Some things I liked some I did not.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

In 2001, the massive Enron company goes bankrupt leading to a criminal scandal. Kenneth Lay founded the company in 1985 amidst Texas deregulation implemented by the Bushes. There are questionable schemes. There are massive gambling that led to hidden losses. Jeffrey Skilling uses murky accounting practices to pump up the numbers. Executive Lou Pai uses company money for his stripper habit and leaves with $250 million. They game California's deregulated electricity market with some disgusting comments. CFO Andrew Fastow deliberately hides the increasing debt with shell companies. It all collapses in a massive loss. This is in-depth and shows the ugliness of greed. I wouldn't even call it corruption since that seems to be what they intend to do. It is almost inevitable. It is in reality a criminal organization. Whatever small amount of high-minded capitalist ideals of deregulation is quickly lost with the need and greed for money.

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 thought this was a well-performed documentary. I took a different view of it altogether. I believe that Enron is a small microcosm of the Conservative ideology. The greed, the flagrant disregard for innocent people and the manipulation of politics, economic policies to profiteer are all staple traits of Conservatives around the world. These people were not necessarily the smartest people in the room. They had no morals values, or considered ethics in any decisions made. Anyone can profit if you have no conscious.If Enron's practices and policies, corporate/ environmental deregulation (conservative values) were applied to global economics, we would all see the global economy crumble much the same, and the wealthy profit, while the working class pay the price and the poor become poorer.They showcased their new company motto, not as the world natural gas leader, but as the World Leading company. It appears they believed they were writing new economics and capitalism and proving to the world that their ideology was the right way.A great example of conservative policies/ ideologies negatively impacting the world and leaving a catastrophic mess for others to clean up and fix.

William Muir, an animal breeder at Purdue University, once conducted an experiment in which hens were selected for egg productivity using two different selection methods. The first method involved selecting the most productive hens from different cages to breed the next generation of hens, whilst the second method involved selecting the most productive cages and using all the hens within those cages for breeding.At first glance it may seem as though the first method should prove more efficient. After all, eggs are produced by individual hens, so why not directly select the best? Why select at the group level, when even the best groups may have some individual duds? The results, though, told a completely different story. The first method caused egg productivity to sharply decline, even though the most productive hens were chosen each at every generation. The second method, in contrast, caused egg productivity to increase 160 percent in six generations, an astonishing response as artificial selection experiments go.What happened? In short, the first method favoured the nastiest hens who achieved their productivity by suppressing the productivity of other hens. After six generations, Muir had produced a nation of psychopath chickens, who plucked and murdered each other with their greedy, incessant attacks. In other words, traits that are "for the good of the group" are not always locally advantageous within the group and require a process of group-level selection to evolve.It's the same story in "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room", a documentary about a nest of continuously promoted corporate psychopaths who fiscally rape shareholders and competitors, before their hatchery completely self-destructs. Unfortunately, like most of these stories, "The Smartest Guys In The Room" never pushes beyond CEOs, managers and complicit middle men (though they are deservedly attacked) to point fingers at what are really systemic problems.In a book titled "Systemantics", John Gall describes the nature of systems, and how they often eventually become living, breathing entities. Not only do they develop a sort of collective consciousness (or intelligence network), but they also develop the desire for growth, and mechanisms of self-preservation. Of course a system can take many forms (a country, an organisation, a religion etc), but in each case they house similar methods of self-preservation. In the case of a country, Patriotism is the mechanism of self-preservation. In an organisation, it is allegiance to a cause. In a religion, it is faith. In all cases, the adherents are bound within a collective organisational consciousness.Eventually the ego-like qualities of this organisational consciousness cause each system to lust for even greater power. Greater power in turn requires more personnel, which requires even larger budgets, which in turn leads to a never ending spiral of growth. To justify this growth, these systems have no choice but to abandon the original purpose for which they were created. Thus, a moderate original goal must be replaced with a lofty objective embalmed in complex terminology that is designed to sound virtuous (in Enron's case, betting on off shore oil to keep shareholders happy). The elimination of evil, anarchy, crime, and war are just some buzzwords used to cover a drive for acquiring or maintaining power. In all cases, the objective requires growth.This documentary damns Enron, but government bureaucracies play Enron's game as well. In the case of countries (today, of the largest 100 economies on the planet, 51 are corporations and not countries), the lack of profits which would keep a private company in check does not serve as a restriction for a system that can extract taxes as needed from a captive regional or global population. Even if commercial activity declines as a result of excessive taxation, the tax supported systems continue to grow (and often currencies are then expanded worldwide in a global competition of debasement). And as taxes increase, so too must patriotism by a corresponding amount to avoid insurrection. In some cases, the practical justification for a tax supported system disappears all together, leaving behind nothing but the naked lust for power. With its own language, its own culture, and its own survival mechanisms, the system then feels that complete domination is the only objective worthy of its inflated sense of Self. End result: the world falls under the control of tax supported psycho chickens who have the strength, and the motive, to rob almost every person on the planet...until they don't, and we laugh at them with documentaries like this.8/10 - Worth one viewing.