Highly Overrated But Still Good

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's amazing how long people can keep a lie going, even though they know it'll eventually blow up in their faces. A company "too big to fail", and people "too greedy to care". If the story of Enron is an example of anything, it's an example of how the love of money can destroy your moral compass. I don't think these people were born money-hungry manipulators, but once they got the idea in their heads, they threw their morals out the window and only saw dollar signs. From creating fake companies to dump their debt into, to manipulating California's energy and creating a crisis that cost billions of dollars. At the end of the day, it was all about money, and nothing else. Hopefully this stands as an example to any would-be corporate criminals out there that think they can get away with stuff like this, because you may for awhile, but all your house of cards needs is a spark in order to go up in flames.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is a highly informative and detailed example of how corrupt a business can become when it is not being regulated or watched over. Although the film is lengthy (and at times tedious), it covered large subject areas effectively. The way the film ends is slightly vague and some of the diction and terminology used was difficult for me to understand personally, which could be because I have never taken an economics class or any variation of such before but still. I learned a lot from the film and, if the films purpose is to inform and not so much entertain, then I consider it to be well put together.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a documentary based on the best- selling book of the same title by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.It is a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history. McLean and Elkind are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney.The documentary examines the collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives; it also shows the involvement of the Enron traders in the California electricity crisis. The film features interviews with McLean and Elkind, as well as former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters and the former Governor of California Gray Davis.The documentary opens with a reenactment of the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter, then travels back in time, describing Enron chairman Kenneth Lay's humble beginnings as the son of a preacher, his ascent in the corporate world as an "apostle of deregulation," his fortuitous friendship with the Bush family, and the development of his business strategies in natural gas futures. It points out that the culture of financial malfeasance at Enron was evident as far back as 1987, when Lay apparently encouraged the outrageous risk taking and profit skimming of two oil traders in Enron's Valhalla office because they were bringing a lot of money into the company. But it wasn't until eventual CEO Jeff Skilling arrived at Enron that the company's "aggressive accounting" philosophy truly took hold. The Smartest Guys in the Room explores the lengths to which the company went in order to appear incredibly profitable. Their win-at-all-costs strategy included suborning financial analysts with huge contracts for their firms, hiding debts by essentially having the company loan money to itself, and using California's deregulation of the electricity market to manipulate the state's energy supply. Gibney's film reveals how Lay, Skilling, and other execs managed to keep their riches, while thousands of lower-level employees saw their loyalty repaid with the loss of their jobs and their retirement funds. This is a meticulously researched and ably handled chronicle of one of the largest corporate scandals in American history.Also,it is a deft, entertaining and infuriating documentary about one of the most egregious cases of corporate corruption in American history that one does not require an interest in business affairs to fully appreciate it.Finally,it one will surely get mad when he watches it.

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.