ASSHOLES: A THEORY (B) - Just about what you'd expect from an adaptation of Aaron James' timely book of the same name that coincided with the resurgence of anti-social behavior in the past five years. A nice touch is person-on-the-street interviews, a quaint throwback. Otherwise, the pontificating is done by James himself and a few ringers, including Monty Python alum John Cleese and a bunch of academics. One law professor tells an insightful story about calling out an abusive student who, after the behavior was pointed out, turned it around and became a model student. "No one had ever told me," he lamented to the professor.
The definition is key to the strength of James' theory. He's talking about someone who allows himself (we'll go with the male gender here) special advantages amid cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against complaints from others in society. Self-awareness (indeed, provocation, usually) is key, as it tends to distinguish assholes from, say, narcissists, who are seen as lacking such awareness.
Director John Walker skips through a series of illustrative subjects, including the military, the bullying Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Italy's proto-Trump Silvio Burlusconi (vis a vis a transsexual Italian lawmaker, seen here confronting her online troll), an investment firm that plays nice (Cf. below) and, of course, social media. In a zippy 81 minutes, Walker makes his case well and finds entertaining ways to explore a disturbing subject that plagues contemporary society.
ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM (2005) (A) - Sometimes these things write themselves. Long before the scam known as "Fyre," the greedy crooks at Enron not only exhibited a biblical scale of amorality, but their dirty deeds made millions of people suffer, whether they lost power in California or saw their 401(k) disintegrate in Portland.
The recent power crisis in Texas is a good reminder that deregulation -- "the magic of the marketplace," in Ronald Reagan's famous turn of phrase -- takes the handcuffs off of assholes as well as the good guys. Alex Gibney made his bones with this energized (sorry) filleting of the Houston good ol' boys who exploited the loopholes in the trading of electricity as a commodity (they would expand to bandwidth and the weather as commodities, too), where they profited pornographically whenever misfortune struck (and giving them a perverse incentive to solicit misfortune in the form of needless random power plant reboots).
Bethany McLean, a reporter for Fortune as the turn of the millennium, is the hero of this story. A few simple questions about Enron's shady accounting methods arranged by its big three executives, who all eventually were convicted (one would die before he could be sentenced). This was a dry run for the subprime-mortgage crisis (and the devious idea of collateralized debt obligations) that would take down the whole U.S. economy just a few years later.
Gibney covers all the bases and slowly reveals the true assholery of the three principal villains -- Jeffrey Skilling, Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, and Andrew Fastow -- and the inevitable collapse of their house of cards. This documentary is a true touchstone of our collective Clinton-Bush Y2K fever dream.
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