The Smartest Guys in the Room

Remember that sleaze Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall Street? His motto was "Greed is good!" and the top managers of Enron certainly practiced what Gecko preached.

I just saw The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is the story of the rise and fall of Enron, and it's an amazing and appalling story of how greed at the top trickled down to the company's front lines, with its traders running amok, going so far as to shut down power plants in California in order to drive up the price of Enron stock so they could earn generous bonuses.

Enron was in the habit of counting estimated/predicted future profits as income. It also hid its debts in offshore satellite firms which it effectively owned. It financed itself by talking leading investment banks like CitiBank, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Merrill Lynch into lending it money merely based on its reputation as a hot company. It didn't do this purely through fraud or "smoke and mirrors." No, just as much it relied upon the greed of people in the banks, in their law firm, and in their accounting firm (Arthur Anderson, which also had a conflict of interest through acting as a consultant to Enron as well). It also bribed and bullied stock analysts into giving its stock favorable ratings and reviews.

The firm was flying high as a Wall Street darling when, in 2001, senior reporter for Fortune Bethany McLean asked a smple question which for a healthy and honest firm would have had a simple and obvious answer: "How does Enron make money?" She asked this because, strangely, Enron was in the habit of not producing financial reports.

With the publication of McLean's Fortune article, "Is Enron Overpriced?" more questions arose, and Enron's house of cards began to tumble. Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO during this period left for undisclosed "personal reasons" a few months before Enron declared bankruptcy. By doing so, he left Ken Lay, the Chairman, holding the bag. Lay became the CEO at the helm when the firm was forced by circumstances into bankruptcy.

Unfortunately for Skilling, he probably didn't bail soon enough to protect the huge profits he made by dumping his Enron stock. (The one winner in this category is Lou Pai, former CEO of the Enron Energy Services subsidiary, which failed, and who took $335 million in profits early enough to escape insider training charges, and who quickly became the second largest land owner in Colorado).

The biggest tragedy of the failure of Enron, though, isn't the big people. It's the little people who had Enron stock in their portfolios. This includes numerous employees of Enron. To take one example, when Enron bought Portland General Electric, PGE employees' PGE stock became Enron stock, which was frozen when Enron filed for bankruptcy. While the stock was frozen (could not be sold), the value of the stock was not frozen, and so all of these little people had to watch the value of their investment decline daily until it was worth virtually nothing.

And then let's not forget all the individual investors and mutual funds which were heavily invested in Enron. Countless Enron investors were left holding Enron's bag while Enron execs tried to abscond with hundreds of millions of Enron funds. Funds which, if recovered at all, will be in the "pennies on the dollar" range.

The tragic truth is that even if we learn a lesson or two from this financial train wreck, it can happen again, and again, and again, as long as people believe that "greed is good." And so...it will happen again, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Let me start off by saying that A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an absolutely visually dazzling movie and it's as wryly witty as can be. The casting is quite good, with Martin Freeman (Shaun of the Dead, Love Actually) playing the Walter Mittyish Arthur Dent; Mos Def playing the alien contributor to The Guide, Ford Prefect; Zooey Deschanel playing Trillian, the love interest to both Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox,who is ably played by Sam Rockwell. The voice of the depressed (and depressing) robot, Marvin is done by Alan Rickman, a stroke of casting genius. Inside the robots Warwick Davis (Willow).

The story is absurd, and it's not sci-fi at all, but rather a spoof of sci-fi. Basically, the story in a nutshell is that Arthur Dent wakes up one morning to discover that a demolition crew is outside his house preparing to demolish it for a new freeway bypass. While he's in the midst of an act of civil disobedience in an attempt to stop the demolition, his best friend, Ford Prefect happens along with a shopping cart full of beer. He gives the construction crew the beer to stop the demolition and drags Arthur off to the pub, where he tells Arthur that the world is about to be demolished by a Vogon demolition crew in order to create a hyperspace bypass. Ford is there to save Arthur from the fate facing other earthlings, which he does, and which propels Arthur off into a very funny (if not exactly hilarious) galactic adventure.

Along the way, Arthur meets the President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is more insane rock star than politician, and is on the lam after stealing the spacecraft Heart of Gold in order to discover the question regarding life, the universe, and everything. (You see, the answer is already known, but makes no sense apart from the precise question. Coincidentally, aboard the ship is Trillian, the girl Arthur met and fell in love with at a party, but lost because he wasn't willing to drop everything and go to Madagascar with her (haven't we all had that experience?). Coincidences are omnipresent in this story, to the extent that even the spacecraft has an "infinite improbability drive," dangerous to use but handy to get out of tight spots.

I think perhaps the weakest casting has to be Zooey Deschanel. Trillian could have been played better by any number of other actresses. Zooey seems best in stoner-type roles such as the one she played in The Good Girl. Roles, in other words, where not much acting ability is required.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

I just got back from seeing Star Wars: Episode III - The Revenge of the Sith.

It's hard to believe, but the original film, just plain old Star Wars, appeared almost 30 years ago in 1977. Princess Leia was played by a then 21 year old Carrie Fisher who is now (arghh!!!) nearly 50. That's how much time has gone by.

The original movie was a ground-breaker. If you're not around my age, almost 60, you can't know the thrill it was to see that gigantic spaceship cruise down from the top of the screen at the beginning. We'd never seen anything even vaguely like that before.

Computer graphics hardly existed back then. The spacecraft in the original were scale models, and the difficulty of making them (frequently in several different sizes) limited what could be done. Today, with the aid of photorealistic computer graphics, a sci-fi director can put hundreds or thousands of spacecraft on the screen, all moving independently of each other an with no risk of wires getting tangled.

Even with all the realism however, some things can't be changed and really date this series of films.

Just as when I was a boy in the 1960's I could see all the flaws in the sci-fi films of the 1950's, so anyone who spends much time watching the Discovery or Science channels can point out all kinds of flaws in the more recent star wars.

Let's start with an obvious howler: In a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away English is spoken, even though England doesn't even exist yet.

And while we're at it: Yoda, would it be so hard to take a few night courses and learn proper English syntax? You can hop around like a grasshopper while wielding a light saber, but you still are saying things like "A worried mind have you." Someday one of your Jedi buddies is going to be cut in half while trying to parse something like "Out to your left look. Being attacked are you by clone."

Apparently back then in that galaxy far, far away, a person can hop into a spacecraft in about 10 minutes be at the other side of the galaxy. At least Dune had an explanation (albeit a wacky one) for being able to do this. In Star Wars movies, you just accept that this is possible.

Then, there are all those strange-looking aliens. The problem with them is that if there is life elsewhere, it's probably much more different from us than the Star Wars aliens. It seems like most aliens in Star Wars are based on a human model: two arms, two legs, and a head. The aliens in these movies are basically nothing other than very badly deformed humans.

There's a scene in this film where on one of the alien worlds, the planet apparently has a twin which is so close it looks huge in the sky. The thing is, objects that large and that close would have an enormous gravitational effect on each other which would cause so much internal friction that both planets should probably be so volcanic as to be uninhabitable. After all, our little moon can raise the ocean 60 feet in some places, but if the Moon were the same size as the Earth, the effects would be much more dramatic, and probably incompatible with life. Also, unless the two planets were rotating around each other (or more correctly around their mutual center of gravity), they would be drawn into a collision with each other.

The philosophy in this world is of the penny ante variety. The Matrix actually gives us much, much more to think about. And sometimes the Jedi in this film seemed confused as to right and wrong themselves, breaking their code because Chancellor Palpatine was evil. Well, gee, if your code isn't adequate to help you in the face of evil, isn't it time to hang up your light saber and join The Dark Side?

Of course, maybe the problem the Jedi were having involved the fact that Chancellor Palpatine had the blessing of the galactic legislature, so that if Palpatine (who was planning a kind of coup) was a traitor, in a sense so were the Jedi. Both sides mouthed a support for democracy, but both sides were more or less ready to suspend the galactic constitution in order to get their way.

Just like the Matrix series, the Star Wars series has grown more and more bloated and over-designed as time has gone by. The final Matrix movie was worse, with graphics which were at times so alien and gigantic in scale that it was hard for a mere human to relate to them. The computer-generated interiors, exterior architecture, spaceship design, and battle scenes were just way over the top. The same could be said about the wardrobe and makeup, but at least Natalie Portman's Padme didn't have to wear the kind of outrageous hairstyles and outfits she wore in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.

The idea of the Jedi knight is almost custom-built for the mind of the 13 year old boy, what with special swords, monkish garb, and magical skills, and perhaps that is George Lucas' genius. Even I, at age 58, still find this aspect somewhat cool, but in an embarrassing way, as if I still thought Nehru jackets and Beatles-style "mop top" haircuts were cool.

Someday someone might explain to me how it is that Jedi can be slammed around the room like rag dolls and not break every bone in their body. They are highly-trained warriors with lightning fast reflexes, an ability (through the mysterious "force") to anticipate their opponent's actions, and someother powers that are actually magical. None of this explains how they avoid the many broken bones you'd think they'd have after some of the fight scenes.

One thing that doesn't work very well is the love relationship between Anakin and Padme. I for the life of me can't imagine what she would see in him. From the start, Padme has been wise beyond her years. Anakin has been immature and impulsive.

Of course, a lot of the dramatic tension is gone from the story since the whole story has been told out of order and in a fashion where we already know who lives and who dies, so the movie is not so much about what happens as the how and why.

Even so, I found it an enjoyable two hours, even if during the time it took George Lucas to give us the last three parts of his story, Peter Jackson showed us all how to do an epic by giving us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, much better movies in almost every way.