INSIDE JOB

The global financial crisis of 2008 cost over $20 trillion worldwide, left millions homeless and unemployed, and raised some serious questions about the state of our financial systems. So who was really responsible? This is what Inside Job, the latest from award-winning documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson, seeks to discover. In a series of interviews with Wall Streeters, politicians, academics, psychologists, and call girls, a sad and almost unbelievable story is revealed. Corporate greed, loose morals, bad decisions, and pathological self-interest seem to be the major causes of the GFC, and Ferguson takes no small pleasure in pointing the finger at the culture of sex, drugs and money that rules on Wall St. The film is a good overview of the crisis for those of us not up on the finer points of global finance, although there’s not much of the real victims here. Inside Job is more like an autopsy – and a polemic one at that – of the single worst financial crisis since the Depression, the repercussions of which are still being felt around the world. (KB) ***1/2