Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 2005 123movies

Watch: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 2005 123movies, Full Movie Online – Enron dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year in this tale told chronologically. The emphasis is on human drama, from suicide to 20,000 people sacked: the personalities of Ken Lay (with Falwellesque rectitude), Jeff Skilling (he of big ideas), Lou Pai (gone with $250 M), and Andy Fastow (the dark prince) dominate. Along the way, we watch Enron game California’s deregulated electricity market, get a free pass from Arthur Andersen (which okays the dubious mark-to-market accounting), use greed to manipulate banks and brokerages (Merrill Lynch fires the analyst who questions Enron’s rise), and hear from both Presidents Bush what great guys these are..
Plot: A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.
Smart Tags: #deregulation #reference_to_the_fortune_500 #reference_to_blockbuster #cfo #governor_of_california #california_governor #enron #corporation #california #accounting #corporate_fraud #accounting_fraud #corporate_crime #bankruptcy #hubris #reference_to_enron #american_company #reference_to_ken_lay #corporate_scandal #natural_gas #reference_to_the_stock_market

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Ratings:

	7.6/10 Votes: 18,817
	97% | RottenTomatoes
	N/A | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 215 Popularity: 11.103 | TMDB

Reviews:

Stylish but Soft-Hitting
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is suave and well-crafted, but betrays some wishful thinking and apologist tendencies.

Some ex-Enron workers venture poetic but unmerited speculations about their corrupter associates, conjuring hypothetical images of their former friends now reflecting back on their transgressions and experiencing ethical remorse. We are subjected to clichés about their having to face their own “shadows” and whatnot, all of it speculative, and in spite of any evidence that they ever experienced a moral twinge or regretted anything other than getting caught.

There’s also an insidious “slippery slope” message, some philosophical waxing upon the blurriness of ethical lines, and depictions of compulsive personalities, all of which introduce unwarranted moral ambiguity. Bethany McLean, one of the investigative journalists, surprisingly lays overmuch of the blame on Andrew Fastow, declaring that the fraud started with him (!) even though Fastow is elsewhere shown to have been recruited into a company already corrupt from the top down. There is some subtle attempt at containment here. This film skewers the culprits one moment, but then shrinks from the implications.

The WORST example is a naive question given undue emphasis by being left “provocatively” open-ended. The narrator, Peter Coyote, asks, “What motivated the corrupt traders? Was it their million dollar bonuses? Or was it docile complicity?” (I’m paraphrasing here) A no-brainer answer you might think, but then – I kid you not – the documentary suggests the second possibility and launches into the fascinating but entirely irrelevant Milgram experiment, in which reluctant subjects are persuaded by an authority figure to voluntarily electrocute others. But Enron traders were a uniformly sanguine lot, evidenced by testimonials and taped conversations displaying naked greed and delight (generous clips of which are included in the documentary). Yet we are supposed to imagine they were the victims of obedience training?

It’s a bit much…

Maybe two or three of the commentators don’t pussyfoot around, and through them “The Smartest Guys” successfully conveys the perils of the free market and deregulation; but these lessons get watered down by wistful undertones and feigned ambiguity. Post-Enron, the communist charge that capitalists are “cannibals” now seems undeniably apt. Yet we forever flatter ourselves, rehearsing the cant of the free market ideology, according to which the profit motive encourages 1) innovation and 2) hard work. Granted. But what the pundits and economists invariably overlook is that the profit motive also encourages 3) robbery. Adam Smith’s *other* “invisible hand,” if you will …hidden behind the back and gripping a knife! Enron calls for an inquiry into the nature of capitalism, not an explanation based upon specific personalities. Human nature is what it is, and there will always be people ready and willing to cut throats when given motivation and opportunity. To misquote the NRA: People don’t kill people.. incentives do.

Final criticism: a bit of shabby hypocrisy. One of the Enron execs is portrayed as having sleazy encounters with strippers; the viewer is then dutifully treated to lots of footage of nude strippers… ha!

A Documentary Depicting the Sort of Slick, Stunning, Witty Con Games For Which We Love To See Ocean’s Eleven, Heist, Entrapment, or The Great Train Robbery…
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.

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 50 min (110 min)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated R
Genre Documentary, Biography, History
Director Alex Gibney
Writer Alex Gibney, Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind
Actors John Beard, Tim Belden, Barbara Boxer
Country United States
Awards Nominated for 1 Oscar. 3 wins & 11 nominations total
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix N/A
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera N/A
Laboratory Technicolor
Film Length N/A
Negative Format N/A
Cinematographic Process N/A
Printed Film Format 35 mm (Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI)