A Masterpiece!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.The film was released in 2005 and I watched it in 2015. Is it dated? Perhaps a bit. But it is also just as important as ever, really recapping some great history of finance, energy, and California politics. The names of "Ken Lay" and "Jeff Skilling" have not been forgotten.What would perhaps be interesting is a follow-up film about some of the key players. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big winner. Ken Lay is, I believe, dead. I forget what happened to Skilling. And Gray Davis? Still tainted, and for something he had no control over.

I guess the Enron collapse, and the other corporations that collapsed around the same time (such as Worldcom) were sort of a harbinger of the crisis that was to arise in 2008, however just as with the events that surrounded Enron, it seems that the response to the global financial crisis was simply to sweep the problem under the table, make sure the stock market starts rising again, and go on as if nothing had happened. However, the case of Enron is similar to this whole farcical system that is the modern market, and that is that the health of a company is determined by the growth in profits, and in turn the growth in the share price.The funny thing is that we were look at the growth in the share price of a company, or their reported earnings, there is one thing we don't actually see, and that is inflation. There are other ways of increase profits without actually increasing the earnings or the customer base, and that is to cuts costs. One can actually grow profits (and even earnings) without actually increasing the customer base, and that is one of the massive cons of the market. There is much that I could say about this issue, however I think I will simply focus of the Enron fraud in this instance.Enron, like many modern corporations, is effectively a farce. It only exists to make money and its only reported goals are profit growth and its success if measured by the value of the company. However a company's value is a vary dubious quantifier as there is a lot that cannot be measured. A company's value can be measured by the value of its assets and by its actual earnings (which is quantifiable because that can be measured), however one can also add an intangible factor called 'goodwill', which is the reputed reputation of the company, and then there is future earnings. Future earnings, as the name implies, are earnings that may come in in the future, but because they are in the future they are merely speculative. However what Enron did was to base its current value on these future earnings though a method called mark to market accounting. The problem is that if these earnings don't arise then the value of the company comes into question.However, what Enron did was that they kept on creating these wonderful ideas and deals (such as bandwidth trading, which never eventuated, or video on demand, which also did not eventuate as the technology was not sufficient to allow at at that time), and when they began to dry up, they began to manipulate the market itself. This is thus the cause of the California rolling blackouts. It was not that deregulation did not work, it is that deregulation was being exploited to drive up the price of electricity. Power plants were being shut down, and blackouts and brownouts created to create the appearance that there was not enough power, and in response the price of electricity was being forced up. I remember that at the time we were simply watching it as the failure of deregulation, however as it turned out it was a lot more sinister than that.What is interesting though is that this documentary reminded me a lot of the Wolf of Wall Street, however this had a much stronger focus on the human cost and the actions of the people at the top of the tree, were as the other film was more glamorising what was in effect a crocked and greedy individual.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a documentary based on the best- selling book of the same title by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.It is a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history. McLean and Elkind are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney.The documentary examines the collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives; it also shows the involvement of the Enron traders in the California electricity crisis. The film features interviews with McLean and Elkind, as well as former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters and the former Governor of California Gray Davis.The documentary opens with a reenactment of the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter, then travels back in time, describing Enron chairman Kenneth Lay's humble beginnings as the son of a preacher, his ascent in the corporate world as an "apostle of deregulation," his fortuitous friendship with the Bush family, and the development of his business strategies in natural gas futures. It points out that the culture of financial malfeasance at Enron was evident as far back as 1987, when Lay apparently encouraged the outrageous risk taking and profit skimming of two oil traders in Enron's Valhalla office because they were bringing a lot of money into the company. But it wasn't until eventual CEO Jeff Skilling arrived at Enron that the company's "aggressive accounting" philosophy truly took hold. The Smartest Guys in the Room explores the lengths to which the company went in order to appear incredibly profitable. Their win-at-all-costs strategy included suborning financial analysts with huge contracts for their firms, hiding debts by essentially having the company loan money to itself, and using California's deregulation of the electricity market to manipulate the state's energy supply. Gibney's film reveals how Lay, Skilling, and other execs managed to keep their riches, while thousands of lower-level employees saw their loyalty repaid with the loss of their jobs and their retirement funds. This is a meticulously researched and ably handled chronicle of one of the largest corporate scandals in American history.Also,it is a deft, entertaining and infuriating documentary about one of the most egregious cases of corporate corruption in American history that one does not require an interest in business affairs to fully appreciate it.Finally,it one will surely get mad when he watches it.

Does "The Smartest Guys in the Room" require the smartest theater-goers in the world to understand it? Not exactly, but close. I pay attention to the news but I never really grasped what Enron was all about. I hoped this documentary would straighten me out on "the corporate crime of the century." I now feel I get the basics of what happened in a scary story about rapacious manipulation and greed. But there's a lot that didn't become crystal clear.I taped this movie on CNBC, and it was a good thing. Over a few days I was able to rewind repeatedly as I tried to put together for myself what had really occurred. (I'm trying to become more financially literate in general so this wasn't easy for me.) The main format for this movie is talking heads with, predominantly in the first half of the film, some thematically related songs woven in for atmosphere and lightening. I could have used a little more explanation along the way to understand better what happened in the course of wrongdoings large and small, from the Nigerian barge deal to the California electricity scam. Still, I'm able to walk away with significant illumination. The movie definitely has its strong points. I'd remembered company whistle-blower Sherron Watkins from the news, and she's just as impressive here. When company villain Jeffrey Skilling resigns a year and a half before Enron collapses, right around the time of 9-11, "this was Jim Jones feeding us the Kool-aid and not drinking it himself," she says. The small-print follow-ups at the end, citing Skilling and Fastow's incarcerations and Lay's death, amount to a happy ending. But as Ms. Watkins reminds us: "It's all about the rationalization that you're not doing anything wrong. And it can happen again."