TIFF 2010: Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job

[Editor’s Note: This was published during the 2010 edition of the Toronto Int. Film Festival. We are republishing this to coincide with the theatrical release.]

Following his take on the Iraq blunder with No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson’s sophomore documentary serves up a toxic dish on how greed and complex Ponzi-like schemes essentially placed the U.S, and other invested nations into some deep dodo. Inside Job serves as a 101 on the financial crisis and proves that its business as usual on Wall Street and in Washington, this includes Obama. For those who are up to date with their current affairs, what is most alarming in the docu, is how academia is tainted by the financial support from these special interest lobbyists.

We’ve seen it before with professors who are naysayers on the climate change — if you’re paid handsomely enough, you can find an academic that would go on record and say deregulation and freakish derivatives market is a plus, and this at the same time of a financial meltdown. It’s scary how institutions like Harvard and Columbia see no problems with these handouts, I think viewers will appreciate how Ferguson (no one can put a fast one on him) corners some of these untested profs who think they can outwit the interviewer — it adds for some rather humorous moments where the subject is caught midstream. All jokes aside, it’s the cognitive understanding of the situation that has been tainted, shaped and paid for with cash — when those who are doing the teaching help shape the future Wall Streeters and economists, its no wonder that a change in policy is not for the imminent future.

Thursday night, the opening of the 35th TIFF edition, was the premiere for Ferguson’s Inside Job, as you’ll see in the pair of vids below, he still holds onto the hope that a wave of change is in the air, and to that I answer: only when middle class Americans decide to fight back will there be any change. This will be unlikely in my lifetime.