bust and of no value for years, had exaggerated its profits and covered up its losses by the simplistically clever bookkeeping practices so corrupt that their accounting firm was ruined.
They evidently bragged constantly about being exceptionally smart and clever, but Skilling and Lay were the opposite of cautious. When a market analyst makes an inquiry into ENRON's statements during a conference call, Skilling can't answer and just settles for cursing the guy out, which, if someone with such sense and facility could just try to conceive, causes a lot of gossip and unwanted heat. One approach was to create fictitious offshore corporate names and move their deficits to those accounts, which were off the books. They are named with wild and thoughtless haste, one of them being "M. Yass."
In what did ENRON deal, really? That is what I wasn't sure of till I saw this. I read at one point that they were a natural gas company. But then they were in the electricity market. This film depicts them as they essentially created a market in energy, laid bets on it and stage- managed it. They moved on, even genuinely taking into consideration trading weather. What was this company's product, I ask? The answer turns out to be keeping a high share price no matter what. We find out that its traders, mostly young white guys who gradually gain a lot of control and become high-stakes high-tech gamblers, lost the whole business in bad trades, and concealed their deficit by burying the news and creating counterfeit profit reports that propelled the share price even higher!
In a sense, this documentary depicts the sort of slick, stunning, witty con games for which we love to see fictitious feature films about them is itself a great insight into why we love those feature films, Ocean's Eleven, Heist, Entrapment, The Great Train Robbery. Why? An early justification is that the thieves are likable and their victims are somehow deserving. Untrue. In ENRON's case, most of California were the victims! But why do we chuckle at the slickness of it? It actually happened!
The movie is amassed of a plethora of footage, from testimony at congressional hearings, and interviews with disillusioned ENRON people. It's at its best when it sticks to factual footage, least when it goes for visual effects and representative inserts which give it more of the feel of a Discovery Channel special.
Bethany McLean played a role in exposing the scandal, and she is so cute and poised, with such a soft, tender voice and a doe-like disposition. I chuckle when I imagine how innocent she must have sounded when she asked a simple question about ENRON's quarterly statements, and suddenly their whole "house of cards" started tumbling.
Most appalling is how ENRON contemptuously concocted the fake California energy crisis. Doesn't it sound so fun to say this after hearing about it: "But there never was a shortage of power in California." Using recordings of traders calling California power plants, we alarmingly listen in on them shutting down for "repairs." They pushed the price of electricity up ninefold. Twists don't stop there. Wait till you see how Skilling futilely tried to slither away before the company went kaput.
It's silly that there hasn't been more rage over these swindles and crises. The cost was immeasurable, not just in deaths caused by the blackouts, but in the amount of money for which Californians sued to regain what they paid in overcharges during the fake crisis. If ENRON were instead Al Qaeda, or Hammas, if terrorists had staged blackouts and power failures all throughout the enormous state, reflect on how we'd look upon these same scandals. Nevertheless the crisis, made doable by deregulation persuaded by ENRON's lobbyists, is still being laid at the door of too much regulation.
Alex Gibney's documentary is a crime procedural. It's fashioned in a way in which it primarily entertains, what with very familiar songs over the soundtrack with tongue-in-cheek relevance and the subject of the biggest white collar confidence scheme in history. Regardless of a viewer's politics, this will make you relish the image of what must be happening to these guys in prison. It's about how ENRON grew to be one of the largest corporations with what was fundamentally a scheme to rob Peter to pay Paul, and ultimately ransacked the retirement funds of its employees just to prolong the inevitable.
There's a notion that ENRON was a group of decent businessmen gone bad. The movie make the case that it was a con game almost from the start, much to the tune of a Mamet script. At the time CEOs Ken Lay and Skilling claimed that they were running the best energy company in the entire world, they had to know that it had been bust and of no value for years, had exaggerated its profits and covered up its losses by the simplistically clever bookkeeping practices so corrupt that their accounting firm was ruined.
They evidently bragged constantly about being exceptionally smart and clever, but Skilling and Lay were the opposite of cautious. When a market analyst makes an inquiry into ENRON's statements during a conference call, Skilling can't answer and just settles for cursing the guy out, which, if someone with such sense and facility could just try to conceive, causes a lot of gossip and unwanted heat. One approach was to create fictitious offshore corporate names and move their deficits to those accounts, which were off the books. They are named with wild and thoughtless haste, one of them being "M. Yass."
In what did ENRON deal, really? That is what I wasn't sure of till I saw this. I read at one point that they were a natural gas company. But then they were in the electricity market. This film depicts them as they essentially created a market in energy, laid bets on it and stage- managed it. They moved on, even genuinely taking into consideration trading weather. What was this company's product, I ask? The answer turns out to be keeping a high share price no matter what. We find out that its traders, mostly young white guys who gradually gain a lot of control and become high-stakes high-tech gamblers, lost the whole business in bad trades, and concealed their deficit by burying the news and creating counterfeit profit reports that propelled the share price even higher!
In a sense, this documentary depicts the sort of slick, stunning, witty con games for which we love to see fictitious feature films about them is itself a great insight into why we love those feature films, Ocean's Eleven, Heist, Entrapment, The Great Train Robbery. Why? An early justification is that the thieves are likable and their victims are somehow deserving. Untrue. In ENRON's case, most of California were the victims! But why do we chuckle at the slickness of it? It actually happened!
The movie is amassed of a plethora of footage, from testimony at congressional hearings, and interviews with disillusioned ENRON people. It's at its best when it sticks to factual footage, least when it goes for visual effects and representative inserts which give it more of the feel of a Discovery Channel special.
Bethany McLean played a role in exposing the scandal, and she is so cute and poised, with such a soft, tender voice and a doe-like disposition. I chuckle when I imagine how innocent she must have sounded when she asked a simple question about ENRON's quarterly statements, and suddenly their whole "house of cards" started tumbling.
Most appalling is how ENRON contemptuously concocted the fake California energy crisis. Doesn't it sound so fun to say this after hearing about it: "But there never was a shortage of power in California." Using recordings of traders calling California power plants, we alarmingly listen in on them shutting down for "repairs." They pushed the price of electricity up ninefold. Twists don't stop there. Wait till you see how Skilling futilely tried to slither away before the company went kaput.
It's silly that there hasn't been more rage over these swindles and crises. The cost was immeasurable, not just in deaths caused by the blackouts, but in the amount of money for which Californians sued to regain what they paid in overcharges during the fake crisis. If ENRON were instead Al Qaeda, or Hammas, if terrorists had staged blackouts and power failures all throughout the enormous state, reflect on how we'd look upon these same scandals. Nevertheless the crisis, made doable by deregulation persuaded by ENRON's lobbyists, is still being laid at the door of too much regulation.