Film Impressions

REVIEW: Inside Job

DAYLIGHT ROBBERY

Charles Ferguson, the technology entrepreneur-turned-filmmaker describes what the banking industry did to the US economy through their heedless greed as a 'heist' where the looters didn't walk in with guns, but were the guys running the show themselves. Inside Job suggests that the indiscriminate deregulation of the financial services and insurance industries and the unbriddled spread of high-risk transactions called derivatives, has looted America (and, by extension, the world) of trillions of dollars and increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the country like never before; worse, rather than being prosecuted for their role in this scam, they continue to hold key positions in the Obama administration!

DOCUMENTARY: Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired (2008)

NOTES ON A SCANDAL

Months before Roman Polanski was placed under house arrest in Switzerland (he was in Zurich to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award) in September 2009 on pending charges of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977, came a documentary chronicling the incident that changed the course of the famed director’s life. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired by Marina Zenovich methodically delves into the events leading up to the harrowing trial that unfolded under the media glare and the flip-flops of presiding judge Laurence J Rittenband who clearly emerges as the villain of the piece, finally forcing Polanski to flee America in 1978, never to return to that country.

DOCUMENTARY: Nero's Guests

WAKE UP CALL

No matter how much documentaries are run down as boring and preachy, there is a viewership and a market for them, even it is small and scattered. If only feature filmmakers had the courage and imagination, there are thousands of stories out there, just waiting to be told. If they were made in the fiction format, maybe many more issues would reach a larger audience.