America's economic meltdown was an 'Inside Job'

Watching "Inside Job," Charles Ferguson's lacerating examination of the 2008 economic meltdown, the viewer may suspect that Ferguson has made a strategic error in his role of propagandist. The movie has made you so angry at the greedy, myopic people behind the catastrophe that you move behind rage and into doubt. Should I really be this angry? Could it have been this bad? Was the financial state of the union in the hands of such pirates? And then you decide yes, and move back into a state of undiluted infuriation.

Ferguson, whose Oscar-nominated "No End in Sight" was one of the first, and some would say best, examinations of the Iraq War, is the filmmaker that Michael Moore only thinks he is. Ferguson attacks the big subjects, and people, but does it without preconceived notions (other than the idea that the nation was in trouble and something caused it). He does it without glibness or forced cleverness, and most important, with a respect for his audience. There's no dumbing down of content, no cheap ridicule of his subjects.

At the same time, there's nothing about the information provided by "Inside Job" that isn't accessible to the ordinary person - which means it should have been detectable, and preventable, long before the country found itself teetering on the edge of another Great Depression.

Filmed in the United States, China, France, England and even Iceland (which had its own mini-catastrophe), "Inside Job" is heavy on the talking heads, but Ferguson also has a distinct sense of cinema. The smooth, glossy surfaces in which he frames his smooth, glossy suspects punctuates the movie's sense of another world, one which the vast majority of Americans only pay for.