See Inside Job!

Inside Job ★★★★
(USA, 108 min.)
Dir: Charles Ferguson
Narrated by Matt Damon

This will just have to be a quick blurb because I need to get my act together and finish my Oscar predictions. On that note, it will be an easy task for me to select my pick for Best Documentary Feature: Inside Job is a compelling and persuasive essay on the events, actions, and politics that ultimately led to the economic meltdown of 2008. Director Charles Ferguson offers plenty of testimony and archival evidence to explain the build-up to the recession, and the film communicates the complexity of the situation very clearly - one can enter the film with virtually no knowledge of the recession and be able to follow it quite easily.

Ferguson uses the conventional Talking Heads mode of documentary and allows various experts and economists to explain what happened. The pundits also offer wildly contradictory answers, while some give statements that clash with the evidence or even their own previous remarks. The outcome is often quite funny, but it also creates a horrific portrait of contemporary society: are these really the people pulling the strings? If so,  it's no wonder the whole world's in trouble! Ferguson assembles the interviews together in order to build towards larger philosophical questions of social inequality, which is the greatest accomplishment of Inside Job. The film goes beyond the statistics of the recession and probes issues that are deeply entrenched in the system. Intelligent and entertaining, Inside Job is an important and highly relevant film.

Inside Job plays at the Bytowne in Ottawa Feb. 24th and 25th.